Are You Measuring These Metrics On Your Campaign Website?

Knowing what your campaign website traffic does when it arrives at your site can help you tailor your web content for maximum effectiveness.

Google Analytics provides valuable information that allows you to find out where your web site visitors are coming from, what pages they are viewing, and what they do on your site. Here are three metrics to keep an eye on no matter what analytics program you are using.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits where the visitor left your site from the entrance (or landing) page. Traffic sent to (donation or issue) landing pages, home page, and other internal pages will have different bounce rates.

Look at the pages with very high bounce rates. Is there are reason why people are not sticking around? Is there a call to action on the page? Is there enough content? Does the content match the traffic source? For example, if you are running a PPC campaign, are the ads pointing to the most relevant page on your site?

Average Page Views Per Visit

Your visitor’s overall engagement can be measured by how deep into your site they will go. The average page views per visit gives you an indication of how much interest your site holds for your visitors. When people find content that resonates, they will read more and tend to share that content with others. This ties into what content visitors see. If you find particular content is popular (such as issue pages), then you may want to create additional, similar content.

Average Time

This ties in with the other metrics. Are you reaching your visitors, and are your visitors spending time on your site? For example, you have a video on a page that is three minutes long, you’ll want to see that your audience has remained on the page for at least that long.  Typically a high bounce rate will correlate with a low average time on the site, but not always.

Take a good look at your content when looking at your analytics. Try to see it through your visitor’s eyes, as if it’s the first page they see. Even better, have a neutral third party give you feedback on your site and page content.

Examining metrics on the page level will give you an idea of what content is most engaging to your audience and give you areas where you may want to change your content. Knowing what your visitors do is critical to understanding the effectiveness of your site and overall marketing strategy.

Analytics code can be easily be added to your Online Candidate website through the Site Setup. For more articles, information and tool about analytics and online campaigning, visit OnlineCandidateResources.com.