Episode 017: Important Traffic Metrics for Your Ecommerce Website   Episode Summary:  A high average order value can make it easier to run your online business. In this episode, Julie walks you through the benefits of a high AOV and specific strategies for increasing your website's AOV.   Episode Links: https://analytics.google.com/ https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place? Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to Episode 17 of the Savvy Business Method podcast where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Okay, before we start today, a quick reminder. If you have not come over and joined me on Facebook, please do so. I am hosting a couple times a day on there, I have links to videos, these podcasts, other really cool resources I find are on the Internet. Or, you know, if you want to ask me a question, that can be a great place to do it, as well. I am at Savvy Business Method on Facebook.   Alright, let's dive into today's topic, which is important traffic metrics for your website and what they mean. Now today everything I'm going to talk about in terms of the numbers that we need to be keeping an eye on as small business owners, all the things today I'm talking about, are going to be available in Google Analytics. I am hopeful that if you have Google Analytics already installed on your website and are tracking your website information.   If you don't, I have a great video on YouTube you should check out about why it is so important to put a Google Pixel on your website, even potentially before you launch your website so it can be ready to go and collect all that information.   So if you don't have that right now, real quick, Google Analytics is a free tracking system. It gives you an enormous amount of information about people who visit your website and what they do while they're there. And to get Google Analytics on your website you need to create a Google Analytics account. And weirdly enough you can Google that. You'll also probably need a Gmail account, it's a good time to reserve your business' name, like I have savvybusinessmethod@gmail.com. Don't email me there, it won't go anywhere, but I own that email address. You'll also need to prove that the website is yours and then they're going to give you some code to put on your website so that things can be tracked.   Now, Google is limited to tracking the website you own, right? And it does start tracking right away, but you aren't going to be able to install tracking code like on your Facebook Page or your YouTube Channel or anything like that. Google is limited to the website that you own. But, that is hopefully where most of your business is occurring and let's talk through the three sets of metrics that could be really helpful for identifying problems with your website, seeing what's working and then coming up with ideas for ways to improve.   Okay, so those three sets of metrics are who is visiting your site? What they're doing while they're there? And how they're leaving? Okay? So let's dive in. Alright, first up, we want to know as much as possible about the people who are visiting our website. So, one of the metrics that I look at regularly for my websites are the number of visits, okay? So that ideally the number of people coming to our websites each day should be going up, right? Like, that's what we want now, granted, we do want quality visits. So just because we got more visits on a certain day doesn't necessarily mean that those visits were possibly going to buy anything and I'll talk about that in a minute when we talk about sources.   But this number is helpful because although we definitely want to see it trending upward, sharp moves in either direction can be a sign of a problem. If your website suddenly one day has a ton of traffic, for example, you need to identify where that traffic's coming from and make sure it is at least legitimate traffic and not say, some sort of denial service attack on your website, okay? A sharp downturn in that number could signal that you're having a problem. It could mean that something about your website isn't working properly anymore, so maybe your website is not as ranked as well on Google. It could mean that one of your major traffic sources is no longer sending you traffic. Maybe your Facebook ad stopped working, or something like that.   So, keeping an eye on that number can be a good clue, both when things are going well for you, but also maybe even more importantly, when they're not. Now, a sharp downturn may not be something you have to fix. It could be, I'm just throwing this out there, it could be a legitimate reason, something predictable, right? It could be if you have a very seasonal-type business, you'll probably see a pretty sharp downturn at the end of your season.   So, this is where you have to take all that other information that you know about your business when you're looking at this number. This number does not necessarily tell you anything in and of itself, it is a clue for what else you need to look at.   Next up, you want to look at the sources of your traffic, okay? So this can help you figure out where your efforts need to be put in terms of driving traffic to your website. And it also can help you see what is quality traffic for you and not, because you're able to actually segment in Google the source traffic comes from and then what they do. So, how quickly they leave your site, or, you know, whether or not they buy anything, something like that.   Now, something you'll commonly see as a website owner, if you've been doing this longer than maybe three months, you're going to end up having a day where you suddenly have way more traffic than you should and it's all coming from like maybe social media and you go frantically drilling down into your reports, trying to figure it out. And it turns out it's coming from a site like Stumble Upon. And those people did not stick around, they didn't buy anything. So it's just kind of a blip on your traffic radar, right? So that's something to think about. The source information can be really useful.   The other thing I like to look at with my sources is I, as a website owner, because I tend to be a very risk-adverse person to begin with, I do not like risky adventures. I like to be seeing in my traffic numbers a good spread across various sources. So, yeah, I want some of my traffic coming from organic traffic from search engines like Google. I want some of my traffic coming from Facebook or some other social media sites. I want some of my traffic coming from email. I do not, as a website owner, want all of my traffic coming from one place because something can always happen to any of my sources.   