Using Website Metrics to Build Your Business

Metrics don't just help you measure the success of your website and enhance its performance to boost traffic, customer engagement, and online sales. Studying your site analytics can also help you build a brand strategy, sometimes in surprising ways.

Before you build your website, it's helpful to have a good sense of your overall brand strategy. By taking some time early on to define your overall goals for the website, you can pick out key performance indicators (KPIs) to track those goals. It's also a good idea to occasionally dig deeper into those KPIs to do some future planning. Site metrics can help you gain valuable insights into how visitors and customers currently engage with your site—and what more they may want from your business. 

These tips and tricks will help guide you through the ways metrics can help you find your audience and provide them with top-quality content that keeps them coming back for more. 

Using metrics to refine your product line 

If you have an ecommerce site, there are a few ways you can use analytics to better focus on what you do best and determine which metric tracking best suits your needs.

By studying site analytics that measure sales by product, you can easily identify best sellers and underperforming items. Consider weeding out the product lines that don't appear to resonate with online customers and expanding the product lines that people gravitate toward. Perhaps you could even build product bundles around the best-sellers to increase the amount of the average sale.

In your search keywords analytics, you can also review the words and phrases that visitors have entered into web searches and, as a result, used to discover your website. You can look over the terms people have entered into your website's internal search feature as well. Treat both sets of results as powerful indicators of customer purchasing desire.

How well does your site satisfy those desires? You can compare search keywords to actual sales to see whether you're effective at selling people the products they are most interested in buying, or whether you need to make changes to your site to increase your conversion rates. This is a practical way to use metrics for success on your site.

Improving your marketing efforts

Marketing isn't just about figuring out the right stories to tell about your business, but about making sure those stories reach the right audience. By monitoring your KPIs, you can make data-driven decisions around your marketing efforts.

In fact, analytics give you almost real-time information about the success of a marketing push. After you send out a newsletter, make an ad buy, or post a link to your site on social media, monitor your site analytics to see whether the post or campaign has a short-term effect on website traffic.

You could drill deeper and study sales and conversion data to determine if your marketing efforts bring idle browsers or enthusiastic new customers to your site. You could also conduct A/B testing with targeted social media ads or marketing emails. That A/B test would include sending out two different messages and discovering which one inspires the biggest response from your audience. 

The long-term effect of incorporating metrics into your marketing is that you can devote your time, energy, and resources to the channels and messages that prove the most effective.

Identifying new audiences

Metrics can spur you to think strategically and creatively. Studying keyword searches and, in particular, website search terms may reveal new areas for your business to grow into.  

When you find out what search terms people use to get to your site, you may also identify new target audiences. For example, if you're a bakery in Cleveland that offers a couple of vegan options on the bakery’s online store, you may discover that more and more people find you by searching for “Cleveland vegan cakes.” Even if you currently sell only one vegan cupcake, this information may open a new area for product development and a new set of potential customers to target. 

Perhaps you have one or two brick-and-mortar locations and are thinking of expanding into a third. You could study the geography analytics to see where the biggest numbers of site visitors live, and focus your real-estate search on cities or postal codes where you have an interested customer base.

The more you become familiar with site analytics, the more you may realize that there are stories behind the numbers. And once you learn to read those stories, the more they may inspire you to think creatively about the future. 

Learn more about how to measure the success of your website.