This article should answer any questions you may have about tracking your website’s performance and provide you with a few new ideas as well. If you have any questions at all, email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Tools for Measuring your Web Metrics

There are a lot of different website statistic packages out there. Some of them are better than others as they provide more detailed information. Generally, most packages will give you enough information for you to measure some of the key performance indicators of your website. Website stats packages will also measure traffic slightly differently, but you shouldn’t be too concerned over just how your traffic is measured, as the goal with web metrics is to track trends over time. If you haven’t already, take advantage of the excellent Google Analytics system – it’s free and it will give you some excellent insight into user behaviour on your website (more on that later).

Excel

We highly recommend that you create a spreadsheet for your website using Excel, creating a sheet for visits, Google referrals and rankings. One of the big benefits of tracking your key webstats in Excel is that should you ever move your web hosting you will have a backup of your most important data.

Unique Visitors, Visits, and Page Views

Each month you should track how many visitors your site is getting and the percentage increase or decrease in visitors. There are three metrics you can measure: unique visitors, visits or page views. ‘Visits’ is the total number of visits your website receives. So if one person visits your site five times over a month, then five visits will be recorded. ‘Unique Visitors’ is the number of individual visitors your site receives, so a visit from one person will count as one ‘unique visitor’. Unique visitors are tracked by using an IP address (every computer on the internet is assigned either a temporary or static IP address). The Unique Visitors number is not always accurate as the same person could be assigned a different IP address every time they log on to the net. ‘Pages’ is the total number of pages that have been viewed by visitors, so if you have two visitors and they both view five pages, then your site will have 10 page views. You don’t need to track all of these – ‘visits’ is more than sufficient. Copy the visit number for each month into your Excel spreadsheet. You can then do graphs or line charts for a quick visual guide.

Search Referrals

By ‘search referrals’ we really mean ‘Google’ referrals, as in our experience the majority of websites receive the bulk of their search traffic from Google. If your website is in the minority then track the search engine that sends you the most traffic. You could also lump all the search engines together and just track-search traffic for each month. If you track Google referrals, enter the number of monthly referrals for all of Google (including all of the country-specific Google websites). The goal is to have an ever-increasing number of visitors from Google.

Referring Sites

If you are paying for a listing on a directory website, then track the number of referrals you get from the site. If you have a blog that is separate from your website, track the number of visitors you get from it. Perhaps you have gone onto Twitter. If so, you’ll want to track all of the different Twitter-generated hits (including from sites like http://twitturls.com).

Keywords

Keywords are the phrases used in the search engines and which result in a visit to your website. They are logged in your website statistics and are a rich source of information about how people are searching for your product or service. You can also measure whether a recent blog post or article topic has started to generate traffic. Generally, there will be three or four main keywords that generate a lot of traffic.

Rankings

Getting high rankings (top 10) in Google is a sure-fire way of bringing in new visitors to your website. It doesn’t take long to manually check the rankings for your top five keyword phrases. These are the phrases that describe your product offering, e.g. ‘Christchurch restaurant’. Add these phrases to your spreadsheet and enter in the corresponding number of where your site is positioned each month in Google. You can choose to track rankings in either Google.com or Google.co.nz, as the results will differ slightly. If you get the bulk of your traffic from Google NZ, then track your rankings in that version of Google. Most searchers don’t go past page 2 of the results, so you only need to track up to position 20 or 30. If you have a Google account, be sure to log out of it before you start checking your rankings, as when you are logged into your account the ranking results are personalised to your web history.

Conversions

The goal with any website is to get people to act in some way. If they do what you want them to then you have achieved your goal and a ‘conversion’. You can track conversions manually (i.e. keeping track of the web forms completed on your site), or you can use Google Analytics to set up specific ‘goals’. If you have an enquiry form on your website that has a ‘thank you’ page, then set up a goal of visitors reaching ‘thankyou.html’ (or whatever your page is called). Google Analytics will then track this goal for you, so you can find out what your conversion rate is (and which page is converting the best). If you are in a business where people are more likely to pick up the phone and ring you, then get into the habit of asking how they heard about you.

Bounce Rates

Every page on your website can have its own ‘bounce rate’. This is the number of times (expressed as a percentage) that this page is the only page viewed on your site (also called ‘single page’ visits). So a visitor may land on your ‘history’ page from a Google search, stay for a 30 seconds and then leave without going to any other pages. Bounce rates indicate how well your website and its specific pages hold the interest of your visitors. A high bounce rate (anything over 50%) is a cause for concern, so you should look at ways of improving your page content. Bounce rates can also differ based on the source of the referral to your site, so a referral from Google may have a lower bounce rate than one from Twitter (and vice versa). This can help you measure the worth of links coming into your site.