You know, Google could have some sort of algorithm change in the middle of the night. The rules that they have in place on what websites are number one versus number 10 on their search results, that can suddenly change. There are a lot of website owners out there who are still upset over some of the algorithm changes over the last couple of years. And so I don't ever want all of my traffic coming from one place because what if that goes away in the middle of the night, okay? Because that can happen. So I really like to look at my sources of my traffic so that I can not only see where people are coming from and maybe where I need to beef up my efforts but to make sure that I'm maintaining kind of a spread across various sources and so that my business is more stable.   Alright, also in terms of who's visiting my site, I like to look at the entry pages. What are the landing pages that people are coming in on? And this can help me kind of understand what pages are bringing in the most traffic and kind of recognize that, oh, I have that article out there and I've been putting it out to various bloggers or out on social media and look, now that page is a landing page. People are coming in to the site via that page.   Now, for established websites with strong category pages, strong product pages, good content marketing strategy going on, one thing you'll start to notice is that your home page becomes less and less important as a driver of traffic for you, which is so counterintuitive if you're just getting started. So you'll just have to take my word for this. You know, home pages are great, they can be very keyword heavy. They're obviously a good entrance into your site, but from a search engine's perspective in particular, something like a category page or a product page or a really good content article might be fulfilling the needs of the searcher more than your home page. And the Google and being in all the other search engines, their algorithms are constantly trying to find the best place to route people. And so your home page may not always be that and as you get more established, as you get better at managing your website, you're likely to see your home page drop in popularity as a landing page for your website.   Alright, so let's move on to what your visitors are doing once they're there. This is another set of metrics that we really want to look at. One thing I like to look at is the average pages per visit. This is the average number of pages that someone views before they leave the website. This can be an indicator of a couple of things. The big ones are the quality of the visitor. So someone who is potentially interested in the information you have is probably going to surf more pages than someone who is not. This could also indicate to how well your site is internally linked. So let's say you have a category page or an article that comes up and ranks really well with the search engines and someone, a lot of people tend to come into via that page. That's the first page that they see when they get on your website. If you have a good linking strategy, and there are links on that page to other related pages, you'll have a better chance of keeping them on the site for a second page and a third page and so on and so forth.   If you have a ton of your traffic only visiting one page on your website, it might be worth taking a look at whether you have a good path for them to follow, right? Among your pages if your pages are well-linked. So, average pages per visit, again, is one of those clues, right? It helps us understand maybe where we need to look to possibly improve our websites. Alright, related to that is the page path that people generally follow. So what I mean by that is what is the first page they look at and then what page do they go to after that and what page do they commonly go to after that? This can give us, as website owners, a lot of information about how people are using our website. So again, we can make tweaks, right?   In what links we want to direct people to and what best information for them to see next. You know, the good example of this is if you look at Google Analytics and you see that the page path that people are following is not really conducive to the sales process, you might need to change out the way that your pages are linking together or your menus or something to try to get people to click on a better page next, right? A page that will move them down the sales funnel so they go from being maybe aware of your product to being interested in learning more to being interested in possibly purchasing it to getting them to that purchase process. And so this is kind of a way to double check that we're funneling people through our website in a logical manner and if we see that we're not, then we need to go back and play detective and figure out why it is that they're not moving along that path successfully.   Alright, next up are two metrics in terms of customer behavior on the website that we all should love and adore. One is our conversion rate, that's the number of people who place an order during their visit to the website and the other is their average order value. Now, we talked quite a bit about average order value in the last episode, in Episode 16. If you haven't heard that one yet, please be sure to go listen to that. But, the conversion rate and the average order value are kind of our best case scenario, right? This is what we want people to be doing on an E-commerce website. I mean sure, we put the articles in there, we put lots of information, we want them to feel good about making a purchase, but in the end, we need them to make a purchase That's really important. And so we need this conversion rate to constantly be going up. It could be a big indicator of how our site is doing. It can also be, like a traffic number, an early sign if there is a problem. If we start to see our conversion rate going down, we need to dig in hard to the rest of our metrics to figure out why that is happening.   And then in terms of AOV, I'm just going to say briefly, because I just talked about this in the last episode. I'd really encourage you to go listen to that. You know, your site's AOV can make a huge difference, it's the Average Order Value, a huge difference in how difficult it is to run a profitable site and to have the cash necessary to grow. So again, that's a metric we always want to see going up when we're checking on our metrics each day.   Alright, third set of metrics we need to be looking at. The how are they leaving metrics? How are our customers leaving our website? Now the first metric you should look at in this category is called the bounce rate. Now, if you haven't heard the bounce rate before, the bounce rate is the number of people who land on a page on our website and then immediately leave without visiting a second page. They're bouncing, right? Like a ball, they hit the ground and they go right back out.   