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Evaluating Your Website Behavior
Evaluating Your Website Behavior
By Scott Buresh
This month, we'll cover measuring your website behavior. When trying to gauge how effective your website is in helping you to meet your organizational goals, the following three basic questions can help.
What is the goal of the website?
Many companies consistently notice poor website behavior because there were no predefined goals in place when the site was made. What do you want the site to do? Sometimes the goal is easy to define. If your website sells items online, you most likely want your visitors to make a purchase. For many other companies that sell services (or high end products that can't reasonably be sold online), the goal is to have the visitor initiate a contact so that the sales staff can attempt to convert them into a customer. The important point is that your website should be more than a static billboard that proclaims that your company is open for business- it should be designed to help achieve predefined goals (and unless the site is strictly informational, this usually means encouraging the visitor to take a desired action). Simply "having a website" does nothing to help your business or your customers, and will lead to poor website behavior.
How many people are coming to the website?
As discussed in previous newsletters, most site owners have access to traffic statistics, usually provided by their web host. This data is an important part of determining website behavior. Without knowing how many visitors your site receives over a given time period, you cannot determine whether your website is meeting the stated goals (more on this below). Benchmark data over at least a month is recommended to ensure that you have a representative sample. Ideally, this sample will not be drawn from a period in which the company was doing an unusual amount of offline marketing and promotion, since this number would not be indicative of website traffic for an average month.
How many visitors take the desired action?
During the same time period that you tracked the total number of visitors to your website, you should also track the number of visitors that take the action that you desire. For instance, if your primary goal on your website is to get visitors to fill out a form, how many forms did you collect in the allotted period? This number, coupled with your traffic data, forms the basis of your site conversion rate, a critical component of website behavior. For example, if you had 1000 visitors over a one-month period, and 10 of them sent in a form, your website conversion rate is 1% (10/1000). It is important to draw a distinction between your site conversion rate and your regular sales conversion rates (unless your site is selling online). Not all people who send in a form, for example, will become customers. However, your site conversion rate is a very useful piece of data to have, as you can use it to measure the success (or failure) of changes that are made to the website.
Three Quick Tips for Improvement of Your Website Behavior:
1. If your traffic levels are too low to draw any meaningful data on website behavior, consider launching some traffic-building initiatives, such as search engine optimization. (For more info, see our article, "Four Tips to Increase Search Engine Ranking").
2. Make certain that you make it easy for your visitor to take the desired action from any page of your website. For example, if you want them to fill out a contact form, make certain that there is a prominent button inviting them to do this on each page.
3. Check your sales copy to be sure it also invites visitors to take the desired action. Too often, companies use offline brochure copy on their site without taking into account the unique opportunities that the online arena affords. This simple step can often increase website behavior dramatically.
© Medium Blue 2007
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