In 2021, there will be a total of 1.2 billion websites in the world. This means a huge amount of information that people like to take advantage of. Just think about how much time we spend on the internet every day.
And would that mean that each page works effectively and contains relevant data? This is not true.
There are plenty of webshops and websites that work with no added content. They do not perform analyzes, do not monitor and optimize the conversion rate, and are thus unable to grow. In the following, you can read about how to use some measurement tools to monitor the effectiveness of your website.
What makes a website effective?
What makes a website effective depends on a lot of things. Basically, we can say that a web store or blog interface will only be effective if it generates as much traffic as possible and it has a good conversion rate.
Based on statistics, the average conversion rate is between 2.3 and 3%. Of course, it also depends on what topic your website addresses or what product you sell.
If your goal is to run an effective website, then your goal should be to exceed that number. To do this, you need to optimize your conversion funnel, advertise, consider the user experience, and last but not least, take continuous measurements on your website. The importance of measurement is unquestionable since it will help you find out what the results of your campaigns are and what else you need to change.
Many websites are taking the Domain Authority Index (DA) as a very important metric when we talk about website efficiency. We recommend that you do not judge your site based on this data.
Although the DA index is very important, this does not mean that a site with a lower DA is not as effective as a site with a higher value. The Domain Authority is Moz’s ranking score based on which we can measure domain strengths and the likelihood that a given website will reach a higher position in the search results.
Even if the DA of a webstore is high, it does not mean that its traffic is also high. It can easily happen that a 30DA page produces a higher conversion rate than a site with 50DA.
Of course, it is a good idea to measure this value regularly, as well as other metrics on your website. But what measurements should you take to test effectiveness? Let us see some tools.
How To Analyze Your Website UX
As we mentioned, effective websites are characterized by an increasing trend in conversion rates. In our article later, you can also read about metrics and tools to measure traffic, but let us start at the beginning, what do you need to start with?
Before you examine your traffic, take a look at the quality of your website. A landing page, a well-structured structure, or just the design will decide whether your visitors from different surfaces will contribute to an increase in your conversion rate. To test this ability of your webpage, you have several options:
- Heatmaps: Heatmaps can be the perfect solution for mapping out individual elements of your website. The tool uses warm colors to indicate well-performing, visited items – such as CTAs, buttons, images, or even the entire surface – and cool colors to mark less popular or worse-performing spots.
With heatmap analytics, you can be able to optimize your website, find out which elements should be used multiple times and which should be omitted from your website. It is a great help if you want to make your website user-friendly.
- Replays: If you want to make your web store effective, you definitely need to know how your visitors or potential customers will use it. Replays help with this.
This tool gives you the ability to see how people get from your landing page to a subpage, how they behave at and after the cart, and what CTAs are considered an eye-catcher for your page. To care about your traffic, you need to know these, since how do you want to increase your conversion rate if you haven’t even gauged what typical actions are on your website? This information is of paramount importance when we talk about traffic.
- A/B tests: The opinion of your visitors is the most important, remember that. Then why not ask for their opinion? Run an A/B test on your page and evaluate the results.
These metrics are perfect for tailoring your site to the needs of your visitors. The point is to run 2 UX campaigns in parallel and then assess which one performed better, A or B. Striking name, right? If you are striving for flawlessness, you can combine this with the two measurement tools mentioned above which will give you the maximum chance of increasing your conversion rate.
Now, are you sure you think about how I can measure the effectiveness of my website? What do I have to look at if I want to investigate this? I cannot read about this.
In order to move on to the actual performance measurement and possible metrics, we must first state that the visitor should arrive at a user-friendly page. For a site that is well optimized, has a clear structure, and meets the needs of your visitors. Until this factor is not realized, there is no need to talk about traffic, since UX is what keeps traffic, of course, along with the quality of the product or service and the quality of your content.
Collect data about your website
Your website is well optimized, visitors arrive at a user-friendly page, they have the perfect basics. Let us get into measuring efficiency.
If we talk about website effectiveness, we can differentiate between when you analyze your website and when you analyze your competitors. The latter is important because it will give you a complete picture of what position you are in, in that particular market, so that, for example, your conversion rate in that sector is low, medium, or high.
First, let us see what options you have if you want to check your own website. It probably comes as no surprise to say that the best tool for this is Google Analytics. This software will show you all the information you need to know about the status of your website.
But what are the metrics and statistics you should look out for? We recommend that you start the measurement based on these points:
- How many users came to your website? So, the number of visitors is worth watching.
- Check what and how many pages these visitors viewed. This point is closely related to UX optimization, it is likely that if you have not optimized your site in this respect, there will be a bigger chance that you will see much worse results here.
- Keep track of how many sessions users have completed. You may also want to pay attention to what these sessions were, as closing pop-ups on the landing page is also an activity, or moving from one subpage to another too. Select the relevant actions here.
- Examine visit trends. See how your number of visitors has changed in a given month. Based on this information, it can become clear what external factors influence traffic to your website.
Using a simple and clear example, if you run a jacket sales website, you are likely to have more traffic at the end of October than at the beginning of the month. The reason for this is the change in the weather, the cooling down, and this is shown very nicely by these trends.
- Find out where your visitors are coming from and what device they are using. From email inquiries? About social media? From a direct search?
