How to measure the success of your WordPress website?

Does your new website perform for your company? Here are six easy metrics to help you measure website effectiveness. You’ve recently updated your website with a new design and you’re working hard on social media as well as paid advertising to get people to visit. But does the website really help your business?

Understanding how successful your new website is requires checking out some of the numbers behind it. Web analytics is a measurement and analysis of data that enables you to find insights on customer behavior. The more insight, the better. Using that information to create a better customer experience means more sales. I'll explain why analytics matter, and go through six website effectiveness metrics you should be looking at.

Here’s a not-so-secret secret: online sales success is extremely predictable. And the reason for that is because everything—all movements, actions, and behaviors—can be collected as data. It’s this data that makes web analytics so important for a small business after a site overhaul.

The new website is a blank slate, and it’s up to you to decide how your company will perform online. You could use your web analytics tools to figure out what’s working and what needs some improvement. If a call-to-action button isn’t getting traction, you could make it larger or different colors, or change its positioning for enhanced conversions. The possibilities are endless! Data is key to continual growth on the web, so start using it to your benefit.

The site owner would never know the button wasn’t getting clicks without looking at the data. Reviewing the data and running tests like these will help you determine how to sell more efficiently to customers. Who is the target segment — someone who is a webmaster and want to learn more, programmers who are looking to make a website review more profitable and really anyone who has an online presence.

Traffic

This metric should be measured at the beginning of your journey with web analytics. It is the number of visitors your site has received at a given time. You’re looking for increases in trend data and whether there have been spikes in returning traffic. Marketing should increase traffic over time, so the number of visitors should rise.

Increasing traffic means new visitors are visiting for the first time. New visitors expire after two years, so anyone returning within that timeframe is a returning visitor.

Pageviews

The next metric is a vanity metric known as pageviews. It gives you insight into how many people are visiting your website, and provides context on where customers like to go on the site. Over time, chart this data to find content and sales opportunities for your small business.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources on the new website show you the kind of traffic that is received. These include referral, search engine, and social traffic. If you’ve recently launched a social media campaign, this information helps to see if it’s working (an increase in social traffic) or if site SEO is improving (search ranking). Guest blogging and other dynamic content-centric approaches will help with referral traffic.

Most viewed pages

You may know this rating as top content, but it’s a way for you to determine which pages on your site have the most visitor traffic. For example, if you have a website or blog with a lot of pages that don’t get many views, you might want to improve them to help drive traffic.

With this information, make sure you know what customers are looking for and if they want certain products and services so you can base future promotions on real data. It’s up to the page content to convert visitors into buyers—which won’t happen if there isn’t enough traffic running through it.

Devices

One of the most important metrics, is the device type, which shows what device customers are using to browse your website. For example, if you find out through this metric that 90% of your customers are shopping on mobile, it would make sense to invest in marketing campaigns for mobile users. Other device types include desktop, tablets, and “others,” such as smartwatches and smart cars. Your website should be fully responsive on all of these devices.

Demographics

Demographics is the last foundation metric that you should be aware of. It tells you where customers come from, which is helpful if they’re concentrated in one area of the country or a specific city. Demographics are also helpful if you’re tracking location-centric pages on your website.

Tracking and measuring these metrics is best done over a few months or within any “testing” window. You should have a general idea of the overall trend of your progress within the first three months. Active testing of one page can be done in a specific window of time, like a few days.

Begin with a baseline of your page metrics, and decide on goals before starting your test. Each test must have its own time limit so that you can analyze the results properly. For instance, run an ad linked to the landing page for a few days. Change the ad headline in the middle of the promotion, and see if there is an increase or decrease in your page metrics. Tweak what you do for the highest conversion rate. Data tells you the most when compared to historical data or data from competitors in the same niche. Use these opportunities to find what other people are doing well on a particular topic or content area and do it too!