What Are Users Really Doing on Your Website?
You’ve just launched a new website for your business. Now, all that’s left to do is sit back and wait for the leads to come in, right?
Not exactly.
To get the most out of your website, you need to pay attention to how people are using it. Seeing which blogs people are reading, what buttons people are clicking, and even what terms people are searching for will tell you a lot about how you can convert a new customer.
In this blog, we’ll dive into what website analytics you should keep your eye on, what insights they provide about your website, and how to make tweaks to improve your conversion rate.
Must-have Website Analytics
There are many different tools to view your website’s metrics. Although Google Analytics 4 is the most popular one, you can measure analytics with tools ranging from WordPress plugins like MonsterInsights or as part of CRM platforms like HubSpot. With these tools you get an inside look at how visitors interact with your website. While there are a ton of metrics to track, these are the most important ones for understanding how your website is performing.
Sessions
Sessions can be thought of as periods of time when someone browsed your website. From the moment someone lands on your website to the moment they navigate away counts as 1 session, as long as they remain active.
Website sessions are a good metric for understanding how busy your website is. It gives you an understanding of how many times your website is being browsed, not just how many people are visiting. This metric is helpful for understanding how your website is performing in a given time period. Check your website sessions monthly to see if any trends emerge.
Pageviews
Pageviews are the number of times that an individual page was viewed. Anytime someone opens up a page, they add another pageview to your total.
This metric is very helpful for understanding which pages of your website are popular. By seeing which pages are getting the most pageviews, you can understand what information people are looking for, which blog topics perform the best, and which pages might be difficult to find. Use these insights to lean into what works and improve navigation to pages with less views.
Most Visited Pages
The most-visited pages show you what content your audience is most interested in.
This metric can show you which services people are checking out, which of your blogs are creating the most traffic, and what pages people are looking at before they decide to contact you. A high-traffic page presents an opportunity: focus on how to impress your users and encourage action within your most-visited pages.
Session Duration
Session duration indicates how long someone is staying on your website after they arrive.
A shorter session duration could mean that people aren’t finding the content they’re looking for on your website. To improve your website’s session duration, add valuable information and don’t use “clickbait” in your ads or social media. In general, your session duration shows how long you’re keeping your visitor’s attention.
Location
Location shows you the geographic location of your website visitors.
For most businesses, traffic from outside the U.S. should be excluded from analytics results. For local or regional businesses, you may want to see what percentage of your traffic is within your service area. If you’re seeing a high percentage from outside your coverage area, you may need to adjust your marketing or more clearly state your location on your website.
Source
A source refers to where the website traffic came from. This includes if the traffic is direct, organic or paid. If you set up a way to track your campaigns (for example, using UTM codes), you can see which specific campaign brought traffic to your website. This means that you can know if the traffic source was from your social media post, a Google Search Ad, or your YouTube video ad.
This is one of our favorite metrics here at Liquid Creative. If you tie it to the conversion metric (explained in the next paragraph), you can measure which campaign brought your desired conversions and be able to evaluate the performance of each campaign.
Conversions Metrics
Some of the most common goals for business websites are leads and sales. When a visitor takes action on your website, it’s considered a conversion. Many service-oriented businesses rely on their website to generate leads, including form fills, email inquiries, and phone calls. E-commerce businesses are more likely to look for online sales.
Unlike the metrics explained before, conversions are metrics that you have to create yourself, based on your goals.
Here are three of the most common and useful conversions:
Form Fills
Form fills refer to submissions to any form on your website. These forms allow users to do things like ask general questions, requesting a quote or a free estimate, ask for a call back, and more.
Most businesses are interested in the quantity of leads they can generate through form fills. However, you should also be aware of the quality. Take note of how visitors are interacting with your form. What fields are they skipping? What common themes do you see? Making your form as fast and easy as possible is likely to increase the number of form fills you’ll receive. Optimize the experience by reducing required fields, adding dropdowns, and being clear about the information you’re requesting.
Phone Clicks
A phone click event activates whenever a user clicks on a phone number on your website. If you coded your website correctly, that click should generate a call. Although this works mostly on mobile, and only if the user clicks on the link (not if they call directly), it’s still an important conversion to evaluate.
Sales
If you are running an eCommerce website, tracking a sale conversion is probably the most important conversion metric of all.
How is your user interacting with your website
So, you designed your website following all the recommended web design trends. Now, which metrics can help you find out how the user interacts with your design? All the metrics we’ve talked about so far may give you valuable information about your user and the actions they take in your website, but they don’t show you how the users interact with each page. Are they liking the design? Are they interacting with it in the way you planned? Are they clicking in places you can’t track with other metrics?
To solve those questions you can use the following tools:
Heatmaps
Heatmaps show how users move and click around on your website.
A heatmap is a great way to evaluate user experience and interest. Pay attention to where people are clicking and where they aren’t. For least-clicked areas, make sure your language is clear and users know what to expect after they click. On the other hand, your most-clicked areas show you new opportunities for expanding your website content.
Session Recordings
Session recordings are actual video recordings of your user interacting with your website. You’ll get a screen video capture of important information like how they scroll, where they move their mouse, in what places they spend more time, and how they go back and forth in between pages.
For privacy reasons, you will not know who the person is or access important information they fill in forms, like phone numbers or credit cards.
Analyze, Strategize, and Optimize
Improving your website is a continuous process. Updating your website, adding content, and improving usability will both improve your SEO and convert more visitors into customers.
Using the metrics above to analyze your website, strategizing ways to improve it, and implementing those changes should be a cyclical process. At Liquid Creative, we develop stunning business websites while always strategizing our next step. We can improve your existing website with intentional updates, improve your SEO with monthly blogs, or even create a personality-filled site from scratch.
Our website team prioritizes strategy and usability to earn you the most calls and clicks. Learn more about how we can help you impress and convert your website visitors: Contact us today!