There’s something exhilarating about substantially increasing revenue without taking a huge risk, like tripling your ad budget or selling equity in your company. One of the few ways to achieve this is by improving your website performance. Increasing conversion rate, creating loyal users who keep coming back and creating a sales funnel that flows users through the buyers journey are some examples of improving your website. But this isn’t possible unless you have the data to point out the kinks in the chain of your website.

Here at Langley Web Design we offer web design services that help you get more customers.

Here are four website performance indicators that will get you on your way to crushing your competitors:

1. Goals That are Relevant to Your Business Objectives

It’s hard to know if your website’s performance is up to par without defining what success looks like. After completing the Google Analytics Qualified Individual program, I used their business strategy template, which helps you line up your Google Analytics Goals with your own business objectives. However, I noticed they didn’t offer a decent looking template for people to take advantage of. Download the one I made and print it off to create an easy-to-read one page diagram of your strategies, tactics and key performance indicators that you have in Google Analytics.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is a metric that gives a percentage of how many users left your website without interacting with it (clicking a link, watching a video, etc.). One important thing to keep in mind about bounce rates is that if you have a single-page website, a high bounce rate may not be a problem. A user may come to your site, skim your products and pricing and leave. In Google Analytics this will be tracked as a Bounce, even though the user actually DID interact with your site by reading through it.

A second thing to remember is that different industries have different types of user interaction. Service websites tend to have lower bounce rates of around 20%, since users come there knowing what they want. On the other hand, blogs have bounce rates of 70% – 98% because users usually just skim over the post and leave (thanks for not bouncing on me yet). Benchmarking your Bounce Rate against statistics from similar sized companies in the same industry as you can give a great indication on how you’re doing. This can easily done in Google Analytics under Audience -> Benchmarking -> Channels, and selecting your industry, country and average monthly visitors at the top of the report.

3. Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are metrics that matter. They are strongly linked to your business objectives and optimizing your website for these will explode your revenue! Your KPIs will depend on what your main focus is for your business right now, but usually fall into one of two broad categories:

• Increase Revenue
  1. Focus on generating new leads which will lead to more sales
  2. Launch an aggressive social media campaign to increase traffic
  3. Improve conversion rate to increase revenue with the traffic you already have

• Decrease Costs
  1. Create a knowledge center where users can answer questions themselves
  2. Offer customer education to save support resources in the future

4. Leads: Quality, Not Just Quantity

Not all leads were created equal. Lets say you have 50% of your traffic coming from Facebook and 50% coming from Youtube. You see that your conversion rate is 3.7% (not bad – the average across all industries is 2.35%) so you decide to keep doing what you’re doing. However, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity, which wouldn’t have been missed if you analyzed a simple metric/dimension pair: Goal Conversion Rate vs. Source/Medium. It’s highly unlikely traffic coming from Facebook and Youtube are providing equally relevant traffic. With this single statistic, you could find out if one of them is giving you higher quality traffic, and adjust your marketing accordingly.

Focusing on these four performance indicators is a great start to improving the performance of your website. Making these types of changes can give you a 100%, 200% or even 500% increase in website conversion, which means more revenue and a smaller customer acquisition cost. The best part – you don’t need to be an expert to take advantage of these optimizations. A few hours of playing around in Google Analytics should do the trick. But if you’d rather spend that time focusing on your business, Langley Web Design is offering a 50% discount on your first month of our Website Analytics service!

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