Why monitoring your site’s performance is so important

Posted 22 September 2011 in Online marketing

‘I don’t get enough enquiries from my website’ is something we hear a lot from prospective clients. The first thing we always want to know is how the site is generally performing, so we can establish why the enquiries are too low and recommend a course of action to fix it.

Our questions would include;

How many enquiries did you have this month from your website? How many visitors have been to your website this month?
On average, how long did they spend there?            
On average, how many pages did they look at?                                  

If you don’t know the answers to the above questions, you probably don’t have a statistics package on your website or you don’t have access to it. This is easily fixed and something we can help you with. Call us on 01923 262189 or drop us an email, and ask about Google Analytics.

Web statistics information enables you/us to monitor the results and more importantly, adapt the site according to its areas of weakness. (This isn’t all the information available from the web statistics package, but it will give you an idea of how useful it really is!)

If we don’t look at the overall picture of a site’s performance, then there’s a strong chance that the wrong plan of action would be undertaken. This would be costly and not necessarily fix the enquiry level problem!

Let’s run a couple of different scenarios, both with the same number of enquiries. You’ll see from the examples below that there are 2 different plans of action, based on having more detailed information on the site’s performance.

Scenario 1.

Results

• How many enquiries did you have this month from your website?   
  Answer: 4 enquiries

• How many visitors have been to your website this month?          Answer: 4 visitors

• On average, how long did they spend there?                              Answer: 2 minutes        

• On average, how many pages did they look at?                            Answer: 6 pages

Our comments
4 enquiries from 4 visitors? Wow! This site is doing a great sales job of converting visitors to enquiries. It’s not, however, attracting enough visitors. Visitors are spending a reasonable amount of time on the site and looking at several pages, which is great. It means that the site navigation and the words are doing their jobs too.

Plan of action
Drive more traffic to the site! Let’s talk about Google Adwords, SEO, link building etc.

Scenario 2.

Results

• How many enquiries did you have this month from your website?         
  Answer: 4 enquiries

• How many visitors have been to your website this month?          Answer: 2,500 visitors

• On average, how long did they spend there?                               Answer: 20 seconds       

• On average, how many pages did they look at?                           Answer: 1 page

Our comments
4 enquiries from 2,500 visitors? A great number of visitors but this site is not doing a great sales job of converting them. Visitors are leaving quickly and only looking at one page. This would suggest that the site navigation and the words are failing to do their jobs, or that the wrong type of visitors are dropping by.

Plan of action
Rewrite the words on the most popular landing page (typically the home page) and review in 2 weeks to see how the results have improved.  

How we can help!

We run a bespoke training session on how to interpret your web statistics, which for the month of September (2011) is available at a discounted rate of only £55 exc VAT. This 1 hour session will be based on your site’s statistics and will show you precisely how to interpret your results on an ongoing basis. This valuable insight into your website’s performance will enable you to pinpoint the areas that need improvement. The session is by telephone so can be booked to fit around your schedule.

If you’d like to find out more about this training or want to find out why your site is not performing, drop us an email!