Website gone live? It's just the start.....
November 2011 by Kim d'ArcyIf you invest in media relations or marketing you should be measuring its success – to assess the return on your PR pound.
And the same is true when you create a new website or revamp its content and/or design. There is no point in spending thousands on your online presence and then leaving it to miraculously deliver results.
Once your website goes live this should just be the start, not the end of a process. Measuring how many people are using your website, who they are and how they find and use your site is absolutely critical, so that you can see what’s working, what’s not working and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Google Analytics gives a good overview of traffic trends -how
much traffic a website receives, along with the source of the traffic and which
keyword someone has typed, if they have arrived via a search engine.
It also provides information such as the ‘Bounce Rate', which can be a very
important piece of data. This refers to the percentage of single page visits
where the visitor left your site from the landing page without continuing to
view any other pages.
You can also view the average time people are spending on your website, again if this figure is low and you are not receiving enquiries, just like ‘bounce rate' this might suggest that your site is not perceived as being relevant. It could also be an indication that navigation to other relevant pages, for instance a ‘contact us' feature, is not clear.
For example, we recently completed www.sheffieldachesandpains.com - a unique online resource put together with Sheffield GPs, consultants and other healthcare professionals which aims to encourage people to manage their own common aches and pains.
We know through Google Analytics that in its first two months, the site was visited over 9,100 times, which is hugely encouraging.
Of those 65.8 per cent were new visitors coming to the site for the first time and people spent an average of 3 mins 18 secs on the sites which had 44,137 separate page views. The bounce rate was just 37 per cent – which is very low, indicating that people are getting what they are looking for from sheffieldachesandpains.com.
But we will also be using more sophisticated tools such as Google Webmaster to monitor the actual workings of the site so we can make sure it is performing well.
As a matter of course you should make sure your content is continually maintained and refreshed , so that it’s always relevant and up-to-date. You should also ensure that you don’t view the website in isolation, but that it keeps up with developments on other marketing and media platforms.
So, for example, you get much better results just from having good video or audio content. You should ensure that where possible site content links to your social media presence on , for example, Facebook and Twitter, to ensure you are creating a seamless, virtual community of potential customers or supporters through a continual organic process.