This information highlights how successful your marketing campaigns are. If you see that 40% of your traffic came from a social media interface, you’ve made a good campaign for those interfaces. However, if you also see that you have generated only 5% of your traffic from direct searches or specific keywords, then you may know that you need to put more emphasis on SEO or you have to use PPC ads.
When you check the device, simply see that your website has been opened from a mobile or desktop device. If you see that the numbers are larger in the mobile device, you may have to turn back to website optimization, since you need to make your website completely mobile-friendly. This is the only way for your site to work effectively.
- Keep track of your conversion rate. This is perhaps one of the most important indicators in the life of online businesses. Keep track of it from month to month, it will always help you be up-to-date with the current performance of your website.
As you can see, Google Analytics gives you answers to almost every question. We know this sounds complicated at first, but believe us, it is easier than you think. The platform is extremely logical, you can easily set up all the functions and you can start measuring the effectiveness of your website.
Sure, it must have turned in your head that’s okay, but if my conversion rate was 4% it means good now or not? If my traffic was 2,500 in the previous month, does it count as good? What can I do to decide this?
Do not worry, you will get an answer. As mentioned, measuring website effectiveness is a complex topic. Although there are average numbers, such as an average conversion rate of 3%, your 8% may be low in your sector.
You should always have a basis for comparison. In this case, it is best to consider your competitors as a basis. Without the data of your competitors, you will never be able to determine that your web store is performing well or not. Let us see how you can get data from competing sites.
Analyze your competitors
Unfortunately, you will no longer be able to use Google Analytics to obtain traffic, conversion, or user data for competing websites, as you will not be able to access their account unless you know their password. Fortunately, you do not need to be an amateur hacker and get the codes, because you have plenty of useful applications and software at your disposal to help you access important information completely legally.
For competitors, there are 4 things you need to take into account:
- The traffic of the website
- The sources of the traffic
- The keywords of your competitors
- And finally, the good old conversion rate
For the first two, that is, the amount of traffic and the source of the traffic, the best and easiest solution is to use Similarweb. This tool is slap easy to use, all you have to do is type your competitor’s domain address into the app’s search engine and you already have the more exciting data in front of you.
Evaluate, you can see the total number of visitors to the page per month, and if you scroll down, it will give you a breakdown of sources which give you information about what sources their traffic is coming from. Why is this information needed? Because based on that, you’ll finally be able to tell that your site is working effectively or not.
If you analyze, for example, 5 competitor pages and each has traffic over 10,000 and yours have 5,000 then you can know that your website has performed poorly in terms of traffic. Conversely, if yours have 10,000 and your competitors have 5,000, you can sit back because you have twice as many visitors as the others in your market.
If you see that your website has attracted extremely few visitors, do not panic. This is where the second point comes into play. Check where your competitors’ traffic came from.
If you realized that most come from social media interfaces, you may have to focus on your social media interface. Advertise and post regularly. If you find that email inquiries generate the most traffic, we recommend that you embark on a direct marketing campaign.
It is also important to consider what are the sources from which your competitors have traffic (if even a small amount) but your website does not. If you noticed that some competing sites have 3-4% traffic from display ads and for you this number is 0%, then you may have to create and place display ads. Do not let that few percent lose, believe us it can greatly increase your traffic which also affects your conversion rate.
Keywords
Keywords are the basic elements of content marketing. It plays a prominent role in the life of any online business, both in keyword optimization and in the production of website content.
If we simply want to describe it, the keyword is basically a word through which the potential customer can find relevant content for themselves. So, the keyword predicts the content.
But why is this important when examining effectiveness? Because this is one of the factors by which you can increase your organic traffic and also get a better position in the list of results, also organically.
Compare your competitors’ keywords with your own. Feel free to use an app called Ubersuggest to do this.
If you find a keyword that is found in your competitors’ site but did not show up for your website, start building content for that word or phrase. This is necessary because it increases the chances that your website will already appear in the search results lists for a given keyword search, which will eventuate an increase in traffic in the long run, which is the cornerstone of efficiency.
Higher traffic will eventuate more purchases. And more purchases will increase your conversion rate. This is how you create a well-performing website in just one word.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is very important in the life of any website or web store. The goal is always to keep this rate as high as possible. If we talk about it in general, we can say that the higher the conversion rate of a website, the more effective it is.
With that in mind, you are sure to want to measure this to find out how you are doing compared to your competitors, but we have some bad news. Unfortunately, you cannot use any software to query the conversion rate of your competitors.
We know you are a little sad now that we have emphasized the importance of this indicator so far, but there is something good about wrong things. Although you cannot list it, you can calculate it.
There are plenty of pages that can calculate the conversion rate from the numbers of visitors and the number of events. But you can also easily calculate this with either a calculator or your phone, as you only need to divide the total number of purchases by the number of visitors, then multiply that by a hundred and you already have the conversion rate in percentage.
This means that if you had a total of 1000 visitors and 20 purchases made on your website then your conversion rate would be 2%. It is a very simple count and one of the most defining data when you check website efficiency.
Conclusion
As you can see, measuring effectiveness is not one of the easiest tasks you need to do on your and your competitor’s website. It is a very time-consuming and attention-consuming job if you start this, but believe us it is worth it.
You will not only get a comprehensive picture of what is going on in your market, but you will also get free information on what you can do to increase the value of your website further. You can find new keywords, start new campaigns that will help increase your website traffic and conversion rate.
Based on the above, you already can measure overall website effectiveness. Do not regret the time and energy, cut into it.
We hope we can help you.
