Having a website is good but without taking the time to evaluate and review website analytics on a regular basis, advisors can miss out on quick opportunities to improve their website. It’s important when managing a website, to understand these 5 basic analytics metrics to continue to improve your website. We often get questions from advisors asking us about what these terms mean so I’ve summarized them below with simple explanations.
Visits
Some analytics tools call this “Sessions”, such as Google analytics. Our product, Digital Agent (link) uses “Visits”. This is defined as any time a visitor reaches your site from an outside domain. A visit ends when someone leaves your domain by visiting an external site or closing his or her browser. A visit will end in Google Analytics after a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more.
Visits give a website owner an idea of how many people visited their website in a given time period. It’s a good idea to review website traffic on a consistent basis.
Referral Medium
When reviewing visits it’s also recommended to review specifically where your website traffic is coming from. Website traffic typically comes from a few primary sources:
• Direct: traffic that comes to a website when someone types in the URL of a website directly into the web browser to get to a website.
• Organic: traffic that comes to your website from organic search results, not from paid ads. More specifically, when someone types in a keyword and your website appears in the search results and someone clicks on the URL.
• Referral Traffic: when a visitor comes to your website from other websites. This could include social media websites however some analytics platforms have a separate bucket for social media. If your website link is listed on other websites and someone clicks on the link, this would be counted as referral traffic. The name of the website would be listed as a referral link.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on one page of a website and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on the site. This can also be seen as single-page visits. Ideally, you want your bounce rate as low as possible. A bounce rate within the range of 26 to 40 percent is considered excellent. One between 41 to 55 is roughly average. A bounce rate between 56 – 70 is higher than average. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for pages outside of blogs, news, events pages.
Having a website is good but without taking the time to evaluate and review website analytics on a regular basis, advisors can miss out on quick opportunities to improve their website.
Time on Site
The average amount of time a visitor spends on your site within a certain time period. Many marketers or website owners use this metric to get an idea of the effectiveness of their website. If your time on site is less than a minute or under 2 minutes, it can be concluded The longer someone spends on your website, the more effective your website probably is.
Page Views vs Visits
A page view is a visit to a page on your website. If the visitor reloads a page, this counts as an additional page view. If the user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, this will count as another page view. A visit is defined as a sequence of consecutive page views without a 30-minute break. A visit always contains one or more page views. The number of pageviews will always be higher than the number of visits. A visit can also be viewed as a person visiting a website. A person can view multiple pages would be counted as page views.
If you are a marketer and want help getting your advisors to understand these metrics, we’d be happy to help. If you are an advisor, I encourage you to take a few minutes each month and review how your website is performing. There are simple things that can be done to improve the performance simply by taking the time to look at the numbers.
