Most of us have met a doctor at some point in time. You would have noticed that a doctor does not start writing prescription as soon as you enter his/her office. It is quite obvious that they first need to know the symptoms, run a few tests if required, and based on the finding prescribe you medicines and/or therapy.

Similar is the case with your website. You would have to diagnose your website and run tests to figure out the shortcomings. You would then need to base the corrective measures (prescription) on the problem areas, to make your website healthy.

“You cannot make your website perform better unless you know what exactly is going wrong with it.”

To get a more accurate understanding, a little background is probably in order. Businesses use websites as instruments to convert visitors into customers, and thus fulfill their goals. This conversion process can be visualized in the form of a funnel – the website conversion funnel.

As evident from the funnel diagram, not every visitor performs the desired action – in short the goal is not accomplished. Although 100% conversion may be an impossible feat to achieve; increasing it is a definite possibility. In order to maximize goal conversion performance of your website, you need to play the role of a website doctor.

Doctors use instruments (stethoscope, CT scan, etc.) to identify problems. Similarly, you need to use web analytics to study and analyze the website and its visitors. Armed with this knowledge, you can cure most (if not all) of the website’s deficiencies. Caution: You cannot turn a ‘blind eye’ and pretend that everything is just fine. If you do so, you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to garner more business.

Web analytic tools have abundance of raw data that needs to be interpreted correctly into actionable information. It is also imperative that you clearly understand the correlation between each data set.

Since most of us use Google Analytics (it is free, simple and a powerful tool), I would confine my discussion to it. However most of it will also be applicable to other analytic tools. To get you off the mark, you need to define your goal(s) in analytics – one of the most important key metric or KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

You will need to constantly track this key metric along with other key metrics, some of which are mentioned below.

1. Visits and conversions: Check the number visitors over a predefined period of time (preferably a month) and the associated conversions. You would then have for yourself the numbers that go at the start and the end of the conversion funnel.

Armed with this basic knowledge you would know the rate at which visitors convert into customers, and can then strive to better it.

2. Bounce and Exit rate: The second step would be to analyze each webpage and the corresponding bounce rate.

Since every webpage/landing page acts as an entrance to the conversion funnel, it is imperative to identify pages that help visitors move further into the conversion process. At the same time it is also important to identify pages that trigger a high bounce (visitors who leave a webpage without navigating further) rate, which creates proliferation of visitors.

A more important task would be to check exit rate (not same as bounce rate) of the most important landing pages.

Once you have zeroed upon the ‘troublemakers’, you would have to make appropriate changes (based on your findings) and test them. Google website optimizer is a great tool to help you accomplish this.

This would greatly assist you in arresting any further conversion funnel abandonment.

3. Page Views and time on site: You can break down visits into page views/visit to study visitors’ behavior. This metric defines the ‘stickiness quotient’ of your website. The more the visitors stick the more are the chances of them converting into customers.

This data also tells you how you could possibly space you call to action elements. If the average page views per visit are less to 2 then it is imperative that the CTA element is resident on the next page, irrespective of where the visitors land. In essence, the visitors should be able to perform the predefined action within two clicks. At the same time you should work to better this figure to get more page views per visit.

Average time per visit is another metric that is worth your attention. Can you visitors find all the relevant information required to make a decision, in the given time frame?

In addition to this, studying the navigation pattern of the visitors, reverse goal paths, and funnel visualization, will give you the required insight into the performance of your website and visitors’ behavior. This actionable data can be effectively and efficiently used to not only enhance the performance of your website, but also maximize your business goals.

It may be a seemingly mammoth task and may deter many, but believe you me – it’s not. And even if it was a bit difficult and time consuming, it is definitely worth your time and attention.