Everyone knows how critical websites are for businesses of all shapes and sizes. A good-looking, modern, and functional website is table stakes for any business wanting to stay relevant in 2024. Businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars to produce a website that accurately presents their brand. But once produced, it is difficult to know if the website is doing what it’s supposed to do.
Before we discuss how to know if a website is working for you, we need to understand why it’s important for a business to have one in the first place. A website acts as a central hub where customers can discover products, learn about services, and make informed purchasing decisions. It serves as a space to present your unique brand, share your narrative, and interact with customers from all corners of the world.
With the right design and brand strategy, a website can enhance your presence in search engine results, attract new customers, and facilitate direct sales around the clock. It’s a cost-effective way to market your products and services, gather customer feedback, and continually adapt to the evolving needs of your market.
Different websites for different needs
Website is a blanket term used for web applications of any sort. However, from a branding and marketing perspective of a business, there are primarily three types of websites:
E-commerce Websites – Online stores for selling products or services directly to consumers. So, if you are selling something online, it can be categorized as an E-commerce website.
Corporate Websites – Official sites that provide comprehensive information about a company, including its services, team, and corporate news. In the marketing lexicon, these are what one may call brand websites.
Portfolio Websites—These are used by individuals, freelancers, or agencies to showcase their work and attract potential clients. They are also brand websites but mostly geared towards creative service businesses like ours.
There are lots of other types of websites, from social media (Facebook, Linkedin) to business directories (Clutch et al). However, our main focus in this article is to understand the nitty-gritty of a corporate website and how to know and measure if it’s working.
How to measure if your Corporate/Brand Website is working?
To gauge whether a corporate website is truly meeting its goals, we need to skillfully blend analytics tools, user feedback, and key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with the website’s goals. Let’s take a step-by-step approach to this process.
#1 Define Objectives
A website is a website is a website. Correct? Nop.
Even though corporate websites are supposed to provide similar information, the goals of the websites differ depending on business, brand and marketing goals. That is why it’s critical to define the objectives of the website project. Here are some goals for the website:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Information dissemination
- Customer support
- Credibility validation
A website will have multiple goals that need to be met for the project to be considered successful. Let us consider an example of a law firm’s website and what different goals it may need to achieve. For a law firm, goals like brand awareness and lead generation would seem obvious, but credibility validation could be a major goal that is weighted more than others. Why?
Usually, people don’t buy “lawyer services” right off the bat. A prospective client might land on a law firm’s website through a referral, and the main goal of the website for this customer is to provide them with information that helps the client validate the credibility of the law firm. And if the law firm generates demand through other channels like networking or social media, its website must act as a credibility validation tool to persuade prospects to take a favourable action.
#2 Track Website Traffic
Leverage tools such as Google Analytics to explore the depths of your website’s traffic—tracking its volume, pinpointing its origins from organic searches to social media referrals, and observing trends over time. This data is critical in understanding how visible your site is and how effectively it attracts visitors.
#3 Analyze User Engagement
User engagement is super critical to know if your website content and user experience is appealing to your target audience. Key metrics to gauge user engagement include:
- Page Views and Average Time on Site: Indicate how engaging your content is and how much time users spend consuming that content.
- Bounce Rate: Indicates the proportion of visitors who exit the site after only viewing a single page. A high bounce rate could suggest that the site isn’t meeting visitors’ expectations or that the pages where users are landing aren’t engaging enough.
- Behavior Flow: Tracks the paths users take through your site, highlighting the most engaging and weak areas. This data is helpful in understanding how well the site content is interlinked, where the users are dropping off the website and which particular content is bringing in the users.
To accurately record and track user engagement data, you may need a combination of tools, such as Google Analytics (GA4), Hotjar, etc.
#4 Track Conversion Metrics
Conversion goals may differ based on the objectives of a corporate website. A sale is not the only way to define a conversion, especially in a scenario where the sales process is long and takes weeks and even months to close. It is important to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to measure different actions that can be counted as a conversion. Here are the conversion metrics one should track for a corporate website:
- Form submissions (contact forms, newsletter sign-ups).
- Downloads (brochures, whitepapers, case studies).
- Specific actions like ‘Request a Quote,’ ‘Book a demo,’ or scheduling a consultation.
- Clicking on Call Us CTA.
#5 Search Engine Performance
Search engine performance is a critical data point in understanding how people are discovering your website and how it stacks against your competitors. Use tools like Google Search Console, SEMRush, and Ahrefs to measure your SEO performance. Key SEO metrics to track and understand:
- Search rankings for target keywords that are critical for your business.
- CTR or click-through rates from different search engines.
- Identifying and resolving key technical SEO issues is essential for enhancing your search engine placement.
#6 User Feedback
There is no better way to know if something is working or not by asking the people who matter i.e. your website users. Collect direct feedback from users through surveys, interviews, feedback forms, or usability testing to understand their experiences, pain points, and satisfaction.
If you don’t have the capacity to launch the fancy feedback mechanisms listed above, then just ask your existing and prospective customers what they liked and disliked about your website. You will be surprised to learn what they have to say and how you can use that feedback to improve the user experience of your website.
#7 Website Speed & Accessibility
Website speed is a critical factor in the overall success of your website project. With our diminishing attention spans, if a website is slow, users are not sticking around to wait for it to load. That is why website loading speed is super critical to ensuring that it works for your audience. Use Google’s page speed insights tool to track and improve your website speed performance.
Accessibility is another crucial factor to ensure that your website is available to all users. Depending on your target audience, an accessibility could make or break your goals. In general, businesses in Canada need to follow the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
#8 Competitive Analysis
Compare your site’s performance against competitors’ sites in terms of traffic, SEO, content quality, and user experience. Regularly assessing these areas will give you a comprehensive view of how well your corporate website is performing and where you might need to make adjustments to meet your business objectives better.
Unlock your website’s true potential
A corporate/brand website is a powerful communication tool that can be leveraged to create traction with your target audience. That is why it is crucial to understand how to measure the website’s effectiveness and performance. Measuring your website’s performance requires a comprehensive approach that blends robust analytics, precise tracking, and insightful user feedback.
By zeroing in on crucial indicators like traffic origins, user engagement, conversion rates, and SEO effectiveness, you can gain a clear understanding of how well your website aligns with your business objectives. It’s important to remember that the goal is not just to gather data but to use it to make informed decisions that enhance your website’s functionality and boost its contribution to your business success.
If you’re ready to build a website that truly reflects your brand and draws in the right crowd, we’re here to help. Let’s chat.