How Website Performance Insights Can Reveal What Your Customers Want

Standard website metrics can give you a powerful understanding of what your customers really want.

Closer analysis of your website performance can identify powerful ways to better engage your audience. So harness your understanding of their online behaviour to better meet their wants and needs.

The first step is to understand some of the powerful insights you can gain from standard website performance metrics.

1. In-page analytics… how do your visitors interact with your web pages? 

In-page analytics will show you how users interact with your web pages, allowing you to see which links visitors are clicking on. Engagement can be determined by the percentage of clicks that an element, such as a link or a button receives. To maximise your audience’s interaction with your web pages, you should ensure:

• Page layout is optimised for what visitors want to accomplish on that page.
• Visitors can easily find the content that they are looking for.
• Calls to action are both motivating and highly visible.

Gather performance insights into how long visitors take to discover key pages on your sites using simple metrics such as average time on a page. Slow discovery may indicate a need to improve the navigational user journey, enabling visitors to reach their end goal more quickly and intuitively. 

Measure the number of people spending more than a certain amount of time – or viewing more than a certain number of pages – on your site. This will show you how many visitors are deeply engaged with your content, and the content they are deeply engaged with.

Remember: Slow discovery of key pages may indicate a need to improve the navigational journey.

2. Visitor acquisition… who is visiting your website and why?

It’s important to acknowledge who is visiting your website; if they are the right prospect for your business and what they are trying to achieve on your website. Knowing where visitors enter your website is useful indicator of what they are searching for and the solutions they seek.   Typically, visitors are broken down by channel of origin:

• Organic: Visitors who find your website through a search term on an engine.
• Direct: Visitors who arrive by typing in your exact URL.
• Referral: Visitors who find your website by clicking on a link referenced elsewhere, not on a search engine.
• Paid search: Visitors who arrive at your website through advertisements, including Google Ads.
• Social: Visitors who have arrived through links posted on your social platforms, such as LinkedIn.
• Email: Visitors who arrive by clicking through on links to your website via email marketing.

Think: Are visitors to your website the right fit for your business?

3. Page performance… which of your webpages are working well?

Page performance insights can help you to determine which content pages are working well and which aren’t bringing in new traffic.  This will highlight levels of interest, engagement and success across your website. If customers aren’t staying on your ‘Solutions’ page for very long, then it is not delivering the results they want.

Other metrics you should include when observing page performance include:

• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site having no interactions.
• Organic search conversion rates: The percentage of visitors who arrive through organic search and convert via a desired action.
• Landing page performance: The percentage of prospect who arrive at a landing page from various entry points and convert.
• Average time spent per page: The amount of time visitors are spending on your page.
• Per visit, per goal achieved: How many visitors are achieving desired actions, in a specified amount of time.

By adding these metrics, you can analyse the depth of engagement and understand exactly what your customers are after. Observing the performance insights of each page also enables you to compare how content on one page performed in terms of influence and value against content on another. 

Remember: performance insights enable you to discover exactly what it is your customers want. 

Page performance analysis will help you see how many of your visitors start the conversion process, how many complete it, and where others drop off. This will provide a greater depth of understanding about your customers, what they want and what they’re looking to achieve.

4. Internal site search…understand your customers’ intentions.

Observing the behaviours of customers who use your internal site search will enhance your understanding of their intentions. 

If your site has an internal site engine, for example, you can see what search criteria visitors typed in and how many left the site immediately after. Not only will this highlight the performance of your keywords, but it will determine if your website has any relevancy to the needs of your customers.

Remember: Website performance insights can reveal a wealth of information about your customers and how they discover and interact with your content, but this doesn’t mean anything unless you…Adapt to buyer behaviours

Website performance insights provide a valuable source of information about how effectively your website is performing and how well your content is meeting the needs of your prospects. If your website is not performing how you would expect, you should review your strategy  and adapt your approach accordingly, using the data to drive engagement upwards.

Takeaways:

Performance insights from your website metrics can reveal more than you might think. Try to:

• Observe where your visitors are entering your websites and how long they are staying for.
• Refer to your visitors’ activities on your internal site search to reflect on their behaviour Optimise your content and search strategies with lessons learn from  page performance analysis.

Discover more about how your customers think and what they want, download your free eGuide now: How to Create a Conversation Audit to Drive B2B Marketing Success