Four Ways to Measure Website Success

With web analytics, it is always important to understand how your audience interacts with your content. To get the best results, it is important to ask the right questions. Otherwise, how can you know that users are reading or looking at your content? While there are more options than ever to measure the data from website visitors, finding true value in website data analytics can be a confusing and difficult process. According to Gartner, 91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative. However, many digital projects often fall into the category of digital optimisation which isn’t sufficient for businesses to be considered truly digital.

Digital transformation refers to the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, usually driven by the need to meet changing business and market needs. For continuous optimisation, these programs require a clearly defined strategy, helping to drive direction and focus.

This fundamentally changes how value is delivered to customers and requires shifts in business culture and processes. Despite these large-scale efforts, it’s crucial to understand its inherent value and what digital transformation can really mean for your business.

3 Benefits of Digital Transformation

1. Meet Customer Expectations

Customers increasingly expect seamless and personalised omnichannel experiences when interacting with businesses. Digital transformation enables companies to deliver on these expectations, allowing them to stand out from competitors.

Data collection is a crucial piece of the puzzle in delivering personalised experiences across multiple channels and this process is significantly enhanced by the integration of digital technologies throughout businesses. More specifically, the introduction of new systems can help to gather relevant customer data and then translate it into insights across a range of touchpoints.

A single view of the customer journey equips companies with a wealth of insights and improves their ability to make informed decisions to successfully meet customer expectations. Digital transformation enables companies to provide great customer experiences throughout the entire buying journey, from access to relevant information during the consideration stage to seamless, convenient processes during the purchase stage.

2. Increase Agility and Innovation

With constant changes to the technological landscape and customer expectations, agility is the key to surviving. A common trait of many successful companies is their focus on continuous improvement, which involves constantly seeking improvements to their processes, particularly those impacting customer experience.

As technology continues to evolve, companies that have undergone the digital transformation process will be better equipped to adopt new ways to provide positive and meaningful customer experiences. Anticipating your customers' needs is the first step, but technology plays a key role in improving speed-to-market and enabling innovation through the implementation of new and better ways to meet these needs.

Continuing to reevaluate and optimise processes as technology evolves will be crucial to success. This not only has an impact on customer experience, but also on employee engagement. Having the right digital tools in place will encourage greater levels of collaboration and increased transparency within internal teams.

3. Adopt a Growth Mindset

In order for employees to successfully adapt to and leverage technological improvements, they need to be dedicated to developing and growing their knowledge and skill sets. Embarking on digital transformation programs acts as a catalyst for employees and companies to adopt a growth mindset.

While it does require employees to initially accept and embrace the necessity, there are significant benefits for them as well as the wider business. Adoption of growth mindsets results in a shift in their approach to work, but this ultimately allows failures and constructive feedback to be embraced as learning opportunities. In addition, challenges present opportunities to innovate and this renewed approach to problem solving helps drive further business development and growth.

Why Digital Technology Needs to Be Embraced Sooner Rather Than Later

The world is primarily driven by technology these days and it’s important to note that the integration of automated intelligent processes into applications or the complete overhaul of a business’s technology are no longer just reserved for giant corporations.

Digital technology grants businesses the ability to make decisions that are actually driven by real data. In addition to this, replacing a company’s existing processes and rigid structures helps businesses to build their resilience and successfully adapt to changing customer expectations.

Tips When Planning to Become a Digital Business

Successful digital transformation programs require complete support from company leaders and the wider team, and planning for the future as a digital business involves the creation of a culture that is open and happy to taking risks. Learning to recognise that risks are an inevitable aspect of change as well as being open to new approaches and methods will open up new opportunities for growth and development.

It is also important to have a clear vision and defined goals, as they provide a consistent direction for the team to work towards and a means of measuring progress and success. This will enhance the team’s ability to understand and support the company’s efforts in achieving these goals.

Does Your Business Need to Undergo Digital Transformation?

