Running a profitable website with good metrics and KPIs is a continuous process and a continuous investment. The road to long-term success online can be long and difficult, and you need to continue investing in your online presence in order to maintain your momentum and keep bringing new customers in while retaining loyal brand advocates.
All of this demands that you know your audience, build your cluster channels to support your WordPress website (like social media), and most importantly, that you continue to analyze your website data. Collecting and collating your WP site’s data is the only way to gain valuable insights and make the right, data-driven adjustments quickly.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can utilize this data to improve your ROI in 2023.
Start with clear goals and KPIs
Before you venture into your Google Analytics dashboard and start looking at the charts and the numbers, you first need to go to your website. On your website, you will start analyzing all the pages, going through the content and the visuals, you will analyze the journey and how different pages are connected, how they guide visitors around and what their goals are.
This is crucial data you need to have at your disposal in order to set goals and redefine them, as well as to set clear KPIs that are relevant to your brand and your website. Without this information, the data you pull from Google Analytics won’t mean much to you, because you won’t be able to put it in the right perspective.
Starting with your website’s goals and KPIs will also allow you to build a first-party data strategy that will help you collect relevant customer data and use it to improve marketing and sales performance. Consider these KPIs for your website:
- Number of unique visitors
- Number of returning visitors
- Traffic by source
- Session duration
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Goal completion
- Organic traffic
- Top-performing landing pages
Examine the channels that lead to your site
One of the most important data sources you should analyze is the number and the performance of external channels that lead people to your website. This can be especially important when you are building a personal brand but also if you are building a multi-channel corporate image that needs to build social proof from different sources. Why?
Because all of these channels will build trust around your brand and improve your on-site KPIs. People coming in from different channels, like forums, groups, and social media, or the first page of Google, tend to stick around longer and they tend to interact with the website more than if they were to find you by chance.
With that in mind, make sure to examine the channels that lead to your WP website, and start working on improving them in order to indirectly boost your website’s performance. This way, you’ll pre-engage people before they land on your site.
Analyze your mobile traffic
Is your website getting enough visitors on mobile devices, and if so, what is their overall user experience? How many actions do these visitors complete vs the number of interactions from desktop users? How long do they stick around and where do they tend to drop off?
These are some of the important questions you need to answer about your mobile audience, which may be an unexploited source of revenue and growth for your brand. Analyzing your mobile audience will also be crucial for building a financial model for an app in the future, when you decide to build a branded mobile app to streamline their experience.
The way your website is performing and scaling on mobile devices will give you clear feedback on what needs to be improved, and will guide developers in the future when you start building your app. That said, because an app is a long-term investment, make sure to use this data to make immediate improvements to the mobile version of your website first.
Analyze the rate of new vs returning visitors
Google Analytics will tell you exactly how many people are coming to your WordPress site as new visitors, and how many are returning customers. This data is invaluable for the growth of your business, as you need to focus on customer retention over the long term to build passive income and minimize financial investments into customer acquisition.
While there are many different passive income ideas you can explore for your WP site, at the end of the day it will always be more cost-effective to inspire existing customers to make another purchase than to convert new leads. However, the rate at which you are getting and converting new visitors is an important indicator of how different pages are performing and how your brand is performing in the eyes of fresh leads.
Analyze your landing page performance
Landing pages play a crucial role in the optimization of a website, and they can have a huge effect on your brand’s performance, trust, and visibility in the online world. With that in mind, it’s important to analyze each landing page according to your goals and KPIs.
Analyze the traffic, where people are coming from, and if they are landing on the right landing pages after clicking on an ad or a link. Analyze where people are dropping out and how long they stick around on the page, and how far they scroll.
All of this will tell you which pages perform best and it will uncover some of the pain points of individual pages. You will then be able to shorten or lengthen the copy accordingly, adapt and optimize your visuals, and better place your CTAs to maximize the potential of every landing page.
Over to you
Analyzing your WP site’s data on a continuous basis is the first step towards long-term growth and success in the online world. Whether you’re running a company website or a personal online brand, make sure to use these tips to analyze your visitors and customers, identify different behaviors and pain points, and improve the customer’s journey quickly.
This is how you’ll stay ahead in 2023 and the years to come.