Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a measure of the performance of your website. These KPIs are important when planning a website redesign or when you need to tweak your digital marketing strategies for the better. Here are four KPIs to help you grow your online business.
1. Website Traffic
Website traffic is one of the main performance indicators. You need to measure different traffic parameters, starting with the number of unique visitors and the number of revisits on different pages. The source of traffic also helps you tweak your marketing to grow your business. Traffic can be organic, direct, referral, or from social media sites. You also need to see where your visitors come from; whether local, regional, or international. Traffic will help you assess the ROI from different marketing campaigns to see what is working and what is not and how to make your marketing better.
It is also important to consider the time visitors spend on pages. If they spend more time on the shopping cart page, you will know that you need to make the cart more customer-friendly. You also want your pages to be fast so that your customers can move fast and find whatever information they need.
2. Customer Engagement and Conversions
How engaged are your customers when they get to your site? An engaged customer follows the site flow culminating in conversions. You can gauge engagement by looking at how the visitors click on and view the images and videos on your site. It may not lead to conversion, but the fact that customers are engaged means you are headed to making conversions.
Engaged customers end up giving you the conversions you need to grow your business. You can check the conversions on Google Analytics through the number of subscribers, shares on social media pages, and a growing email list. If you sell products or services, you can see your sales going up. You can create CTAs on your images or videos and see how well these images convert. You need to use the traffic and conversion data to understand where your customers are coming from, then create a persona to attract more customers from the same region.
3. Page Performance
How slow or fast are your pages? Your customer’s time is valuable, and you should respect it. If the pages take too much time to load, the customers’ attention and interest will likely disappear. Your pages should load within three seconds, any longer than that and you lose your customers.
You also need to measure average page requests because these requests can slow down the pages. Check the size of the files in each of the pages as that can affect page performance. Large sizes can increase bounce rates from a measly 9% all the way to 38% if your pages load in 5 or more seconds. You may need regular website maintenance services to check the size of the pages to faster loading pages. Creating faster pages might mean crushing the size of the images – make all images smaller than 3 megabytes.
4. Brand Awareness
Are you trying to push your brand out there but still feel like people still do not know your business? Brand awareness is a KPI that helps you know how well your marketing efforts are working. Many factors show you how well people know your business. The first is traffic and its source. If you check Google Analytics, you will learn more about your customers over time. You can tell whether your brand is more popular locally, regionally, or internationally.
After checking the brand awareness, track customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is subjective and can be challenging to track. You can use surveys to measure how satisfied customers are with your website, products, or services. Different survey tools offer different functionalities with some allowing you to track customer satisfaction graphs. You will also learn more about cart abandonment and website bounce rates. When you understand where your customers know you from and how they engage with your website, you can tweak your marketing to meet your needs.
The easiest way to grow your business is to measure, make changes, measure again, and make more changes until you have something that works. Even after you have a working growth strategy, you still have to keep measuring so that you are one with the trends.