Running a business is always a dance of investments and returns. Tracking your return on investment (ROI) for your website has a reputation for being nebulous because it is never quite as cut-and-dried as determining your financial ROI, which is usually a simple equation comparing how much money you spent on an improvement and how much money you made as a result.
There are definitely key indicators, though, to determine what kind of returns you’re getting for your website investments. How you interpret the value of these returns in a financial scope can be complicated, but the returns are there and we’re going to show you some of the clearest ways to see them.
Most-Viewed Pages
Tracking what pages are viewed the most on your website helps you know what your visitors are most interested in and what strategies they are responding to. By determining what your most successful strategies are and what content or advertising your visitors focus on, you can direct your investments to replicate what works in order to generate a greater return on your other pages, too!
Bounce Rate
Watching your bounce rate means learning how many people leave your site before you give them an invitation to. If you find that you are losing a high percentage of your visitors on a particular page that doesn’t contain one of your exit strategies, that is a page you need to invest more resources into because it is not generating the intended return. You know your investment is giving you a return when the bounce rate lowers - meaning that your customer didn’t give up on you, continued to view your site’s pages, and/or trusted a source you provided that enables them to leave your site with a positive opinion of it.
Exit Pages
What pages do visitors exit on? The difference between this and your bounce rate is based on intent - your customer didn’t blatantly abandon your site, they were guided and/or released from it in a way you intended, from a particular point you designed for that purpose. By tracking your exit pages, you can view how effectively your visitors have been led to the exit page you intended. If the exit pages you intended to have the highest volume are not the exit pages your visitors are using the most, you’ll want to invest in a different strategy to pave that road more clearly for them to obtain a better return.
Keyword Hits
Choosing your keywords is all about determining what words your potential customers are using to find the information/goods/services you offer on your website. Tracking your keywords helps you determine if you are speaking your customer’s language and attracting their attention. By experimenting with different keywords associated with your business, you can find out which ones get the most hits and then invest in incorporating those keywords, driving more traffic to your site as the result.
Conversions
The most black-and-white indicator of your website’s success is how many visitors you win over with your strategy. By tracking how many people choose you to provide them with goods or services, you can see how effective your investments have been, or even if you’ve made a change in the wrong direction should the number of conversions take a dive!
It is important to understand that the correlation between your site’s ROI and your business’ financial ROI can be tricky to nail down because although your ultimate goal may be to earn money, your website goals are are not immediately pecuniary. Luckily, tracking performance is a bit more straightforward than most people have been led to believe, so use these guides to help you interpret and improve your website’s performance to build a successful conversion machine!
