Five Numbers Worth Watching

The performance report of your website often gets looked at but nobody does anything with it. The report might contain numbers that people don't understand or don't know how to act on what it says.

Sessions. Page views. Bounce rate. Average time on page. Impressions. These describe activity. They do not describe whether the site is doing its job, and a business owner reading them cannot tell whether last month was good.

We want to cover five numbers that will tell you more than any dashboard:

Qualified visits. Just because your website gets traffic, it doesn't mean everything is great. You want to look for qualified visits from people who might buy from you. Organisations forget to remove their own team's traffic from the count, and traffic from other countries that have no intention of hiring your firm is of no value. Imagine you ran a cafe. People turning their heads to see your cafe while driving past in their cars doesn't make them a qualified visit. Your staff coming in and out of your front door doesn't count either. But a pedestrian that stops to look inside your cafe, that's the person you want to count as a qualified visit.

So remove the noise in your Google Analytics and look at the traffic that is most meaningful.

Service page reach. What proportion of qualified visits reach a page that describes what you sell? This is your comprehension number. If it is low, people are arriving and not finding what you offer. This is a navigation issue, a clarity problem, or poor user experience. Using the cafe example before, imagine that same hungry pedestrian wants to know what you offer. They are looking for your menu or to see if you have a display cabinet of what food and drinks you offer, but they can't easily find one. They walk away to find the next alternative. That's the problem you are trying to fix, maybe it's a better display cabinet, maybe it's a menu out the front, or a big menu board above the counter, and so on.

Enquiry rate. Total enquiries divided by qualified visits. Count every kind of contact, including phone calls, which many fail to capture and which are often a large share of the total. You need to know how many inbound calls you get because of visits to your website (ask on the phone how they heard about you, and if they visited your website). Continuing with the same example above, count how many times a customer walks into your cafe asking for a table, divide it by the total number that stopped to take a look at your cafe. That's your enquiry rate.

Median time to first response. Measured in minutes. Chapter 13 explained why this belongs on a five-number list. How quickly a customer hears from you after an enquiry can make or break their decision in using your business. Imagine the customer walks in, asks for a table, and you leave them there for 15 minutes without taking their order.

Enquiry readiness. Of the enquiries you received, what proportion could you send a proposal to without going back to ask for something more. Not how many were good leads. How many were complete.

Back to the cafe. One customer stops at your door, reads the menu, walks in, asks for a table for two, and orders the breakfast special. Another walks in and you ask three questions before you can seat them. Both are enquiries. Only one of them was helped by the shopfront.

This is the number that tells you whether your website is doing the work of informing your buyers, or simply capturing leads and handing them to whoever does your selling, who then does that work by hand.

Tally it over your next twenty enquiries. Count how many needed a follow-up question before you could put a proposal together. You will be surprised how high the count is. If you would rather not tally, the rough proxy is the gap between the date an enquiry arrived and the date your proposal went out, because every one of those follow-ups sits inside that gap, and it shows up in the number above it.

So how often should you look at these five metrics? We suggest monthly, not weekly. Weekly readings will have you reacting to nothing. Pencil time in your diary, the first Monday of each month, that's when you see the dashboard. When reviewing the metrics, add a line next to each number explaining what changed since last month and why you think so. Then change one thing at a time where you can and believe it will have an impact. This may be slower than making ten changes at once, but we feel it is the only way you will ever know what worked.

If a report you are receiving does not contain these five metrics, ask whoever produces it to replace what is in it. If they cannot, then you know you have a wider problem.