Upgrading Your Website: Benchmark Metrics and Tools To Get You Started
When upgrading your website or even just improving your existing one, you need to know that the changes you’re making are helping you to achieve your KPIs and business objectives. Throughout our website upgrade series we’ve focussed on what your new website will achieve and how.
We need to spend some time focusing on right now — How your current website is performing, where it is succeeding and which areas need work. To do this, we need to start your benchmark journey.
We’d hope that if you’ve gotten this far, we don’t need to convince you on what benefits benchmarking will give you and your marketing team. If you still need to be sold on why investing a little bit of time now will create better successes in the future, our blog on why benchmarking is important is a great starting point.
How to Benchmark
At the beginning of your website upgrade process, you should have created SMART website goals for every area of your organisation. These goals are important to the success of the website and should be the trigger for your benchmarking metrics.
Let’s carry on our example from the previous post, increasing online donations.
Step 1: Pick a SMART goal.
Example: Increase online donations by 20% before the end of the next financial year.
Step 2: Decide which metrics will help you monitor how this can be improved.
Example: Cart abandonment rate, bounce rate, exit pages.
Step 3: Set a schedule. Benchmarking needs to be done little and often. Remember our road trip analogy for stopping regularly to refuel.
Example: We have 15 months until the end of the financial year in our SMART goal. We’re upgrading our website so we should benchmark every 2–3 months until the new website launches at which point we’ll move to monthly monitoring.
Step 4: Work, measure, adjust, repeat.
Example: If you’re not seeing progress after your launch, try fine-tuning elements and monitor results over a couple of months. If you’re way ahead of your goal, keep going!
This process should be repeated for each of your SMART goals, think about the obvious metric that shows you how successful you’re being but look at the metrics that will help you come to conclusions that are actionable too.
Benchmarks to consider as your starting point
When starting to look at the benchmark metrics you could use, it’s easy to see why so many feel overwhelmed and give up. We’ve given you a handful of key benchmarks we think you should consider as a starting point. From there, you can start to see what metrics are important to your business and its objectives.
Try not to be too tempted to focus all of your attention on the traffic to your website; visitor numbers and sessions (number of visits). It can be quite difficult to create any actionable conclusions from these types of metrics, they give you very little detail about how your visitors are actually interacting with your site or which pages need improving.
They will, however, give you a well-rounded picture of how your site is performing and is a great quick metric you can monitor regularly. Add them into your bank of metrics to monitor but look beyond your visitor and session numbers.
The metrics you should aim your attention to are the ones that measure engagement and give you valuable insight into whether or not users are interacting with your site.
