What are the Top 5 Key Performance Indicators for Your Website?

Ever wondered whether your website is really pulling its weight in your business? Today, we’re diving into the Top 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that every website owner should monitor to ensure their site is working hard to drive sales, generate leads, and grow your business. 


Mentioned Resources:

Improving Your Website’s Speed:
--> EP 047: Speed Matters: How Faster Websites Drive More Sales

Speed Tools to Measure your Website’s Speed:

--> PageSpeed Insights 

--> WebPageTest 

--> GTmetrix


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Chapters

• 0:00 Top Website KPIs for Online Success
• 12:40 Maximizing Website Performance With Key Indicators

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 1:10

If you've ever wondered whether your website is really pulling its weight in your business, this episode is for you. Today, we're diving into the top five key performance indicators that every website owner should monitor to ensure that their website is working hard to drive sales, generate leads and really grow your business. So let's jump in and find out which of the top five they are to track. Welcome to the eCommerce Made easy podcast. I'm your host, k 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. Welcome back to the show. Kpis, or key performance indicators, are like the vital signs of your website. They help you understand what's working, what's not and where to focus your efforts. Now, before we dive into the top five KPIs to be tracking, I want you to take a look at where you are in your business. If you're just starting out, then I highly encourage you to be looking at these numbers maybe a little less frequently, because if they're not growing very fast you might get a bit disappointed is why I say that. So you might want to look at the monthly, because it really does take a little a good bit of time to really make that snowball effect happen on our website, and listening to this podcast and other resources can really help you get that snowball going faster. But I don't want you to be disappointed by checking your numbers daily. Maybe even weekly might be a little bit too much. So you can use your best judgment and see how these are changing and how fast they're changing. To determine how often you're going to look at these, I would recommend, at minimum, monthly. Really more ideally would be every other week, if not weekly. So let's dive into what those are.

Carrie Saunders: 3:16

So the first key performance indicator you really need to be looking at is your website traffic. This is the total number of visitors coming to your website and you can track this, you know, and, like I said, whether it's you're tracking it based upon the month, the week or every two weeks. Have that timeframe set, but we wanna see how many visitors are coming to your site on a regular basis and then compare it to the previous time period that you were recording on how often they were coming, and so this really helps you understand whether you're growing your traffic to your website or not. And we don't grow what we're not tracking. So making sure to track this is actually pretty important and put it on your calendar. Maybe it's something you do on a brain dead Friday afternoon every Friday, or maybe it's the first Friday of the month or the first and third Friday. So make this a very regular occurrence and you can use a free tool like Google Analytics to help you track this, and it's pretty easy to set up, install and some ways that you can really benefit from this is. It really helps you understand are you making progress on your search engine optimization, or maybe your focus currently is bringing in social media leads? Are you making progress on those social media leads? So really tracking whether your website's traffic is increasing based upon the efforts you're making whether it's search engine optimization or social media optimization then you can really see whether your efforts are working so you know whether to tweak them and change them and make those better. So, even though this is a simple number, we're looking at the total number of people across a certain time period that you pick. It's very important to track your other marketing efforts to help you understand whether those are working or not.

Carrie Saunders: 5:05

Now, another one that you need to track is your bounce rate, and so bounce rate basically means a percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page. So they land on your page and literally bounce and leave. Now, if this bounce rate is high, that means your messaging is wrong somewhere. It could be the messaging to get the people to your website. So, whether that search engine optimization messaging what they're seeing when they're searching and finding your website or it could be your social media marketing messaging, and that might be disconnected from what you're presenting them on the website. Or maybe your messaging is great in bringing them to your website, but your website messaging is failing and not doing its job to keep them engaged and keep them looking around on your website, or there could be errors on your website. So there's quite a bit of things here that could be affecting your bounce rate, and if it's above 50%, then I would definitely have a professional help you out on this if you're having trouble getting this fixed yourself.

Carrie Saunders: 6:10

We wanna see bounce rates generally below 50%. Even lower is, of course, better. But really evaluating is my messaging Are they? Are they bouncing off of a social post that I you know? Maybe you had a blog post and you created a social post off of it and you're drawing people to that blog post. Is there some sort of disconnect that they're leaving that landing page, that blog post page?

Carrie Saunders: 6:36

If it's just general bounce rates, people are coming to you, say, from a search engine search. Maybe your keywords aren't optimized right. Maybe you're drawing people in who actually are interested in your services, so maybe your webpage is great. It's just the keywords that it's drawing in they're focusing on is not the ideal ones for the people you're targeting. So there's many different factors that you can have here and pulling this apart is really important to do. And always reach out to a professional like us If you're really stuck and frustrated, because we don't want you to be stuck and frustrated. But if you don't have this number and you're not following this number, you don't know that you're going to need to make improvements. So, again, what you track you're going to improve upon. So I highly recommend you do that.

Carrie Saunders: 7:22

Number three is conversion rate. So what is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action you want, whether that's purchasing a service, signing up for your newsletter or downloading a freebie? How many people are coming to that page and then how many people follow through with that action or that call to action? And we need to know that this conversion rate is getting better. We want it to grow. We want it to get better all the time. Generally speaking, on a traditional e-commerce site, a conversion rate of 2% to 3% is very good. Yes, that does sound very low, but that is very good for a traditional e-commerce site. So I want you to take your normal conversion rate and get it improved. It doesn't matter where that starts. You could be 15%, 20%. I've seen websites do that. Ours actually has that high of a conversion rate, or it could be, you know, half a percentage or one percent, but you at least know that. You know that you need to improve something. So what are some things you might need to improve to make the conversion rate better? Messaging is definitely one. It can definitely be a messaging disconnect you know how you brought them in versus what they see once they get there. It could be your call to action buttons aren't actionable enough, they aren't urgent enough, they aren't compelling enough. So it could be.

