Tracking key performance indicators is the best way to know if you’r website is supporting your goals or not. If you’re not tracking what people do on your site, you can’t know if they’re taking the actions you want. When you do have this information, you can make changes to your site content, design, and features over time to improve performance.
Which key performance indicators (KPIs) should you measure?
You can follow three metrics to make the most of your time and money: mobile versus desktop visitors, traffic acquisition, and time-on-site. This information will enable you to continually hone your message rather than conducting an expensive, occasional overhaul of your website. learn more about creating a better user experience on your website.
Mobile Versus Desktop Visitors
By tracking mobile versus desktop visitors, you see the types of devices used to visit your website, whether it is tablet, mobile phone, laptop, or desktop. This will clearly show the importance of having either a mobile-friendly or a mobile-optimized site. In the first three months of 2017, mobile devices were used for over half of all organic internet searches. To stay relevant, you must act to improve the mobile experience.
Usage of mobile devices will continue to grow, so this is one of the critical key performance indicators to act upon. For new websites, ensure that it uses a responsive design and HTML5. For existing website, look for a mobile friendly theme, and then watch your conversions improve.
Traffic Acquisition
How do people find your website? Is it through organic searches, social media, or direct clicks? Having this knowledge lets you focus your energy and budget on areas that will produce a better ROI. If organic searches create a majority of traffic, but your email campaigns bring in meager results, you can work on content quality and growing your email lists.
If the issue is your email response, you can work to grow the list and track which one get more traffic. With this foundation, you can simultaneously grow your social networks and master one or two of them. This should result in greater traffic than trying to juggle seven or eight channels. Drip campaigns across all channels should help to drive traffic acquisition. You may also consider producing demographic-targeted or geo-targeted social and internet ads to generate a quick boost to your conversion rates.
Time On Site (TOS)
This metric shows you how long visitors spend on your site per page and per visit. A well-written article, white paper, or blog post can keep visitors lingering for several minutes. However, poorly written content or irrelevant information can drive them away for good.
This is a key metric that Google uses to determine how good the website is performing. Since the search engine doesn’t necessarily understand if a blog post is well written, Google uses the TOS indicator to measure whether visitors think the site is good. The more time a visitor spends on your site per visit, the better it is.
You can improve this metric be reviewing all of the content on your site for clarity and relevancy. You can test different types of content and hone in on the type that works best. Other fixes include adding media and videos. Even if a visitor watches only one half of a two minute video, those 60 seconds on your site just improved your TOS. Continually test and measure for regular improvements.
KPIs for the win
Measuring key performance indicators can help you pinpoint opportunities to improve website performance. As a non-profit, you need to make the most of your resources. By focusing on these three key performance indicators and making small adjustments over time, you can avoid or at least put off having to perform a complete revamp of your site. Moreover, you gain a deeper understanding of what people visiting your site want and can adapt to meet their needs. This can have the result of building a longer-term relationship with them and growing your base of support.