In the past, page views and numbers of clicks determined the popularity of content, but these methods do not necessarily determine the success of a page. Page views show how users are navigating through your site and how many are landing on any given page, but this metric will not provide the strongest insight about what interests your readers. Additionally, the number of clicks show some level of page engagement for site visitors, but it is still an incomplete metric when it is not combined with other data analytics for your site.

Digital transformation is being embraced by businesses all over the world as it becomes ever more urgent to find superior methods of delivering the experiences demanded by their customers

. Businesses need to embrace digital transformation either in whole or in part in order to remain competitive and relevant, to ensure they continue to grow their market share.

The following four metrics can be used to provide a true understanding of your page’s online success.

Digital transformation takes place at the organisational level and involves constant evolution and learning to challenge the status quo and slowly but surely improve all aspects of a company’s digital capabilities.

1. Engagement Time

Today, engagement time is a better tool to assess whether an audience is reading or engaging with your content. Engagement time is the amount of time a user spends interacting with the page, when scrolling, clicking, highlighting or opening tabs. Unlike time on page, which measures the amount of time a visitor spends on a page before going anywhere else, engagement time is the amount of time a visitor is active on the page.

Because “engagement time” does not come out-of-the-box with standard analytics solutions, a plug-in like Chartbeat or Riveted will be necessary to pull and analyze this data.

Take Medium, for example, the communications platform. At Medium, engagement is collected and understood through Total Time Reading (TTR). By comparing a user’s time on page and scroll position, Medium can estimate how much of the content gets read, and how quickly. This helps them understand engagement, with a pretty good picture of how users read, skim, cite or abandon their content.

2. Bounce Rate

When a visitor lands on a page and then leaves without triggering anything else on your site, that counts as a “bounce.” In Google Analytics, your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (people who enter a site and do nothing else before leaving) divided by all sessions. This value is important for determining what percentage of your audience continues to explore your site after discovering the initial page through an ad or a search.

While high bounce rate may not necessarily be a bad thing, site metrics must be understood in relation to your site’s purpose. If your site is designed to encourage an off-page call to action (i.e., a clicking on an ad banner, or placing a phone call), then a high bounce rate can be expected. Make sure the page content is relevant to the headlines and search terms that advertise it. And make it clear how your user can navigate through additional pages (toward a conversion) on the site. This may help lower your bounce rate.

Just like with anything in web analytics, each metric is only a small spotlight on the bigger picture. For some context, Quicksprout published this graphic to illustrate bounce rate benchmarks associated with various kinds of sites.

3. Pages Per Session

If a user doesn’t bounce, then it will be helpful to track how many pages they visit in a session. A session is a group of user interactions that takes place within a given time frame. A session with many page views may indicate a high level of engagement from the user. (Ideally, if ample time was spent on each page.) Because so much of the enterprise is built around a single purchase with a lengthy buying process, many page views may mean continued evaluation, leading to a sale.

Tracking page visits per session is a good way to understand user behavior. Trends may illustrate what users are doing, and what users are not doing on your site. This insight can help you improve your customer experience. When you compare actual user behavior with your web strategy, you can expect a better picture to help your users interact and convert.

4. Conversion

Conversions are completed activities that are important to the success of your business. Google Analytics categorizes conversions into two parts: micro conversions and macro conversions. A macro conversion is usually the sale of a product. A micro conversion is any number of smaller interactions that lead to a macro conversion like signing up for a newsletter or attending an event. By setting a goal for these conversions, you may find success by optimizing your pages and content around micro conversions, which can increase quality traffic, leads and sales.

To make the most of metrics data, it’s important to ask yourself if your visitors are accomplishing what you set out for them to do. A restaurant with a welcome page, a menu page and an online delivery form would hope to see a low bounce rate, steady click-through and a conversion on the checkout page. In the enterprise, success can be understood across many goals, with or without the success of sales. If your website is optimized, but not personalized, then adopting a personalized marketing strategy may drive traffic and increase your conversion rate further. It depends on what interactions you’ve set out for your audience to perform.