Runtime News
Making Sense of Stats |
| Posted by Andy Smith (andy) on Jan 20 2009 at 12:56 PM |
Although you will often be presented with a whole load of figures, you really should be concentrating on just 3 to start with:
• Visitors
• Conversions (these are people who fill in a form or order something)
• Conversion rate (the percentage of visitors that convert)
Visitors
This reflects the number of people visiting your site, and is a good indicator of the success of your online and offline marketing. Ideally, you should see a steady rise in traffic for new websites, especially if you are running Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay per Click (PPC), Email Marketing campaigns, or other activities. You may have come across 'Hits' as a measure of a websites success. Don't worry about this, it is a very inaccurate measure that you can safely ignore!
Beware of using visitors alone as a measure of success: unless your site is generating orders or enquiries then the only thing the traffic is good for is brand building. It's much better to have 3 visitors who want to buy a water filter rather than 1000 schoolkids who are doing a project on water quality in the third world.
Conversions
The number of conversions is the number of people who visit your site AND do something (ofter called a goal) This could be:
• Placing an order
• Completing an enquiry form
• Sending an email from a link
• Viewing a certain page
• Signing up to a newsletter
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is a measure of a number of aspects of your site.
• Are you attracting the right visitors?
• Does it look as the visitor would expect?
• Is it easy to find the 'goal'
• Do you have what the visitor wants?
• Is your call to action powerful enough?
• Are your prices within the budget of the visitor?
To improve you conversion rate, these are things you may like to try changing to improve the success of the site.
We recommend using Google Analytics to measure these performance indicators. Call us on 01952 457392 to find out more.
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