Understanding Your Online Audience Through Key Website Indicators

As a business owner, understanding your website's history and trends isn't just beneficial—it's essential. While it's essential not to fixate on the past, reflecting on past website performance can provide valuable insights to enhance your present strategies.  In this episode of the eCommerce Made Easy podcast, we delve into the importance of analyzing key website indicators and how these metrics can help us understand our businesses better.


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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:03

As a business owner, being able to look at your website's history and trends is crucial to knowing where you're going in your business. While we shouldn't really obsess over the past, being able to look at where we were in our business can help us learn and make the present day better and make sure we're on the right track. In this episode, we'll be diving into what you should be reviewing regularly with your website metrics, and why so. This is going to be a little bit different than last week's episode, where we talked about business metrics. Now we're going to be talking about website metrics. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, keri Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old my main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Welcome back to this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. So last week, in episode 51, we talked about three key performance indicators in your business that you should be tracking regularly. These are mostly metrics focused on cash and sales in your business. Today, we're driving into what are three key website performance indicators that you should be reviewing specifically on your website using some analytic software such as Google Analytics. Now, if you listen to this episode in basically real time or close to real time and haven't already heard, google's universal analytics data is going to be deleted. All your data is going to be deleted starting July 1st of 2024. This is a bit of a big deal for many businesses who have been around for a while, because they like to look back, especially as established business, look back at what their history is on their website, how much traffic's coming in, etc. So I wanted to use this opportunity to help you understand, as you're growing and maybe you're already a growing business, but you're not looking at these metrics what should you really be looking for it? So, even if you're listening past July 1st of 2024, we're going to be looking at what you should be looking at on your website regularly and how we can do that in a way to help propel our business forward.

Speaker 1: 3:35

Now I know for some of you thinking about looking at website metrics I get a lot of feedback on this can sound super scary or overwhelming. I have a lot of customers and clients and business friends tell me this all the time. I just don't know what to look at, carrie. I get so confused, I get so overwhelmed. Those are the words they use all the time when talking about looking at their website analytics.

Speaker 1: 3:59

But we're going to be breaking things down and making them simple. Plus, not tracking these essential elements is pretty much guaranteed to slow down your business and your business growth, and I know that we all want faster and better business growth, so let's dive right in, all right. So first off, what are some of the key metrics you should minimally keep an eye on and I'm only going to go over three in this episode. These are my top three that I think are really important. That if you minimally look at these, it's going to go over three in this episode. These are my top three that I think are really important. That if you minimally look at these, it's going to really help you out. First off is traffic volume. Then next we're going to look at bounce rate and what that is. And then, finally, we're going to be looking at traffic sources, or traffic acquisition as it is now called in Google Analytics 4.

Speaker 1: 4:45

So I'll be defining and getting to the details of what these metrics mean in a few moments, but I want you to keep in mind something first For all of these metrics, we want to look at trends. Please try not to obsess over the daily fluctuations. Some people will do that and look at the daily fluctuations and get really panicked or really excited, depending on whether it's going up or down, but likely you're going to want to look at these metrics monthly, maybe weekly, if your business is pretty up and running and very established and moving quickly. They each contribute to your understanding of the health of your website. Also, if you aren't looking at any of these yet, please give yourself grace. It is something that even I fall off the bandwagon on and don't look at as regularly as I really should. So part of this episode is really speaking to myself and reminding me I need to be doing this. So, and if the thought of looking at all of these overwhelms you, please pick one first to work with and I'll go over which one I recommend the most over all of them If you can only handle doing one, and then, a few months later, once you've got that one under your habit and are looking at it regularly, add the next one and then the third one and then, if you really want to go gangbusters, you can keep on looking at more data. But we also want to be reasonable and not look at too much data and not be working in our business and on our business. So make sure looking at one of these is better than looking at none of them. So just give yourself grace. Remember that if you're not looking at any of them, looking at one is better than none. All right, so let's get started.

Speaker 1: 6:26

So we're going to first look at traffic volume. As the name implies, it's basically how much traffic you're getting to your website. Obviously, if this number trends downward, then something's wrong and you're not getting as much traffic as you used to be getting. So either it could be your content, it could be your website functionality Think about your speed or any website errors you might have, could be marketing strategies and could be search engine optimization Really, just to name a few. So if you, like I said, if you only track one metric I stress, this is the one metric you do want to track. This is also one that I recommend looking at at a weekly or monthly basis.

