Websites are amazing. They are the face of our business, our 24/7 sales person who is always working for us. We need to make sure they continue working as hard as possible. Google Analytics is a great tool to monitor the health of your website (and it’s free!). If you don’t have Analytics installed already, stop reading and go and install it now! The data analytics provides can tell you a lot about how your website is performing.

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The first thing you should be checking is traffic levels over time. Is it increasing or decreasing? At the top of the page select the last 6 months and then compare that with the previous 6 months (tick the compare box). You should now see the two periods side-by-side, what do you notice? If traffic is decreasing this should be an early warning sign for you.

With so much data, it can be hard to know which metrics in Analytics should you be taking notice of. Focus on what’s important:

  • Bounce rate – The number of visitors who leave your website after landing on the homepage. A high bounce rate is anything above 40% and this might indicate that your website is showing up for unrelated web searches.
  • Pages/Session – The number of pages your website visitors are reading. The more pages being read suggests a great website full of useful content for your visitors.
  • Avg. Session Duration – The average time visitors are spending on your site. Are your visitors skim reading or actually taking the time to read your website?
  • Acquisition – Where is your traffic coming from? Organic Search usually provides the best quality traffic to your site while Referral traffic usually is of poor quality.
  • Mobile Audience – Look at how many visitors are viewing your website on a mobile device. Make sure you pay attention to metrics we talked about above such as bounce rate and time on site. If your site is not responsive or mobile-friendly you may find you are losing many potential customers who try to view your website on a mobile device.
  • Behaviour Flow – A brilliant tool which shows how users navigate your website. Look for pages with high drop off rates (indicated by the red arrows); this usually indicates a problem on that particular page which is turning potential customers away.  

Think about it. You wouldn’t keep your sales team around if they weren’t making sales, would you? So why would you have a website which doesn’t generate new leads? It is important that you take the time to check the health of your website to ensure best results.