Carrie Saunders: 8:41

You're just simply your CDAs need to be changed. I always recommend when you're testing things like this, let's change one thing at a time and then use that review time period whether it's one week, two weeks or a month and accumulate a few of those periods you know together and then review again. So let's say you're checking your stats weekly. I would give it at least three to four weeks before you adjust something else again to see if what you adjusted worked. That can really help weed out the anomalies that we might get in a week. You know we might have a slower week because it's a specific holiday for your ideal customers or people are on vacation. It's a typical vacation time. So we do want to give some time period to review it before we actually make another change and adjustment. So give it some time. Be a bit patient here. I know it's super hard to be patient with this.

Carrie Saunders: 9:32

Now, if your software also allows it, you can do A-B testing where you have two different versions of the webpage show up and it's a random and generally that's going to be true A-B testing. Give about 50% to both A and 50% to B, so that we can truly decide which way works better, which landing page works better, which call to actions work better. I recommend again, where we're doing reiterations on these things, let's also make sure that the difference between A and the B version of the website is a small difference. We don't want a really big difference, lots of things different between A and B. Then you don't know which pieces work better. But sometimes you really need some fast action and you want to do that. Then you go to that, say B is better. Then you go to the B page and split that into two different tests and then you make a slight change to one of those versions and keep your original one that was doing really well and then you can start really narrowing down exactly what is helping your conversion rate. So those are just some advanced strategies on what you can do to really help your conversion rate.

Carrie Saunders: 10:42

And then number four is average session duration. So what does that mean? It's the amount of time visitors are spending on your website. It's the average amount of time they're spending. So longer sessions imply that they are looking at more things. They're clicking around, more they're reading, more they're staying on your website. They're a lot higher engagement with your website when you have the average session duration high. That helps you in multiple ways. One, it lets you know hey, you're doing something right on your website, right? Another thing it does is Google, for example. Especially if Google Analytics installed in your webpage, they're going to notice. Oh wait, these people get a long time looking at this web page. Maybe there's something important to this web page. Maybe I need to boost their Google rankings. This will typically help you with search engine optimization when you have a long average session duration. That's kind of hard to say together and it can really help boost your search engine rankings when you see that, when Google sees that it's high, so that's really great. So if you have a web page that has a decent average session duration, see if there's some small things you can do to change that particular page and get it even higher. And you know, use that information you get to make maybe the pages that they're not staying on very long and get those a little bit higher. Maybe you tweaked your messaging and then it boosted up some and then you're like oh, then you know that you need to tweak your messaging on some of the other pages to match a similar style, and that can then help boost your whole website's average session duration. It's a really great idea to focus on this simple but what seems to be maybe meaningless KPI, but it's actually very important, like I said, for search engines as well as for you understanding your customers better.

Carrie Saunders: 12:41

And then number five is the page load time. So how long does it take for your site to fully load? It's something we talk about a lot on this podcast. Your page load time should be less than two seconds, if not even faster than that. People expect fast web pages, so if you are seeing your page load time increase, that is a bad thing, and that means that one there's something probably wrong with your website. Maybe you need to optimize your images, maybe you need to work with your hosting provider, or whomever your website's with, to see what's going on and why it's so slow. It's also going to affect your search engine rankings. So when we have slow websites, google penalizes those websites for being slow and they will service them up less to their visitors because they want to provide a really good experience for their visitors. So making sure that your website's fast is going to help boost your search engine optimization, and we'll link to some other podcast episodes and resources in our show notes about how you can do that a bit better, and so you're going to want to be using things like Google page speed insights, gt metrics those are a few that we love to use and webpagetestorg We'll link to those in the show notes. You don't have to remember those, but they're great ways to test and keep track of your website speed and I highly recommend you do this regularly.

Carrie Saunders: 14:05

I like to tell the story about one client that came to me and said they got an alert from Google which you can set up alerts for Google and it let them know their website was really slow. It all of a sudden went really slow. Well, it was as simple as they uploaded a new banner image that was not optimized for the web. It was just simply too large. So if they hadn't been tracking their webpage speed months down the road, they may have been way down in sales and been wondering why. But since they were tracking their webpage speed, they knew something was wrong with the website and they reached out to us, because we provide services for them, and we immediately found out it was one of their images and we fixed the image for them and they were on their merry way and they didn't get penalized by Google.

Carrie Saunders: 14:50

So tracking this is super important and this is one. Say you track the other ones a bit less often. If you're updating your website weekly, I totally recommend you check this weekly because you typically will find the page speed will get reported by Google a few days, if not a week, after you made a change, so you do want to be checking this one more regularly than the other ones. If you're doing the other ones, like every two weeks or every month, all right. So let's recap this episode. So the top five key performance indicators that you should be tracking are website traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, average session duration and lastly, maybe most importantly, is page load time. I can't talk about that one enough because it's so important for our overall health of our website and when you're monitoring these regularly, you're going to really help create that good snowball effect of a website that's generating you consistent leads and consistent revenue and consistent income for you.

Carrie Saunders: 15:54

All right, so that's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope it was great and helped you have some actionable steps and helped you have some actionable steps. I challenge you to start, you know, viewing these key performance indicators and pick a time schedule that you know is doable for now and then revise that here in three to six months and maybe make it a bit shorter timeframe so that you're really keeping a great eye on your website. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out in any episodes coming up, and we would love to hear from you. If you have any suggestions on what you want to hear from us or topics, drop us an email at podcast, at bcsengineeringcom, and, as always, you can find our show notes at ecommercemadeeasypodcastcom. And we will see you next week.