Your website is the foundation of your company’s online presence. It helps people find you, understand your services and generate leads or sales. But unfortunately, a lot of B2B companies have a questionable view of their website’s ROI. This isn’t always accurate, but many business owners and marketing managers simply don’t know how effective their website is because they aren’t collecting the necessary data they need to determine whether or not their site is working for them. Whether you have an existing B2B website design or are planning to develop one, it’s important to set up a system for tracking your website metrics to make sure that everything is running smoothly. Here are 4 basic metrics that you can start tracking today:
Site Speed
Site speed is one of the most important things to know about your website, and fortunately it’s one of the easiest things to track. You can use pingdom.com to test your site instantly and optionally sign up for a membership in order to get your site tested every minute so that you’ll be the first to know if something is going wrong.
If your website takes more than 2-3 seconds to load, research shows that customers may not stick around, causing you to miss potential sales or even take a hit in your search rankings on Google.
There are a lot of reasons a website might load slowly, and while some are structural and require significant work to fix, simple things like optimizing your images can help cut down on load time.
Tip: If you don’t sign up for automatic testing, make sure you manually test your site speed often. Site speed is vulnerable to a lot of changing factors, so just because it tests well today, it doesn’t mean it will tomorrow.
Time on Site
How long visitors spend on your site is another important metric to track and is easily monitored in Google Analytics. It’s an important indication of whether people are finding your content useful and engaging. In addition to measuring the average amount of time people spend on your site as a whole, you can also measure how long visitors spend on each individual page. This metric will give you an idea of what content your customers are actually reading, and will also give you an idea how much time you have to make an impression on any particular page before your average visitor leaves. For example, if people are only staying on your homepage for five seconds before clicking elsewhere, it would be practical to keep a CTA relatively close to the top of the page to ensure visitors see it quickly.
If your time on site is particularly low, it could be a sign that customers aren’t finding your content to be engaging. Refreshing the information on your website, ensuring that the information you provide on each page is relevant & useful and including video content are all good ways to help bolster time on site.
Bounce Rate
Like time on site, bounce rate is another metric that’s standard to track in Google Analytics. If a visitor comes to a web page of yours that came up in a Google search and the page ends up not being relevant to their search, they’ll probably click the back button and leave your site. When a visitor views only one page on your website before leaving, it’s considered bounce. While some bounce is normal, a high bounce rate sends a negative signal to Google telling it that your page might not be a useful resource to people who found it with that particular search query. If this happens often, the search ranking of the page can be hurt.
A good way to decrease your bounce rate is to ensure that searchers find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily and that your pages contain links within your website to other relevant information or forms. If you offer numerous services, creating and optimizing a page on your site for each is a good way to be sure searchers reach a page that’s relevant to the information they were looking for.
People can also “bounce” from your site by clicking on a link that takes them off of your site or closing the window, so makes sure to limit links and pop-ups to make sure that when people come to your site, they stay a while.
According to Kissmetrics, a typical bounce rate is about 40%, so anything above that could affect your SEO.
Conversion Rate
While your conversion rate can be a bit harder to track, it’s the most important metric you can monitor on your website. On many B2B websites, your conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who took a desired action while on your website. This might be filling out a contact form or downloading a whitepaper you’re using to generate leads. Every website owner should have an idea of each revenue-producing action on their website and track how successfully each page moves users towards that action.
The easiest way to track your conversion rate is to create a page that appears only after a visitor “converts” and measure how many visitors access this page. For example, we have a form on our homepage that offers visitors a free website assessment. The conversion rate we track on this page is the percentage of all page visitors who fill out this form, and we measure this by dividing the total number of page visits by the number of people who end up on the page that this form redirects to after a user enters it.
Google Analytics is the most common tool for measuring conversion rates and setting up simple conversion tracking is easy. Monitoring this number closely will give you an idea of how well your website functions as a sales tool and will help you pinpoint problems or areas for improvement.
Get started today.
You already work hard on your website so that it serves as an online representation of your company; don’t put in that work for nothing. Take it a step further and implement these easy tracking metrics so that you can measure how well your site is working to advance your sales goals.
If you feel that your current website is missing the mark with any of these metrics or would like a hand in understanding the health of your site, get in touch to request a free website assessment.