Website monitoring is the practice of tracking key metrics which provide a holistic idea regarding the performance of your website. It helps businesses to stay on top of their goals of customer acquisition, sales, and more. Additionally, tracking website performance can significantly reduce the risk of cyber-attacks, which, as reported by the Insurance Journal, is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today. In this article by Custom Fit Web Design, we’ll explore the best practices regarding website monitoring and the benefits it provides to all areas of the business.
What Should You Track?
Here are four key metrics that should be included in your daily website monitoring plan:
- Unique Visitors: This metric tracks the number of new visitors who are visiting your website daily. For any business, a high number of unique visitors is a good sign, especially if you’re currently running digital marketing campaigns.
- Top Traffic Source: As reported by Klipfolio, by knowing which source drives the highest traffic you can channel greater resources towards improving website performance. For instance, if social media is the primary traffic source, consider investing in performance marketing campaigns that can significantly increase the number of visits and conversions.
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate calculates the number of visitors who visited a single page of your website before exiting. A high bounce rate is never a good sign, as ideally, you want customers to visit the website and explore a few pages before leaving.
- Exit Pages: Keeping a track of exit pages is a great way to ascertain whether your exit pages is working or not. If customers are leaving the site on the checkout page, it can point to an issue with your payment portal. Similarly, if a particular page is driving the most exits, review its code to ensure it is loading properly and does not have other issues.
Benefits of Website Monitoring
Tracking the performance of your website will require hiring professionals and making an investment in website tracking tools. Here are four ways why website monitoring is worth the time, investment, and effort:
- Better Understanding of Consumers
Tracking metrics such as exit pages and top traffic sources will provide you deeper insights regarding consumer behavior on your site and the type of messaging which works best. Having this data in hand will lead to informed decision-making regarding changes needed to the website and marketing campaigns that will lead to higher conversions and efficiency.
- Improved User Flows
The only way to understand if your user flows work is to track its live performance on your website. A flow that UI/UX designers find simple may not be the same for customers. If metrics show that customers are not taking the desired action on your website, whether it be registering to make purchases, work towards simplifying your website and include better messaging.
- Protection of Sensitive Data
Website monitoring makes it easy to spot anomalies related to its performance. For instance, if you notice a spike in traffic from an unknown source, it can point to a potential cyber-attack. In response, you can isolate affected systems and move company and customer data to a secure server to avoid breaches and save the business from financial difficulties.
Importance of Using Process Mining Tools
Process mining tools are a type of AI-powered software that helps businesses accurately track the performance of the website and connected tools. A process mining tool will analyze log data created by your website tracking tools, CRM, ERP, and other software, which play an integral role in providing customers the best service possible.
Post-analysis, the tool will create visualizations that can be used to make decisions regarding website changes, upgrades to user flows, and the use of customer data. Check out this link to find the best tools for process mining that are the right fit for your business.
Given the key role the website plays in the success of your business, treat website monitoring as a daily priority. Using process mining and website tracking tools will make monitoring much easier and highlight areas of improvement and be promptly addressed to get the best out of your website.
Author of this article is Cody McBride, Tech Deck
