Website Evaluation
Almost 90 years ago Claude Hopkins wrote a book called Scientific Advertising which argued that the days of blindly pouring money into advertising and hoping for the best have ended. His insight was to measure your results. This is the only way to be sure your advertising is working; anything else is just a gamble. We don't believe your website should be a gamble.
That is why we have developed a formal reporting process to measure your website’s results.
What every Website Owner needs to know...
Performance Reporting
We provide all of our multi-page websites regular reports, to provide useful insights and actions based on the numbers. These recommendations can then be discussed further via phone, email or face-to-face meetings.
Website Goals
Every report is written with your current website goals in front of us. It is these goals which allow us to determine website strengths and weaknesses from key statistics. Your goals also allow sensible recommendations for improvements and extra features.
Over time, the goals of your website will change. The report also helps make sure we understand exactly what your website goals are at all times. This ensures that your website remains effective at meeting your objectives over the long term.
Unique Visitors
Historically, websites have been measured by hits. A page with four images counts as five hits (one for the page and one each for the images). For this reason hits has been shown to be next to useless for measuring website traffic. The number of unique visitors to your site in a month has shown itself to be a much more accurate indication of website traffic and growth.
Pages Viewed (per visit)
Pages viewed is simply the number of pages (on average) visitors view on each visit to your website. This gives an indication of how deeply visitors are exploring your website and its content.
Visitor Retention
Visitor retention measures how long a visitor spends (on average) on your website, measured in seconds. The longer the better as it indicates, visitors engaging with your site and content.
Bounce Rate
The site’s bounce rate measures how many people leave your site after only viewing one page. The bounce rate indicates if visitors have found what they are looking for or have chosen to look elsewhere. It is measured as a percentage of visitors who don't proceed to a second page.
Entry & Exit Pages
As Google and other search engines direct visitors to the specific content they're searching for, visitors can Enter your site on pages other than your Home Page. The Entry Pages statistic helps understand what the top pages people arrive on. Simililarly Exit pages measures the pages most of your visitors leave from. Exit pages might indicate parts of your website that are turning off your visitors.
Inbound Connections
Visitors can come to your site, one of three ways. Directly - by typing your web-address into their browser. Via a Search Engine - by searching for your site and following the link. And by Referral - where another website has setup a link to send peopleto your website. (this is commonly a directory or collaborating business)
Top Search Engine Key words & Current Rankings
Understanding how visitors find your site helps you understand how well your website is working. By studying what keywords (words used in a search engine) are used to find your site you can have confidence that your site can be found by people looking for what you do. Certain keywords may suggest potential future improvements. Lack of certain keywords may indicate areas of weakness to be addressed. Current Rankings simply tell you how you are ranking for the keywords you're focussed on.
Top Pages
Top pages are simply the most popular pages on your website, Understanding your objectives will assist in analysing whether your key content is effective in capturing your visitors. Also key pages like "Contact Us" are always important to rank well.
Popular pages indicate where most of your visitors are spending their time. It is a good indication of where a site’s strengths and weaknesses are. If a site aims to get bookings for accommodation and people are never looking at that page, there is a problem.
Conversion Goals
Having some kind of measurable action on your website is one of the best things you can do to make sure your website actually works for your business. If you want people to get in touch with you then you should have a contact form which counts if people fill it out (a conversion).
Most of the above statistics help you with measuring how well your site is doing at getting the visitors in the door. Conversions help you remember that this is only one part of your website’s success.
You may be getting a lot of traffic for certain keywords which never turn into conversions on your website. In this case you might need to consider if those searchers are actually your potential clients at all. You may need to tweak that part of your site to try and get them to respond more positively.
Above all you need to remember your website exists to encourage people to take the next step in buying something from you, or whatever other goals you have established.
Service History
Our website philosophy is not “fire and forget.” We are continually enhancing and upgrading the software behind the sites, the website’s look and website features.
Included with our report is a list of all work done on your site including support, software upgrades, server upgrades, feature upgrades, custom development or any other activities.
Increase Your Profits
Measuring your website is simply listening to what your prospects are telling you. By looking at what your site’s visitors are doing on your website you can see what parts of your message are working and what parts are not. By looking at this over the long term you can see if you can determine if your improvements and changes are getting you a “warmer” or “cooler” response.
A profitable website may provide you with as much new business as you can handle so you may choose to drop other advertising and remove an expense.
Even if you decide to advertise elsewhere, the market intelligence you learn can be applied to your other advertising. This is particularly beneficial in advertising where it takes a long time to measure the results. The lessons learned from your website eliminate unprofitable side roads and so increases profits.
