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Tools: Statistics - How Do I Know If My Web Site Is Doing Well?

There is no 'one' magic number when it comes to web site statistics to determine 'how your web site is doing'. Really, you need to look at a string of about 4 numbers to tell if your web site traffic is improving or not. Your web site traffic is like a funnel. It starts with many people visiting your site, and ends with some visitors hopefully achieving one of your web site goals, with many visitors dropping out along the way. The 4 steps below will help you better determine how your web site is doing:

#1: Visits
Start by looking at the number of 'Visits' to your web site. This will give you an overall idea of your site's MAXIMUM possible useful visitors. Just because a visitor came to your site, doesn't mean they are an existing or potential patient, as you will see in #2 below.

#2: Bounce Rate
The next factor to look at is 'bounce rate'. This means that a visitor came to your site, and bounced right out again. In other words, they saw one page of your site, and left. In general, this means that they were not a 'useful visitor'.

#3: Average Time on Site
This factor is a strong indicator of the usefulness of a visitor. You might notice that visitors from Google, for example, spend an average 2.5 minutes on your site, while visitors from Yahoo spend an average of only 1.2 minutes on your site. This indicates that the visitors who are finding you from Google are more interested in your content than the visitors from Yahoo.

#4: Goals (also known as Conversions)
If a visitor comes to your site, they don't 'bounce', and they stay there for a few minutes and read content, there's a good chance that you might 'convert' them into achieving your goals. A conversion is measured by having a visitor complete a certain action on your site. For example, if you participate in a particular insurance plan, and you feel certain that visitors who already subscribe to that insurance plan, and who read about it on your site will become your patients, then your 'conversion' goal will be to track which visitors click on that insurance plan from your home page. A more complicated goal might be for returning patients to complete an appointment confirmation online.

Every step of the funnel, from #1 to #4 needs to be optimized to first attract the right visitors, and then to maintain their interest as you direct them towards your goal. In our next 4 newsletters, we'll focus on optimizing each step in the funnel.

If there are any web site statistics questions that have been bothering you, or you're wondering how to optimize your traffic funnel, drop us an email and we'll try to help.