Measurable Goals

Is your website successful? Yes? No? How do you know? Have you considered that question at all?

Frequently, when working with a small business or individual about their website, I’ll ask them two questions:

  1. What do you want the user to do when they come to your website?
  2. How will you know if they’ve done it?

And for a lot of people getting started with their first website, these are questions they aren’t sure how to answer. But that’s why we’re here, to help you figure out the answers. In order to know if your website is doing what you want it to do, you need to have goals. What is it you want the person who lands on your website to do?

If you have an e-commerce website, the goal is simple: you want to have sales. That’s an easy one track.

But what if your goal isn’t to sell something? How do you measure that?

Think about what you want from the user. Do you want them to hire you to clean their carpet? Wash their windows? Make them a website? Then you want them to contact you. Your goal is to get people to fill out a contact form and hit the submit button. The reason is that we can track how many people land on your site and then fill out the form. When someone completes the action you want them to complete, like submitting your form, is called a conversion.

If you offer a service and want people to contact you via the website, that’s a conversion. And the percentage of website visitors who land on your site and then fill out the form is called your conversion rate. We want to see a good conversion rate.

What if you don’t want people to contact you? 

Say you have a blog that you write about a specific topic. And your goal is to get lots of people to read it, with the hope of selling ads. You have to prove  to your advertisers that your site is getting traffic. So you would measure this goal by using Google analytics to see how much traffic your blog is getting and watching to see if the traffic grows over time. Another unit of measuring for a blog could be the number of comments or conversion your blog gets. If users are discussing your posts in the comments, that would be an indication that they are finding your site and doing what you want them to do… read your post.

It’s important to figure out how to know if your website is working for you. This way, if it’s not, you can analyze why not and figure out a plan to ensure that it does work for you.

Do you need help finding out how to set and measure goals for your website? Request a quote and we can help!

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Amy Masson, Web Developer
Owner/Developer

Amy Masson

Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.

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