How to Use Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Website

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So far this week we’ve covered all the basics of setting up and designing your website. Now, we’re going to look at what to do once you’ve launched it. 

By the end of this article, you’ll know: 

  • How to add trust signals to your website
  • How to set up Google Analytics 
  • How to look at your website’s performance 
  • What A/B testing is

The post-launch phase is just as important as the set-up and designing phases of making a website. You want to ensure that the website you’ve created is meeting the goals you set when you first developed your website strategy. After all, you’ve spent so much time curating your website that you want to ensure that it’s serving its purpose. 

When people land on your website, you want to ensure that you’re presenting your company in the best possible way. To increase the confidence of your customers, you should add trust signals like testimonials and case studies. 


Add trust signals to increase customer confidence

Trust signals are subtle indicators across your website that give your visitors confidence that what you say and do is authentic and high quality. At the core of it, good trust signals will improve your conversion rates. However, they also help to build your brand and customer loyalty over time. Many of these you may not be able to add immediately as a completely new business but you should keep these in mind as you grow to add in overtime.

  • Customer testimonials What is better than clearly explaining why your product is great? Having a customer do it for you.
    • Case studies. A page dedicated to more detailed stories about how your product or service benefited a customer. Engage with customers who love your product and get them to go on film for bonus points! 
    • Money-back guarantees Putting this front and centre reduces some of the fear people may have in putting their credit card down. It also shows you have confidence in your product.
    • Reviews and star rating. People expect more and more to be able to find out from other people their experience with a company or product before purchasing. 
    • Social media links. Having social profiles allows you to show how active you are and provides more avenues of communication for your customers that they may find more comfortable. 
  • Map and office location. Helps prove you are real and not a faceless online company.
  • An active blog. Having a blog that you post regularly to shows that you’re active and your product isn’t ‘dead’. 
  • A well written About Us page. Opening up about your team, location and vision is a super-easy way to let visitors know you’re real and authentic. 

While you may not be able to gather many customer testimonials and reviews pre-launch, you should try and get as many as possible to put on your website. 

The more you grow your audience post-launch, the more reviews and testimonials you will gain. 
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Post-launch tracking, analytics and updates

 

Launching is just the beginning!

This section doesn’t need to be completed in this week’s work but you should be on your pre-launch list. Post-launch, you’ll need to start tracking activity on your website to ensure it’s meeting the goals you outlined earlier.

You’ll want to expand the content of your website if you have additional pages and begin blogging consistently if you want to improve your website ranking in Google (you do want this). 

For now, we are just going to make sure you are in the correct position going forward to grow your website audience. 


How to set up Google Analytics

The most common analytics tool of choice for tracking your website’s performance is Google Analytics. Not only is it highly detailed but it is also completely free! It’s also quite easy to set up. Here’s how:

  1. Go to google analytics and sign up for an account 
  2. Sign into your new account
  3. Set up a property for your website
  4. Find the tracking code for this new property – In property, click Tracking Info and then Tracking Code.
  5. Copy the tracking code
  6. Add the tracking code to your website. The website code needs to be added to every page of your website that you want to track immediately under the <head> tag

To make sure your tracking is working, go to the real-time tab through the left-hand menu which should start showing live visitors live on your site.

How to look at your website performance

There are a lot of metrics in GA, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here are some of the first metrics you should get to grips with that will help you analyse the health of your website:

  1. New visitors – are you getting traffic?
  2. Returning visitors – do people come back?
  3. Pageviews – which pages are working best?
  4. Time on page – how long are people spending on your content?
  5. Referral source/medium – how did this person find you? 
  6. Bounce rate – who just leaves immediately without looking at anything? 
  7. Exit pages – which page do they leave the site from?

A/B testing

Once you start getting strong levels of traffic, you can start to get scientific about changes. A/B testing is a method where you create two versions of the same page. Half your traffic sees one version, the other half automatically see the other version.

You can then track their behaviour to see which one is the most effective. Don’t get too complicated with changes between the two versions. Change one thing at a time so that you can be sure that this is the change that had the effect.  It could be as simple as testing out two different button colours. The most agile marketers will always be testing something on their website.


Summary

There are so many ways to measure the effectiveness of your website, with Google Analytics being one of the most popular tools available. Understanding the different metrics in Google Analytics will help you to analyse the success of your website. 

If your website is not performing how you’d hoped, A/B testing will allow you to determine if another solution is more effective. 

Next week, we’ll be looking at ways to fund the costs of starting up your business. 

There are a number of ways you can fund your business. If you want to find out more about this process, stay tuned! 

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