Speaker 1: 7:10

For our website, for example I know I mentioned this before on Saturdays and Sundays, our traffic volume drops. That's very common for us. It's happened over the 20 some years we've been doing this business. Our traffic is just lower on Saturdays and Sundays Because our target market is other online businesses. Many of them aren't working on Saturday or Sunday, and some of them that might have their online businesses like a side hustle or they're building it up. They might be on it on Saturday and Sunday, but in general, most of our traffic is Monday through Friday and it usually peaks on the Tuesday, wednesday and Thursday days. Honestly. So I know not to panic when I see that traffic drop on Saturday and Sunday, because I know that is my website's trend. So when you're looking at this data more regularly, you're going to see patterns like that, so that you know, okay, wednesday is my most popular day and Friday is my least popular day, so just keep that in mind as you're looking at this.

Speaker 1: 8:11

Now, obviously, if we see a general downward trend across weeks or months of data, then I know that there's something wrong with our website that needs to be fixed. Either my website's functionality is broken maybe we added a feature and we thought we tested it thoroughly and we missed something or maybe my content is not in great quality anymore. Maybe we're, you know, think we're doing our best on our content, but it's really just not landing right. I could have added a feature to our website that might be slowing it down and causing issues with consumers. You know, maybe we don't notice because we're here near our servers, but other people out in the internet will notice the slow down more than us. Or maybe because our computers are pretty fast, because that's what we do is work on websites, so maybe we need to try it on another device that's a bit slower, or maybe my marketing efforts aren't landing anymore. So this metric is really a general great heartbeat of your website and ideally, of course, you want to see a growth curve on traffic volume.

Speaker 1: 9:17

All right, so next we're going to go into bounce rate. Now. It is the one that Google took away when they brought out Google Analytics 4. And users complained so much that they brought it back. It is a very useful tool to have on your website. It really is a vital thing and it helps you understand your website a lot better. So if you only want to look at two metrics, I recommend the traffic volume and the bounce rate. It's the next one that I would totally add to your list to look at regularly once you're in the habit of doing this.

Speaker 1: 9:53

Bounce rate simply shows whether people go to your website and leave right away. So the word bounce comes from. They basically bounce onto one page of your website and then they're gone, so kind of like jumping on a trampoline and then jumping right back off. They land there and they're like nope, this is not for me, and they jump right back off. So if you have a high bounce rate, or if you see your bounce rate getting higher, then something is probably wrong with your website. Typically, it's one of two things. One, the wrong people are getting to your website. Or two, the right people are getting to your website, but they find it unengaging and they don't want to stick around. So to fix both of these, generally you need to fix your messaging, and it could be either the messaging on the front end, your marketing message or it could be the messaging on the back end, basically the content on your website's messaging.

Speaker 1: 10:46

So are you messaging and marketing to the wrong people? Are the wrong people come to your website and then when they get there it's something else than what they expected. Or are the right people getting your website but then the content they see is not engaging and they kind of felt like you're going to have something else to give them. So you'll want to do some digging here and this can be a little bit hard to nail down as to why your bounce rate is high. So you really need to be digging into this one and be patient with it. So talk to some current customers, talk to potential customers to see if your website resonates with them. You know you're going to need to do some detective work here and get some other people's opinions. Get some opinions of trusted people in your business too. An outside look on your messaging for both your marketing and your content can really help narrow down where the disconnect is.

Speaker 1: 11:46

Now, if you think you've got your marketing messaging as well as your website messaging nailed down and you think that's pretty solid and good, a few other reasons your bounce rate may be high. Is that one your website's too slow. You might have something broken on your website and don't realize it. Maybe it only is broken in Chrome on a Mac computer, or maybe it's only broken on an Android phone, for example. Another thing could be is your website isn't visually appealing or is too cluttered and they just get there and they're overwhelmed and they just want to leave.

Speaker 1: 12:20

So for the website too slow issue, you can refer back to episodes 20 and 47, which we'll link to in the show notes, for how to understand and test speed metrics on your site and how to improve them. Having a too slow website can also affect your search engine optimization, which we talked about in previous episodes too, which will also affect your traffic volume. So Google is going to penalize you if your website's too slow and it's going to send less people to your website, and the people that get there are probably going to bounce because it is too slow and they're just going to give up and leave. And many of these metrics are interconnected, so keep that in mind, ok. So, lastly, we're going to talk about our third metric, which is traffic sources, or acquisition, and the new Google Analytics 4, they use the word acquisition for this, and so what does this mean and why do we care? So traffic sources shows you where your traffic is coming from, as the name actually implies.

