Understanding Website Performance Tracking
For companies operating in the digital space, web performance tracking is essential for business success.
By monitoring traffic, bounce rates, loading times, downtimes, click-through rates (CTR), and more, you can adjust your site to provide the best experience for users and gain sharper insights into their behavior – here’s what you need to know.
Benefits of Performance Monitoring
Search Engine Rankings
Site users are essential for helping us to gauge optimization. Often, the behavior of your users (their loading times, CTR, etc.) will affect your search engine rankings.
By monitoring their behavior, you can make adjustments such as decreasing image sizes or re-arranging text to see if this improves the site’s performance and, therefore, its search rankings.
User Insights
Amongst the most important benefits of website performance monitoring, user insights can help us to spot new product opportunities, reveal mistakes in our strategies and build more comprehensive customer profiles.
With the right tracking, it’s possible for your website to become a crucial source of information on existing/potential customers/clients, helping your marketing & sales teams to better understand their tastes and habits.
User Accessibility
Keeping your website functional and online is critical when your business is digitally-based. By tracking user behavior, you can stay notified of any crashed pages, defunct links, or slow load times.
Many alerts can be set to be automated, so you’ll be aware if there is an outage or if certain pages aren’t loading in certain locations. The alternative is receiving complaints via social media, which is bad PR and indicates poor site maintenance.
Security
Incredibly, 23% of small- to medium-sized businesses were victims of cyberattacks in 2021. Without monitoring processes, you will be slower to recognize a threat and slower to react should a breach occur.
Website performance tracking is a key aspect of cybersecurity and can protect the integrity of your site, saving you time and money in the long term and helping to keep your business and your customers safe.
Methods of Tracking
Performance Metrics
It’s important to consider the metrics we use to measure performance. These are often linked to your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and can affect how you conduct business.
For example, transaction/conversion rates can be measured against the number of unique visitors as a way to gauge the success of your sales pipeline.
Bounce rates, on the other hand, are a good indication of how relevant/effective the initial information is on your landing page. Think carefully about your key objectives and outline your most valuable performance metrics accordingly.
Process Mining
It’s also important to conduct research to discover and learn more about customer behavior and buying decisions, allowing you to refine your site to their needs – this is usually called task mining or ‘process mining’.
Process mining is not only useful for site adjustment, but it will also help you to increase sales, manage risk and help you discover previously unrevealed opportunities. If you’re new to process mining, start by identifying potential data sources, scheduling a timeline, and determining key stakeholders.
Although it can cost time and resources, monitoring the performance of your website is often an important task worth the effort.
With so much business conducted and consumer traffic online, failure to understand your own site’s strengths and weaknesses can result in missed customers, missed opportunities, and stagnation when it comes to growing your company.
