What needs to be measured?
Everything that is useful needs to be measured. How do you know if it’s useful? Work out how it correlates to your sales and bottom line and then decide if improvement in this area would make your business more efficient and productive. If the answer is yes, you should be measuring it.
I know, I know, that sounds like a lot of effort. Since my goal is to get you the most results with the least effort, I’m going to be a little bit more specific. The following are the key website measurements that you should be making and aiming to improve on:
- Sales (from website)
- Unique visitors
- Returning visitors
- Conversion rate of visitors to sales
- Duration of visits
- Top exit pages
These six measurements should give you an excellent starting point for improving your website. The last two, duration of visits and top exit pages, are more subjective than the others but can be used for identifying major problems in your website. I’ll explain more in a second.
