In Luke’s article for this month, he talks about the importance of monitoring your website after it has gone live to look for ways to optimize and improve it. Often times so much work and time goes into developing a site that after it finally launches there is a feeling of relief and a temptation to let it go and call it a day. This is a big mistake. After a site goes live, you finally get to see how your users are responding to it. Website analytics may just look like numbers, but if you know what to look for, the numbers tell a story. By analyzing your website traffic, you can tell exactly how well it is performing and what changes need to be made to increase performance. Here are five things to look for after your site goes live that will help you maximize its effectiveness and drive results:

  1. Where are they coming from?
    One of the most important analytics you can interpret is where your traffic is coming from. How are your users finding you? Is it through online ads you are running? Are your social media pages driving traffic? What search engines are they using and what are they searching for when they find you? The answers to these questions can help you decide where to focus your online advertising dollars in order to get the most visitors.
  1. What are they doing?
    One of the most useful things that analytics can tell you is what your users are doing on your site. You can see exactly what pages on your site are getting the most traffic and what pages aren’t performing well. You can even tell how long users are staying on each page. This gives you a good idea of what pages are most popular and therefore should be focused on when driving traffic through social media, SEO and online advertising. It also tells you which pages are being neglected and may need to be tweaked in order to make them perform better.
  1. Are they converting?
    The main goal for most websites is to increase sales and gain new customers or clients. In a perfect world, the more traffic your website gets, the more customers and sales you should get. If your website is performing well and getting a good amount of traffic, but you’re not seeing results in your bottom line, something needs to be changed. It can be as simple as adding a call to action to some of your pages or driving more traffic to your contact page.
  1. Is your site performing well?
    Another good thing to keep an eye on is the overall loading speed of your site. Having a site that loads quickly is incredibly important for user experience and satisfaction. People are very impatient online these days. If they have to wait too long to get the information they need, they will move on and look elsewhere. Having a fast responding site will ensure that you don’t lose traffic due to user frustration.
  1. SEO Performance.
    The vast majority of people get to a website via a search engine. This is why it is imperative that your website is showing up on Google, Bing and Yahoo when people search for anything that has to do with the products and services that you offer. If you are not performing well in terms of SEO, there are a variety of things you can do to improve this such as tweaking your website text and posting blog articles. Working with an agency of specialists that truly understand SEO is a great idea.

When you finally launch your website, remember that the work is really just beginning. By constantly monitoring and analyzing your site’s analytics and making the proper adjustments, you can be sure that your business is getting the most possible benefit out of your site. Continuous site optimization will lead to more revenue for your business, and after all, that is the true purpose of having a website and marketing in general.

If you could use some help building or optimizing your website, give us a call at 701-478-1111 and ask to speak to a Marketing Advisor or visit absolutemg.com/contact. Our team of web experts are fluent in web analytics and will help your website perform to its full ability.