If you peer into your website statistics and start exploring Google analytics you’ll soon find that there is a whole lot of data that you’ll probably never use. So what do you need to know?
In this article we explore the five most important things you should watch for and consider.
Your Customer Lifetime Value or LTV
Lifetime value is how much you will make from your average customer over their lifetime as a customer of yours. As an example, if your average client spends $100 a year and remains a customer for five years then the lifetime value of a customer of yours is $500 gross. If you make 30% profit on that $500 then your profit is $150. Essentially you could spend up to $150 to get a new customer before you started loosing money.
It’s very important to know the lifetime value as this will help you determine the viability of specific marketing strategies. If you spent $100 on Adwords or content marketing to get that new customer then using the above numbers you make on average $50 per new customer. Spend $1000 on marketing and you make $500 profit and so on.
Time on Website
The time on website is calculated by taking the average amount of time users spend on your site each time they visit. The service or product you offer can massively effect the time but as a general rule the longer someone spends on your website the better. You want to avoid / reduce bounce rates (see below).
Returning Visitors
Returning visitors is the number of people who come back to your website again. It’s a good indication that people liked what they read or saw on your site. According to some studies, a good ratio of returning visitors to new visitors is approximately 20%.
If you operate a eCommerce / shopping cart website then one of your primary focuses is to get people to return and make further purchasers. Contacting them via an email list you’ve built offering specials or coupons is a very simple but effective way of doing this.
Number of Pages per Visit
This is the average number of pages that people navigate through on your site in a single visit. The more pages a website user navigates per visit (around 4) normally shows that people are interested in what you are offering.
Bounce Rate
This is where people visit a single page on your site and then leave before taking any action. Having a high bounce rate (usually above 57%) can mean that your website is not giving a good first impression and or you are attracting the wrong type of website visitor. As an example if you are a individual plumber and you run marketing attracting people to your website from throughout New Zealand, this is the wrong website visitor as you only do local work. A High bounce rate has a negative effect on your websites ranking, and it’s especially bad when you’re investing your hard earned dollars in advertising. There are many reasons that a user may bounce. It could also be poor website design and layout, slow page loading time, unmet expectations, or poor content.
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