How do you know that your website is doing well? If it’s selling products then that’s easy – it’s driving purchases. Or is it? Are these purchasers coming back and buying more and are they telling people how good your site is? If they’re not then maybe they’re not as engaged as you thought…
Getting someone to view your website content once is not actually that hard – promotions and incentives work a treat or a killer piece of relevant content can draw them in. What’s much harder is to get them to keep coming back and that golden egg, to get them to drive other people to your site.
Now that is an engaged visitor and I’d bet you’re not even measuring that they exist.
How to find that engaged visitor
Firstly you want to look at the loyalty of your visitors, this is easy to find using Google Analytics (which is free so no excuses). You can see on your dashboard New vs Returning visitors as a percentage and number, once you drill into the report you can view frequency, so have they come once, twice, more? Another nice measure is when they last visited so are if it’s been over a month and you’re sending out regular communications pushing them to your site – you’re not engaging them enough for them to return.
A couple of nice measures to add to the mix is their visit duration and also you can look at the depth of their visit. Both of these should indicate to you what a minimum for a conversion or sale is. My company knows that people who look at over 10 pages are more likely to contact us for a quote – by looking at your own reports you can spot trends like this.
The forgotten metrics
I’m not saying that you should be reporting on these every week or adding to your vital KPIs but these metrics are often forgotten and can give you great insight into your website. Try to run them once a month and if you make any major changes to your website content, do a before and after report.
If you’ve not got Google Analytics installed on your site then it’s good to do as a minimal reporting tool (google.com/analytics) and if you are using it already then take a look at what you’re doing to measure these softer metrics because engagement plays an important (if not quieter) part of your website’s success.
