How to measure website success

In our blog – Why a web project never ends – we discussed how important it is for Surrey businesses to keep revisiting website performance, function, content and security to ensure their website continues to meet business and customer needs.

So how exactly do we measure how successful a website is?

At the start of each project during our discovery phase, we take a snapshot of the website’s performance, based on the following criteria:

• Inbound traffic from organic search – this is the number of people who find your site through a search engine like Google, which gives an indication of how effective your on-page SEO is; how relevant your content is and how much authority you have.
• Bounce rate – the percentage of visitors who move away from your website immediately after only looking at one page. Obviously, a lower bounce rate is better because it means you’re attracting the right target audience and they’re staying on your site longer to look around and find out more about your products or services.
• New versus returning visits – here we can look at sessions, behaviour and goals of both new visitors and returning visitors. This helps us to assess the customer journey and how quickly both types of audience find the information needed to take action.
• Page ranking based on selected key words – we look at where the website ranks in Google search based on the key words you want to be found for. Being near the top of the first search page is the primary goal.
• Site load time – this is the length of time it takes for a web page to load. A site that’s optimised to load quickly is ideal, since so many people search on mobile devices using 3G or 4G connections. Slow websites tend to frustrate users and mean they’re more likely to search elsewhere.
• Number of leads – the number of people who currently complete contact forms on your website in a defined time frame.
• Number of calls – the people who clicked on your unique tracking phone number from their mobile device in a defined time frame.
• Number of conversions – how many leads resulted in sales either from website forms or phone call enquiries.
• Social media activity – we also take snapshot of social media activity to assess presence and engagement, as well as how much traffic is coming to your website from social media channels.
• Domain authority – this is a search engine tool developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank. The higher the score, the higher the likelihood your site will rank well. It’s a good indicator, over time, of improved website performance.

The information from this snapshot helps to form the website strategy and KPIs, where we address any issues that have been identified. After we’ve completed phase one of redesigning a website, we measure our success by reviewing changes in these metrics after three months.

For clients who have a maintenance retainer, we conduct a review two-weeks after ‘go live’ to compare these metrics, followed by a monthly review for the first three months, making tweaks as appropriate. We also sometimes conduct customer research via Survey Monkey to monitor how customers are experiencing your website. This information helps form our phase two and three plans for further optimisation to continually improve website performance.

We can also help write a digital strategy for the client to plan how we would get more traffic to the site via PPC, SEO, social media and marketing automation. In doing this, we can also estimate how much additional traffic could arrive at the site.

A recent project with office fit out consultancy, Oktra, showed just how positively a web refresh can affect website results: enquiries increased by 400% in just three months! The Oktra case study shows how we measured the success of this website redesign and the results achieved.

If you’re a business in Surrey looking for web design support and would like to find out more about measuring website success and how we can boost your website performance, please get in touch by the form below: