Measure Performance?

Written by Gerry King

How Can I Measure My Website Performance?

You need to measure your website performance and it’s not so hard to do so. But what are you measuring? Ultimately you are measuring paying customers who have sourced your product via your website either directly as with an ecommerce store or indirectly by using one of the many contact methods provided on your website.

You might be ultimately measuring customers but there is a direct correlation between the number of visitors to your website, their activity whilst there and the number of conversions (visitors who convert to customers) so it’s important to measure this website performance and the way you do this is with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Analytics is another free tool from Google and arguably the most powerful, prior to Google acquiring the analytics tool it was known as Urchin and was a paid for resource. You acquire the analytics code when you sign up for the service through your Google account, by adding the analytics code to your web pages all sorts of useful statisics are measured, these figures can be accessed by signing into your account where you can also set up website performance reports to be delivered to your email adddress.

The first and most obvious figure that you will look at is visitor numbers and of course you want this to be as high as possible and to keep on rising but there are some more subtle figures that you should also be looking at. You may for instance be pursuaded to pay an expensive digital agency hefty sums to get your numbers driven up but how many people have clicked just because you were amongst the first few results on page 1 only to leave straight away because your content isn’t relevant, interesting or useful? That would be the ‘Bounce Rate’. Measured as a percentage this tells you the percentage of visitors who arrived on your website and then left straight away without clicking on any other pages. A high percentage of bounces is not good!

Another useful statistic is the ‘Average Time on Site’ which will tell you how many seconds, minutes (hopefully) and hours (rarely) a visitor spends on your website which is of course all down to how interesting, relevant and useful your content is. From day 1 of looking at your various website performance measurements you have a benchmark that you can strive to improve upon. More visitors, more pages visited, longer time on site are all good news for your website visitors and ultimately your business.

If you would like further advice about website design in Newcastle contact I-Netco on 0191 4202778