I found that some one page website owners don’t know what to track on their pages. They think if a website doesn’t have payment process and a bunch of pages, there is nothing to be tracked. Luckily truth is different and there are always essential metrics that all website owners should be aware of.
Get to know your customers and their behavior
Do you know who your visitors are and where they come from? How did they find you and what are they doing on your site? Even if you have just one website page I’m sure that you have enabled some videos, buttons, documents that users can download, watch or do something else with it.
It is always good to define expected user experience and user flow before you ask someone to visit your website. Write down everything you want to know about your site and visitors. Questions that I wrote below are the one I asked myself before I started with the analysis of one of my one page sites.
How Much Traffic a Website is Getting?
- What is the number of visits? (New vs Returning visitors)
- Where visitors came from? (Which country)
- Which channels bring the most traffics?
- How long they stayed on the site? (Session duration)
- What did they do on the site before they left? (Clicks, shares, downloads)
On my website I use Google Analytics as I’m sure, the most of website owners use. In Google Analytics, I created a new dashboard with a unique widget for each of this questions.
Number of Visits – New vs Returning – Country – Session Duration
Widget for the number of visits includes simple user metric that display all users that have had at least one session within the selected date range. Includes both new and returning users.
For the widget that includes new and returning visitors create a bar chart or pie chart that will show the number or percentage of users grouped by user type.
Next one is metric that splits users per country. Here I would like to track the number of all users and new users per country. For example, my goal is to increase the number of new visitors from US.
Session duration metric will help you to understand how long visitors stayed on the site. In this widget you can display average length of a Session per user type. It is useful to know whether the visitors who come back stay longer or shorter. If they stay longer that could mean that they found something interesting (price. service…) on your site. My site has one landing page and blog section and because of that I included page per session within this widget. Pages per session or in other words “the average page depth” is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Traffic Source and Social Media
These metrics are very important because it will tell you where people find you. If you have an active campaign, or you put a more effort in email communication it is important to see the results of those efforts. This metis will show you if you apply the right technique or not. Besides traffic source, I decided to measure the number of users and page per session. In that way, you will know what is the traffic source of the highest quality visitors.
Other metric from this area is divided pre Social Networks. With this metric you will know the number of visitors per social network and their average session duration.
Event tracking – Clicks – Shares -Downloads
To follow up on the previous metric, this metric will show us users who came from the social network and shared the post on social media. In order to do this, you need to implement part of the code that will use for event tracking. All about event tracking you can find on this post Track the Right Metrics for Your Startup or Blog.
What can you track? If you have social share icons on your page you can track that. The easiest way to do that is to use Yuval Oren’ plugin, WP Google Analytics Events if you have a website on WordPress. If you don’t have, you will have to find another plugin or add .js script direct in your code.
If you plan to track button clicks, this could be a part of the code you need:
<a id="button" href="http://link.com/" target="_blank" onclick="ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'button view');">My Button</a>After you add an event .js code you can create a new widget on your dashboard that will include this event. You can track the number of page shares, or you can find out the number of users who came from the social network and shared the post on social media. The best would be to measure the whole process. For example, you can discovered that people who came from email source, spend more than 2 minutes on your website are more likely to press contact button than the one who came from social media. I suggest you to use In-page Analytics report under the Behavior section on your Google Analytics and see how customers interact with your web pages, including what they click and don’t click. You can use these insights to optimize your website layout, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
Next time when you think that there is nothing you can track on your website think again. There is always the valuable data that you can collect from your Analytics tools.
