“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Management expert Peter Drucker had a point when he said this famous maxim. Today, simply having a website isn’t enough. In this digital age, websites should be measured and optimized, ready to help a customer or consumer that may visit anytime, day or night.
While Mr. Drucker is speaking the truth, the advice he gives is not always the easiest thing for companies to absorb or correct. The fact is website optimization is something that is ever-evolving and the constantly changing technologies and algorithms can make the task at hand a challenge for marketers.
But it doesn’t have to be complicated. To start, I recommend that you dive into your website’s analytics. This will give you the information you need when considering how to optimize your company’s website. You might be asking yourself which website analytics you should be focusing on. Great question!
At DMA Solutions, we recommend focusing on the following metrics that, once defined, will provide the information you need to know to adapt and optimize your website.
1
Traffic sources – where are your visitors coming from?
This particular metric tells you which digital sources are directing traffic to your website so you can nurture what’s working and fix what’s not. Some examples include: Direct, Referral, Social Media, and Email. Direct traffic defines the number of visitors that visit your website by typing your URL into their browser. Referral traffic relates to visitors that arrive to your website via another website or avenue, such as a clickable advertisement or hyperlink. Knowing the volume of traffic that you’re getting via social media is also useful because social networks can help increase your website traffic and connect consumers and/or buyers to your brand, story, and products. Emails can also attribute visits to your website, an indication that your marketing automation efforts are working. If you send automated emails to your target audiences on a regular basis, this number will tell you if your emails are useful in driving traffic back to your online assets.
2 Devices – Are your users using PCs or mobile devices?
A vast amount of search traffic is conducted via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. According to multiple sources like NBC News and MediaBistro, it turns out nearly 80 percent of smartphone users reach for their phone within 15 minutes of waking up. Knowing this statistic is critical when you consider how to nurture or delight your website visitor by providing them with a website on their mobile device of choice that is easy to navigate and read when viewed.
3 bounce rate – is your content effective?
A “bounce” is when someone visits your site and immediately leaves upon entry without interacting with the page. If this happens often enough, your optimization opportunity may be content-related. Knowing the pages on the website that are experiencing the highest bounce rate will help you determine the content that is not working so you can produce content that will keep them wanting more.
4 keywords – how are people finding your website via search?
Keywords help you understand the search terms that are used to bring visitors to your site via organic search engines. Understanding the top five to ten keywords that drive traffic to your site enables you to maximize the words that are working (by including them in more of your content) and identify the ones that aren’t (but should be included in your content).
5 page performance – how are your pages performing?
When you know the pages that most people visit, you quickly gain context about the information that is most important to your customer or consumer. For example, let’s say you sell fresh-cut produce and non-fresh-cut produce and both are available on your website. If you see that more visitors are visiting the fresh-cut content, this should indicate to you the topics that interest your visitors the most. This information puts you in a great position to optimize page level content for the areas of your website that are underperforming.
Once you have taken a closer look at these metrics, be on the lookout for trends and opportunities that you see when you compare your website’s performance over a time span of 3, 6, and 12 months. Whether a customer or consumer is seeking to connect with your brand or product/service, hosting an optimized website will increase your chances of them finding you, connecting, and returning after a good experience that encourages a repeat visit.
As a fresh produce marketer, I believe that our websites (and all of our digital assets) are an extension of our brands and, if optimized properly, can bring us one step closer to inspiring a purchase of a fresh produce item, one visit at a time.
For more information about DMA Solutions or to request a website optimization assessment, visit www.dma-solutions.com.
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