5 Little Known Statistics To Help Grow Your Business Online
The dot com boom was all about hits - the more hits on your website the more money when you float it publicly or sell it. That’s what the bust was about too - hits weren’t necessarily making any companies money and they meant very little in terms of revenue to a company. It was like telling people that 500,000 people came into your shop each day - but only 5 people bought anything. Not really a sustainable business model. Especially when your company raises $40mil to just get $1mil of sales.
Since then businesses have been much more focussed on what visitors are doing while they are on their website. Where do they go? What do they click on? How many clicked on where?
Those are all good things to know but here are 5 statistics that can help you grow your website and business that most business people and marketers don’t think about.
Brown Box uses Google Analytics to find the best statistics to help businesses to meet the needs of their customers online.
- Page Bounce Rate
The page bounce rate tells you the percentage of single page visits that a particular page has had. Lower your bounce rate and you have more people engaging with your website and clicking on at least one more page in the site. The more they engage with you, the more likely they are to buy from you. If your home page has a high bounce rate, measure a few variations of the page and check their bounce rate. Over time you can see if your bounce rate drops or lowers with certain versions of the page. - Conversion Goals
Analytics allows you to set up what it calls goals. A way of measuring if a visitor has taken a certain action on your website (like filling in a contact form). You can set your funnel (the track which you think people will take to get to the goal) and measure its effectiveness. See where people have abandoned the funnel and see if that page needs addressing. A potential customer has come to a page and decided to make payment but sees a security warning and runs away screaming. Your conversion goals will help you find out where people are leaving and can help you move potential customers from scared to confident purchasers. - Browser Capabilities
This may seem like a statistic that has nothing to do with the way you run your website. Nothing could be more wrong. Your website is there to cater to the needs of your customers. If they can’t access your 100% Flash (and so totally awesome) website because they don’t have the latest Flash version then you are losing business. Find out a way to cater to your customer’s needs and give them what they want. Analytics also offers statistics on resolutions, colours, browsers and operating systems, and java support. - Language Settings
Believe it or not - some people don’t speak English. Do you sell products to a market that doesn’t speak English? One of our clients has a website which is visited by customers with 10 different language settings, another has customers of with 34 language settings - the third highest language is Dutch. Those customers view almost 8 pages per visit. Wouldn’t you want those people to be able to understand you? Luckily for the Dutch speaking/reading visitors that website has been translated for them and they can understand how to buy products from the website. - Top Landing Pages
I believe that this statistic is extremely helpful. Use this statistic to work out where most people are when they enter the website. The home page is the most obvious page that people would land on but if people are getting to a page that has no menu, has no other way to view the rest of your valuable information then the action they most likely will take is to leave again. Ensure that those top pages have a way for users to get to the rest of your website. Especially if those landing pages have high bounce rates. Again - engage your visitors, give them a compelling reason to stay around and spend more time there (with great content). You might even find that a large entrance point to your site is a page that no longer exists - well put something there to help people get to your content. It’s that easy. Make the most of the people who come in from wherever they come.
I have many times looked at the statistics in these areas and more to evaluate the value our clients are getting from their website. Lowering a bounce rate 10% for the entire site is not a hard thing to do - and it can bring substantial rewards. If you want help measuring or understanding your website - contact me and I’d be glad to help.
~Andrew.