One of the core principles of any professional web design is that before the actual website creation happens, part of the planning for it must include at least one objective for the website, and preferably more than one. This can include increasing brand awareness, lead generation, product visibility and best of all, direct sales.
If we take this forward to the point that a website is live, many business owners struggle to determine how well their website is doing. Often its main objective is not immediately measurable by data. For example, brand awareness is something that does not easily have a number allocated to it, but rather is measured in other ways such as people discussing the brand or showing more trust in the company.
Having said that, there are several ways in which you can assess a website and how effective its web design or redesign has been. These are measured using specific KPIs which give a true reflection of the website and its performance. These KPIs then allow the website owner to arrange for changes and improvements in the web design, traffic sources and content, for example.
Unique / Total Visitor Sessions
This KPI tells you how much traffic is coming to your website as it measures how many sessions, or visits it has had. You need to split this KPI between total sessions and unique sessions as some visitors will return at a later date. Moving forward this indicates if any of your online marketing activities are increasing your traffic as evidenced by increasing sessions.
Visitor Return Percentage
We mentioned in the last section visitors will return and the percentage of return visits can be measured. The significance of this is that if the percentage is low, and your website is one where you want visitors to return it suggests improvements need to be made.