How To Use Benchmarking To Evaluate Website Performance

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shohidhasan
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Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:39 am

How To Use Benchmarking To Evaluate Website Performance

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The amount of metrics at your disposal to gauge your website's performance can be overwhelming. How do you know which data points are the most important and whether or not yours are "good" numbers? Without defined goals and benchmarks, website analytics are meaningless. But as you track your metrics over time and build benchmarks, with your own historical data and that of others in your industry, metrics become one of the most valuable ways to measure performance. of your website. Here are some tips for finding and using benchmarks to make sense of your website analytics. Metrics that matter When reviewing your analytics, it can be tempting to rely on traffic metrics like visitors and sessions (visits). Traffic metrics can be a good starting point to give an overall picture of your site's performance compared to a previous period. However, it is difficult to draw actionable conclusions from these metrics, and they provide little detail about a site's interactivity or which specific pages need improvement. Instead, paying attention to metrics that measure engagement can give more insight into whether or not users are interacting with a site. Engagement metrics include average session duration, page views per session, bounce rate, and conversion rate. If these terms sound foreign to you, check out our article on decoding Google Analytics terminology. Engagement metrics are useful as an overall measure of interactivity on your site, but looking at these metrics on a page-by-page basis can be even more useful to determine what works and what doesn't for engaging and converting. your visitors as you create and adjust your content and design to bring more leads into the sales funnel. Define aims Before you start evaluating your website's performance, be sure to set yourself some goals. Defining the purpose of each page on your website will help you identify the most relevant metrics to measure success and where you should focus your energy to make improvements. For example, if you start a blog to share thought leadership content, your goals might be to drive more traffic to your site from organic search with a good SEO strategy and to have a high average time on site. page that shows that people are reading your articles.

You may not care about its bounce rate because while a high bounce rate is generally “bad,” blogs or news articles often have high bounce rates. Compare to references Once you know which metrics are the most valuable to track and you've set goals for your site, it's important to have benchmarks that serve as a benchmark for your website analytics. Benchmarks you should reference include goals you set for your website's performance, your own website's data over time to Email List measure growth, and industry standards. Benchmarking with your own site Traffic metrics, such as sessions (site visits) and visitors don't make sense on their own, but they start to tell a story when compared to the same data points over time. In other words, your own site's historical data is the best benchmark for site-wide traffic metrics. Traffic metrics fluctuate over time depending on the quarter, so they are best compared quarterly (Q1 2018 with Q1 2019, for example). This helps to mitigate external factors, such as holidays and slower times of the year. Your own site's historical data is also a great reference when you've changed a certain layout or improved your SEO. Comparing before and after the change can give you a good idea of ​​whether or not the change boosted traffic or engagement. In this case, you'll want to explore page-specific metrics like pageviews, average time on page, and bounce rate to get a better idea of ​​the impact of your change. Again, comparing recent data after the change to the same time last year is a good idea to control for external factors, even if the change was more recent. Benchmarking in Google Analytics Benchmarking against industry players is another important step in determining how your site measures up, site-wide. One way to find industry benchmarks from real data is in Google Analytics with a feature called Benchmarking. The tool allows you to compare your website data to that of other companies within an industry. It's the closest thing you can get to comparing your analytics to your competitors. Benchmarking can be found under the Audience tab on the left side of your Google Analytics dashboard.

In this section, you can manually select an industry, location, and business size based on daily sessions, and Google Analytics will aggregate data from all other properties that match those qualifications to establish the "benchmark." (This average only considers companies that have allowed the use of their data for benchmarking purposes in their settings) For example, a construction company might choose websites in the "Construction & Maintenance" vertical that are located in the United States and have an average daily sessions between 100 and 499. There are a number of user acquisition and behavior metrics you can view, from new users to bounce rate and pages per session. You can also compare these data points by channel (organic search, direct, etc.), location, or device, and Google Analytics will show the percentage difference between yours and the benchmark for each. Google Analytics benchmarking tool Search can be an easy way to supplement your own site's metrics and Google Analytics benchmarking. For best practices, it's wise to use a combination of Google Analytics benchmarking and research from industry experts or industry competitors. How to use guides Benchmarking should be used to see where you can improve your website for your users. Which pages have unusually high bounce rates compared to the industry average? Is your average session duration shorter than similar websites? Answering such questions will give you insight into areas where user needs are not being met and help you create a great user experience for your visitors. For example, to decrease the bounce rate, you can place different CTAs or redesign your navigation to encourage site exploration. Examining individual web pages can also give you better information. It may be better to optimize the bounce rate on individual pages rather than focusing on the average for the whole website. The users who visit your blog have a completely different purpose than the users who came to your site to need a service from your industry. So comparing your bounce rate to industry benchmarks on a landing page designed to drive visitors to your site and take action may be more useful than on your Contact page. Success is not only measured by how you compare to others Benchmarking is a great tool, but overall it's still essential to focus on your own analytics. Record your identified KPIs each month, then track how those data points change over time. Success isn't just measured by how you stack up against others, but how well you grow and meet the needs of your target audience.
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