Now every website has a bounce rate. If it does not have a bounce rate, and you'll see people claim they don't, generally they're doing something with like a click bait situation where they're getting someone to click something while they're on the website and then basically they don't have a bounce rate, right? Because everybody clicks whatever it is. So a bounce rate, I just want to assure you, especially as an E-commerce website, a bounce rate is perfectly normal thing to have.   Having one does not indicate a problem. This is actually kind of a strange metric because even having sometimes a high bounce rate, you know, in the 70s and 80s, it might not indicate a problem, okay? So think about this from the search engine's perspective. A company like Google, as a search engine, cares that people who search on their search engine platform are getting the information they need from your website. So if they're going to put your website at number one in the ranking, they want to be pretty darn sure that that person's going to get exactly what they need by clicking on that link, okay?   So, sometimes, let's say you have a really great article on your website about how to pick the perfect camera for you and you might actually have a very high bounce rate on that article because people come in, they look at the article, they find the information they need and they leave, okay?   So in and of itself, a bounce rate isn't necessarily bad, okay, but here's kind of the thing about bounce rates. From Google's perspective, a high bounce rate isn't bad as long as people are getting what they need. From your perspective as website owner, a high bounce rate means they didn't buy anything, right? It's impossible to buy something without visiting more than one page on your website. Even if you have like a Check Out Now button on your product page, they're still going to have to go to the product page and the checkout page, right? And then the thank you page, hopefully, when they press that Place Order button. And so for us as website owners, we need to keep an eye on this bounce rate and generally we do need it to be going down, okay?   If we were running a blog, it could be a different situation, but if you're running an E-commerce website, yes, reading information is good, but we need them to be buying. And so we can look at this bounce rate and kind of look at, and this is along with that page path that I was talking about a few minutes ago, kind of see, you know, where are we failing here? Do we need to get better links on these pages that people are bouncing on? Do we need to lay out the information differently so that people kind of get into that path of moving towards checkout?   Alright, in addition to the bounce rate, you also want to look at the exit pages. These are the pages that people leave from. Okay, so let's say somebody comes into your website and they land on a category page and then they move to a product page and then they move to the cart and then they leave. Okay, the exit page would be the cart page. It's the last page they visited on their journey through your website. Now in a perfect world, we would want most of our exits to be on our thank you page, right? The thank you page they see after they've hit the Place Order button, their order's been placed, this is where we want people to leave our website. But, that's not always the case, right? And if you have a significant number of exits from other pages, this is, again, a place you need to look to see if you need to make improvements to your pages. Why are people leaving? You're not going to be able to prevent everyone from leaving, but again, how do we get them into that sales funnel instead of clicking up in their browser window and taking off? Thankfully, Google Analytics breaks out your exit pages by page. So you're going to be able to see where people are leaving so you can get really granular in trying to figure out how you can possibly improve those pages and get people back into your sales funnel.   Alright, so if you're not currently watching your metrics, I realize this sounds like a lot of things to keep track off. These are a lot of potentially new terms and new places to go look. I promise you, though, that if you start doing this every day or every few days, it will quickly become automatic. I can get into Google Analytics and glance at all of these things in under two minutes a day. I've been doing it for 10 years, believe me, it just gets to be part of what you do with your day, every day.   Okay, so if you have Google Analytics installed and you aren't tracking your metrics, well, you know, at least the data's in there, right? So you need to start today, get in there, start looking at these numbers. If you are getting in there and looking at these numbers, good for you. Hopefully today's discussion has given you a little bit more insight into what each of those numbers mean. If you are wondering what some other numbers mean, you know, feel free to reach out to me. Remember, savvybusinessmethod.com is my website. You can reach out, tell me what it is you want me to talk about on a future podcast. I can totally do that.   But, in the end, I do want to be clear the numbers in Google Analytics are cool, they're fun to look at, they're a great source of information we can use to help inform the decisions we make. But they are not an end all. None of those numbers give us the whole story about anything. They can give us clues, though, to areas we need to work on improving and they can also help us track the consequences of changes we make or things we try. So if we change up the shipping offer, if we suddenly start offering free shipping, we can get some clues from these numbers about how that effect our customer's behavior. If we start changing up the way our site is linked from one page to another. We can get some clues watching these numbers to how that effect our customer's behavior. But in the end, this is one piece of information and you need to take the rest of the knowledge you have about your website and numbers from other sources to make informed decisions.   Alright, well that's it for today. I will be back in your feed in a few days. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this information will help you make excellent decisions for your own business. And hopefully inspire you to get digging in there, right? On how well your website is performing and the areas you need to target for improvement. We all have places for improvement, trust me. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you know, like you want to know what some of these other numbers mean, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And I will talk to you soon.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch ya next time.       Episode 017: Important Traffic Metrics for Your Ecommerce Website