5 Ways to Monitor Your Website Effectively

But first... Why bother with monitoring and measuring?

The lifeblood of your website is visitor traffic. Making improvements to your page design and improving off-page linking may bring you additional visitors, but you'll never be able to tell if you don't measure and monitor your web traffic.

Accurate statistics help you put a value on your website. First the stats will tell you how much business is derived directly from your site. Then you can calculate your Return On Investment. Knowing your ROI helps you make sound business decisions when it comes to funding improvements to the website.

Imagine that your website designer want's £3K to make improvements to your website. How can you be sure that it's worth spending the money? Without accurate statistics you will just be guessing and spending money on a roll of the dice...

Alternatively, if you've made the extra effort to measure and monitor your statistics then you know how much your website is worth to you. In our example if you know that your site generates £60K worth of business every year then deciding to spend £3K on improvements is a much easier decision to make!

Now here are my 5 top tips for measuring and monitoring your website...

1. Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website monitoring tool it works well and it's easy to add to your website. You can track how many visitors you get. How long they stay for. Which pages they visit the most and how often they complete your contact forms. There are dozens of other metrics you can measure too!

Follow the link to find out more about Google Analytics, you can sign up for it, find out how to install it and see how it can improve your business from here.

2. Use a Unique Telephone Number

Website visitors find your telephone number and call your business all of the time, but how can you keep track of these successful conversions?

You could have your team ask each and every caller where they got your telephone number from then log that information in a database that you can collate the results of each month.

That's an onerous task though isn't it? It's prone to error too, you can be sure that some calls won't get logged and it makes your results inaccurate and meaningless.

There's a MUCH easier way to do it! you can buy or rent a fully monitored non-geographic telephone number (or get one free if you sign up for our measuring and monitoring service) and divert it to your main office number. Now all of the telephone calls that originate from successful visitor conversions on your website will get logged automatically for you.

3. Use a Contact Form Instead of an Email Address

Unless you ask each and every customer where they got your email address from it's unlikely that you'll be able to effectively monitor email enquiries originating from your website.

Publishing an email address on your website is also a surefire way to get inundated with (more) spam email

So rather than publish an address like info@mybusinessdomain.com on your website you can use a simple contact form instead

To get the most from your contact form it's important that you only ask for minimal details, a name, an email address and their message to you will do! If you want to you can add an anti-spam feature like Recaptcha.

Design the contact form so that when the visitor successfully submits their message they are returned to a separate web page that thanks them for their enquiry. This is your Thank You page.

Now you can use the Goal Setting feature of Google Analytics to monitor successful visits to your Thank You page and effectively monitor email enquiries to your business.

4. Get Something in Return for Brochure Downloads

Do you have a useful digital brochure or report that you can offer visitors as a free download?

A freebie download is a great way to attract visitors to your site and bring them back to do business with you later

This works especially well if your download has some value to the visitor, ideally it needs to be something more interesting than a digital version of your 'all about us' company brochure, think more along the lines of "10 Essential Things for Your Perfect Wedding". You get the gist?

Now use a form for the download request, simply ask the visitor for their name and email address and when they successfully submit the form take them to a thank you page where they can download their freebie. Also email a copy to them just to make sure they get it!

Now you can use Google Analytics to monitor visits to your Download Thank You page and measure how often it's requested!

5. Use Goals to Measure Results

Google Analytics has a great feature that allows you to set and monitor goals on your website!

It works like this; You setup a goal that tells google Analytics to monitor every time a visitor reaches one of the Thank You pages on your website, like this:

Visitor Enters Your Website
|
Visits Contact Page Fills in Form
|
Clicks Submit
|
Lands on Thank You Page
|
GOAL!!

Now Google Analytics will be able to tell you EXACTLY how many new prospects come to your business through each of your Thank You Pages...

There's an Even Easier Way to Do It!

Although it's easy enough to do this stuff it does take time, time that you might not have, you're busy running your business right? That's why we created our Measuring and Monitoring Service, we sort out all of this stuff for you!

Click here to ask us to Measure and Monitor your website so that you can improve your business.

It's even free for the first 2 months and then just £29 a month thereafter for regular reporting and your unique website telephone number.

X10D Ltd, 1 Dennis Buildings, 87a King William Street, Stourbridge, DY8 4HD.

Tel: 01384 510021

Website design by Cybacat