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2 Metrics to Pay Attention to When Auditing Your Wellness Website

2 Metrics to Pay Attention to When Auditing Your Wellness Website

2019-02-21 13:15:00 | Karen Cummings | digital marketing tips,website

By providing digital marketing services to health brands over the last eight years, we’ve learned that many small (and not-so-small) businesses are in a hurry to get through the marketing side of building a business and jump straight to selling and servicing.

While we appreciate a business owner’s passion to start serving their people as quickly as possible, rushing through these critical marketing steps can result in a business that doesn’t grow like you want it to. And as a result, you won’t be able to impact as many people as you’d like.

Many wellness brands who are just getting started have a very limited budget for all aspects of their business – but marketing typically takes the hardest hit.

In fact, one of the areas we see that’s most often neglected is the company’s website. Ironically, the quality of your website is also the most likely to have an impact on your company’s growth.

We get it, money is tight and there are LOTS of things vying for your dollar.

So, while we aren’t opposed to being mindful of your money, and even starting your business with a bare bones site, at some point you have to make changes to make sure it’s really working for you.

When done right, your website should be driving incredible awareness, leads and patients for your business. Even if you mostly rely on referring partners and providers, word of mouth or other ‘offline’ channels, it’s important to have a website that demonstrates your brand’s mission and gives consumers an opportunity to convert into prospects and patients.

Whether you’re just getting started with your website or you realize it’s time to reevaluate, here are the three main metrics we recommend you pay attention to.

Telling signs your website needs a facelift

Everyone wants a pretty website that looks and feels like “your brand”. While it’s important to have a site that accurately represents you, it’s actually more important to focus on the performance of your website first, before you make any drastic changes.

Below are the key metrics to look at when evaluating your website’s performance. Remember to look at the performance of these metrics over time. You want to see improvements and an upward trend in all three of these over the last 3, 6 and 12 months.

Total website visits

This is easy enough to track and evaluate with Google Analytics. And while watching your website visit trend by itself isn’t enough to determine the true health of your website and digital presence, this number can tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not, and help to inform future marketing decisions.

First, pay attention to where this traffic is coming from. Reviewing your Acquisition Channels in Google Analytics will show you:

  • if your site is growing organically (which should be one of your big goals!)

  • if your social media marketing is effective

  • if email marketing is driving website visits and more.

The main channels include:

Organic – visits that originate from a search on Google, Yahoo or Bing. These are often the most valuable types of visits, and are commonly the visitors most likely to convert into leads or customers because they’re coming from searches that directly relate to the solutions you’re offering.

Direct – This traffic is usually visitors that have saved your URL to their browser or most likely from inaccurate tracking of your campaigns. Make sure you’re using tracking URLs to help provide additional accuracy. You can use this handy tracking URL builder from Google to get started. If visitors are coming from mobile apps (think Facebook or Instagram) and you haven’t implemented tracking URLs, there’s usually a breakdown in tracking which results in these visits showing up as ‘direct traffic’.

Social – These visitors are coming from social channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

Paid – This could be paid visits from search or display advertising or social media advertising.

Email – visits from any tracked email campaigns you’re sending to contacts or subscribers.

Referral – this is traffic generated from referring websites. When a website has a page with your link on it, you’ll see the visits coming from those pages fall under ‘referral’ traffic.

All of this information will shed some light on how well your marketing is working – and how far your marketing dollar is going.

The second stat to pay attention to in conjunction with website visits is time on site. It’s not enough to be getting tons of website traffic when those visitors are only on your website for 10 seconds (sadly, this is an average time on site that we see all too often in our client website audits). Evaluate the time on site as a whole, but also look at time on site by channel.

Pro Tip: If you’ve designated any of your marketing budget to Google Search or Display advertising, this is where we look first to ensure you’re not wasting money or driving worthless traffic. The keywords you’re targeting with your campaigns may be capturing a ton of clicks (and quickly eating away your budget) but the visitors are on the site for 2 seconds. Make sure you’re targeting the right traffic with your ads, and that they’re engaged when they get to your website.

In the end, these stats will help you answer the following:

  1. Are the resources you’re investing in managing your social media channels actually driving visitors to your website?

  2. Is the time and money you’re putting into optimizing your site for search paying off?

If you want to continue to grow, and if you want to make smart decisions about where to focus your marketing budget, these metrics are a great place to start.

Visitor-to-lead conversions

Here at Radiant, we’re a uniquely different group of gals. Every day, and with every campaign we run, we’re merging the beauty of creative, well-designed marketing pieces and the effectiveness of results-backed methods. Few things get us more excited than diving into how websites and campaigns convert and identifying ways to improve.

One of the reasons we love using HubSpot is that it will automatically provide you with visit-to-lead data once your tracking is installed. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you’ll want to setup some goals to get access to this stat.

As you dig into this data, pay attention to both the total number of leads coming through from each channel (paid, social, organic, etc) as well as the percent of visitors converting into leads. As you aim to increase your total website visits, you want to make sure you’re still driving high quality, engaged visitors that are converting into leads for your business. Which means you want to see visitor-to-lead conversions increase when your total website visits increase.

Among other things, you can use this information to determine:

  1. Do you have enough places on your website to convert visitors into leads? (i.e. forms to subscribe to your blog, easily accessible and visible contact forms, downloadable content, offers, etc)

  2. Which of your calls-to-action are most effective?

  3. Which channels are driving those most leads?

While there are many other statistics you can keep an eye on, these are some of the most important ones to pay attention to first when identifying ways to improve the performance of your website and your marketing efforts. You’ll feel so much more confident in making marketing decisions moving forward or making updates to your website with these insights.

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