Evaluating Website Success

To a certain extent there is an element of ‘organic growth’ with a website that is achieved by a website maturing online and getting some history and links. However, a growth rate of 20 or 30% or more each month in Google referrals or visitors would be over and above any organic growth and is an indication that any marketing or SEO you are doing is working.

Be Jewelled NZ are a New Zealand jewellery wholesaler who were looking for an attractive way to showcase their range of jewellery.

The website features an opening flash slideshow, newsletter sign up, and a blog.

Visit: www.bejewellednz.com

Before you launch into your next website development, we recommend that you set aside some thinking time so you can develop a strategy for your website that is aligned to your overall business goals.

Start by determining the purpose of the website

Most businesses know they need a website, and often get one designed so they can tick it off from their list of marketing requirements. It’s very tempting to send through lots of content and a few thoughts to your web firm and tell them to ‘go for it’. If they’ve got a good understanding of your business and a marketing mind then you may well get back a website that will really add to your marketing efforts. But why take that kind of chance? Depending on the size of your business, it could take up a considerable chunk of your marketing budget. So you want to get it right. Without a clear purpose it’s also impossible to measure the site’s actual effectiveness. Once you know the purpose of the site you can come up with a number of ‘calls to action’ to get your visitors completing the goals you have. Examples include: join your mailing list, pick up the phone and call you, print off a voucher, request more information via a web form, or buy an item online.

Work out your target audience and what they need from your site

Most websites have multiple audiences, and one of the best ways to plan for their requirements is by using ‘personas’. A persona is a fictional character who has a background story. You can then brainstorm on how the persona (for example, Jane Smith, 32, professional, lots of disposable income, socially and environmentally responsible) will use your website. You’ll be surprised at how quickly ideas will spring forth from this exercise, as it really helps to say things like ‘Jane would like that we are carbon neutral and donate to good causes’. Personas are part of what is termed user-centric design, which at its most basic is designing a website around the needs of your users.

What type of content will attract people via search?

Getting traffic from the search engines should be one of your top priorities. Your corporate pages (About Us, Services) should rank highly for your main keyword phrases (the terms that describe your offer). You will also want to capture traffic from what is called the ‘long tail’ of search. These are search phrases that are very specific. An example long tail search might be ‘what is the weather like in New Zealand in June’. The best way to attract this type of search traffic is by writing articles or blogs on a regular basis. This can be hard work as it’s not always easy to come up with new ideas on the spot. But once you have one idea, it’s not long before you have a dozen. We recommend that you set some time aside for idea generation. You don’t have to write everything at the same time, but having a content plan for the next few months (at least) will take some of the pressure off.

Don’t try to do everything at once

Phase your website development, as doing everything in one go increases the complexity of the site and the development time. It’s better to have a site live now rather than delay it by trying to make it perfect from the get-go. A website is always a work in progress, and once you have some metrics on what is going on with your web visitors you’ll find you are in a much better position to make intelligent and well-informed improvements as you go. And lots of small changes can really add up to large changes over time.

If you’ve got questions about developing your next website give us a call on 03 366 33 40 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz. We are happy to answer your questions and discuss your requirements with you.

Rotorua Planet Backpackers is located in the heart of Rotorua and was purpose built with modern backpacker facilities.

The website has been designed very much with the target audience of young travellers in mind. It features a corkboard background, flash image slideshows, handwriting fonts, and images with a polaroid styling. The site imports an RSS feed direct from the Rotorua tourism website, has it’s own blog and RSS feed, and a highly engaging and interactive image shuffle gallery.

Visit: www.rotoruaplanetbackpackers.co.nz

Client Feedback:

“Kitty, it would be a pleasure to give you some positive feedback on your website design that you did for us. The help you personally gave me was very much appreciated, for some one who had limited experience in this type of thing your patience and understanding was amazing, I am sure without your experience in handling some quite tricky situations would have caused further frustrations.

The comments I have had from people visiting my website have been very complimentary even some large overseas booking engines have expressed their compliments on the presentation of the website and have asked who designed it so Kitty you are now internationally known. The activities and attractions that we have on the website have all expressed their delight on how their business has been promoted, so all the credit goes to TML and you Kitty, once again thank you for your help.” Regards Graeme

Thirteen minutes after publishing our most recent blog post on ‘how to market your restaurant online’, we ran some web searches in Google.co.nz to see if the post had been picked up by Google. As you can see from the screen shots below, the blog was ranking for keyword phrases within 13 and 18 minutes respectively.

Now that’s impressive.

Found in Google after 13 minutes from publishing.

Just 18 minutes after publishing the post we're number two in Google.co.nz