A well-designed and functional website serves as the backbone of your business, allowing you to take your marketing efforts to great heights. Websites give target customers a place to land and interact with your brand as they move through the buyer’s journey. So, without an updated, optimized, and professional website in place, you could miss out on the chance to connect with your target audience and convert visitors into leads.

Thankfully, you can easily optimize your website to convert by carefully watching your performance metrics and making adjustments along the way. Here are several important metrics you should watch as you fine-tune your company website.

1. Pageviews

When you look at pageviews, you are seeing how many times a certain page was viewed during the selected time period. You can use this metric to judge how popular or helpful each page is — and try to apply what works to other pages on your site. You may find that pages with particular types of content perform better than the rest, for example, giving you the insights needed to optimize. To increase pageviews, simply aim to drive more traffic to your site by sharing your URL in all your marketing channels, such as email, radio, social media and digital advertising.

2. Time on Site

With the time on site metric, you can explore what elements keep your site visitors engaged the most. If your visitors are spending a lot of time on certain pages, you can dive into why they are performing better than the rest. Then, you can apply what you learned to optimize the other pages on your site. Pages with high-quality videos and long-form content, for example, tend to keep people on the page for an extended period of time, increasing their engagement with your brand.

3. Bounce Rate

By exploring the bounce rate of each page on your site, you can learn the true percentage of people who leave your site after viewing only one page. This metric represents the people who land on your website and immediately navigate away without clicking any internal links or visiting other pages. You want to reduce this figure to under 50 percent to ensure all your pages are performing their best. You can do so by ensuring each page has quality content that speaks directly to your target audience and drives them to click through the provided links.

4. Exit Pages

When you review exit pages, you can see which pages were viewed last before visitors left your website. In many cases, the exit pages often share elements that make them less user-friendly and engaging than others on your site. You can then use that information to alter those pages to keep visitors engaged and encourage them to take a desired action, like downloading an eBook or making a purchase. You can optimize your exit pages quite easily by adding value-driven copy and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs).

5. Traffic Sources

At a glance, traffic sources immediately reveal just where your website visitors are coming from. This metric will let you know what inspired people to visit your site, including:

• Social media shares
• Direct traffic
• Paid ads
• Search engines
• Targeted marketing campaigns

You can then increase your advertising through the most effective channels and optimize your other efforts to drive traffic from other sources. By diversifying your advertising channels, you can drive traffic from more sources, improving your marketing reach across the board.

6. Conversion Rate

Often touted as the holy grail of all website performance metrics, the conversion rate simply shows you the percentage of site visits that result in completed sales. You should always look at both new and returning visitor conversion rates to see how to best engage with both groups. You can then make sure that your website is easy to navigate and offers valuable support for all your visitors, encouraging them to complete their purchases. Be sure to review your cost per conversion as well to judge how well each of your advertisements perform both before and after optimization.

Optimize Your Website to Boost Effectiveness

With key performance metrics on your side, you can easily optimize your website, ensuring it properly supports all your marketing efforts. You can tap into these metrics using Google Analytics and other tools — and you can also reach out to our team at Zimmer Marketing. We can help you build a professional website that speaks to your target audience and drives conversions while providing the data to help you make necessary improvements.