Speaker 1: 13:22

This metric's very important as it can help you understand which of your marketing efforts is working. So let's say you're running some social media campaigns or even some social media ads. If you look back at that week or that month's worth of traffic source where you're doing these sort of campaigns whether it's free campaigns or paid campaigns and you don't see an increase in traffic from your social media compared to a previous time set where you weren't doing these types of marketing efforts, then you know your marketing efforts are off somehow. Maybe it's your messaging. Again, you know messaging is so important We'll be going into this later on in our podcast episodes. But without knowing that your traffic source from social media isn't increasing as you would expected, you wouldn't know you need to pivot in your marketing efforts there. You wouldn't know that you might need to change your messaging on your social media posts or maybe your messaging in your social media advertisements. So keeping an eye on this is going to be very important, especially once you start having advertisements to your websites.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Also, with having traffic sources too, you can see how much organic traffic you get. This will help you understand how your search engine ranking is doing so. Organic traffic basically is traffic that comes to you organically it's just kind of the name of the word. It just comes to you naturally via search engine results. So if you see your organic search rising your organic search term it's kind of hard to say altogether then you know your search engine optimization is making progress and this is great for long game tactics like search engine optimization to really monitor and make sure it is working.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Another one I love to look at under traffic sources or acquisition is referral traffic. So this is traffic that comes to your website being an external link from somebody else's website. If you're getting good quality links back to your website, this not only helps increase your visibility from other websites, obviously, but it also boots your search engine optimizations because you're going to look more important to Google and the major search engines. If other websites are linking back to your website, getting some business relationships or connections outside of your circle and getting some more links back into your website, which is going to help boost your credibility, it will help boost your search engine optimization rankings and all those things. It's going to be a nice snowball effect. So if you see your referral traffic is low. That might be something you might want to target next as your goal for, like the next quarter, is hey, I want to try to increase my referral traffic so that I can get some more diverse inbound links into my website. Okay, so hopefully that wasn't too much and too overwhelming, so let's recap where we came from, all right.

Speaker 1: 16:26

So first off, we talked about three metrics that I feel like are minimally a great thing to review on your website regularly. Again, make sure this fits you or you won't do it. You know, maybe it's monthly, maybe it's every quarter. Don't feel bad if it's not all the time. The really big, really busy websites may be looking at this weekly, but honestly, most businesses are going to look at this at most monthly, and I recommend minimally quarterly would be a really good idea. That way you have some data to look at, some, you know, long-term data to really see what your trends are.

Speaker 1: 17:05

And the things that we talked about looking at is your traffic volume how much traffic are you getting to your website? Is it increasing? Is it decreasing? How are you? How traffic are you getting to your website? Is it increasing? Is it decreasing? How are you? How fast are you increasing? Hopefully you're not decreasing and if you are, hopefully it's a slow decrease and then you can bounce that back up and get it to increase again.

Speaker 1: 17:28

The next one we talked about was bounce rate. Are people landing on your site and leaving right away? That is a very big, bold red flag, for something is seriously wrong. If your bounce rate is high, you either have your messaging wrong on the traffic that is coming into your website or your website. There's some functionality was wrong or slowness is wrong. And then you can use that in conjunction with the next one, the traffic sources, to see what your bounce rate and whether your traffic sources, where they're coming from and what might be the source of problems with your website, and whether you're increasing your traffic sources from social, from referrals and things like that. We want to make sure that we're growing in the areas that we are focusing on.

Speaker 1: 18:10

All right, so that's it for this week's episode. I hopefully that was super helpful for you and not overwhelming. I appreciate you joining me this week on the e-commerce made easy podcast. Be sure to visit our show notes and other episodes on e-commerce made easy podcastcom or your favorite podcast player. If you're watching this on the YouTube channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you're listening on the podcast, hit that follow button wherever you're listening and if you're loving our e-commerce made easy podcast, I would be thrilled if you rated us and reviewed us on Apple podcasts. That really helps me reach more listeners and empower more people like you to thrive in the online business world. Thank you again for listening and we will see you next week.