You launched your new website, and you celebrated! (As you should! That was a lot of work.)
But you’re not done. Your website can get better.
You want more leads and sales. And of course, your boss wants marketing to drive growth. The key to getting more leads from your website is to always be improving it. Sound daunting? It’s not as hard as it sounds.
First, you need to understand what your key website metrics are. Then, you can identify opportunities for improvement.
I think of the ways people engage on a website analogous to a customer acquisition funnel. Let’s imagine a content-rich site where the product requires some consideration, like a B2B service. People:
Each of these steps has a metric to measure. By improving the numbers at each stage of the funnel, we can in turn generate more leads and sales.
This type of model is useful for many types of businesses, but the steps will vary. If you buy a lot of traffic, or your website converts through a landing page pretty much immediately, your users start lower down in the funnel. On an ecommerce website, any product page is probably a key page, and sessions with more than one page are not as relevant, so you might remove that step.
Let’s talk about what each of those steps means.
Take a baseline reading of the metrics above for your website for the past six months (or since the last big change), and calculate the percentage that flows through to the following stage. Your data will look something like this:
Funnel Stage | Metric | Value | % from previous |
---|---|---|---|
Visit | Sessions | 23,101 | |
Stay around a bit | Sessions with >1 pages | 14,399 | 62% |
View important pages | Sessions with key pages | 10,295 | 71% |
Take action | Goals (micro conversions or secondary goals) | 1,475 | 14% |
Convert | Goals/Transactions (macro conversions) | 315 | 21% |
These numbers aren’t meaningful by themselves, they just mark where you are right now. Every site’s ratios will be different. And an important thing to understand is not every individual user will go through each stage in the funnel–you could get a purchase from users not having completed a micro-conversion goal, for example. What this framework does is show at what level people are interacting with your website, so that we can start thinking about how to increase the number of people engaging more deeply.
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