Interestingly enough, when we asked “how do you know how your website is performing?” many funeral professionals candidly told us “I don’t; I have no idea.”
Do you review your monthly analytics report?
Lots of folks, it seems, just don’t have the time to investigate how their website is performing.
If that sounds like you, make a commitment right now to take the time to review your site analytics—or simply assign the responsibility to a staff member. You can sign up for Google Analytics very easily, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t use the analytics reports you receive to make necessary changes in your site contents.
What’s Important…and What’s Not
At the most basic level, you want to have an idea of how many people are visiting your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Additionally, you should know what the visitors are doing while they’re on your site. How many pages are they viewing? How much time are they spending on your website?
Here’s a basic outline of what your Google Analytics will tell you, so you can assess your website performance:
Absolute Unique Visits: provides you with the number of unique visitors to your site. One person might visit your site five times in a week. This statistic tells you how many visitors you had instead of how many total visits.
Pageviews: indicates how many pages on your site were viewed. One visitor might have looked at five pages, so comparing the number of pageviews to the number of visitors can help you determine how much content the users are experiencing.
Time on Site: shows how much time visitors spent on your website. This number is averaged, and some visitors might keep your site open in their browsers when they’re not actively exploring it, so this data has the potential to be misleading; however, it is worth noting.
Bounce Rate: tells you the percentage of visitors who “bounced” away from your site immediately. If your bounce rate is high, that means visitors are not sticking around to check out your content. If it’s low, that means folks who visit your site are exploring it in more depth.
All of these statistics help you gain a basic understanding of your website performance. But knowing how many visitors are coming to your site may not be very helpful in a true website performance assessment. To get a better perspective, you’ll need to dig deeper and ask some probing questions.
What Questions?
The writers at FrontRunner Professional have put together an eBook to help you evaluate your current funeral firm website in 30 minutes or less. Titled, How Does Your Website Stack Up, this 20-page digital guide is designed to make it simple for you to assess site performance; then prioritize and implement any necessary site changes.
We want your firm to have the best possible website, no matter which hosting and design company you’ve hired. Click here to request a copy of How Does Your Website Stack Up? How to Evaluate Your Current Site in 30 Minutes or Less.
And be sure to let us know how you did by leaving your comments below!
Ashley Montroy, Marketing Director at FrontRunner Professional, has committed herself to helping funeral professionals understand and excel in today’s digital age. With a long-standing history in the funeral business and her father being a licensed funeral director for over 30 years; she grew up learning the family funeral business. Ashley holds a bachelor’s degree from Carleton University and diploma from Algonquin College. Today, she continues to speak to over 15 state and provincial funeral association groups each year on funeral marketing in the digital age and protecting funeral firms online using experiences and examples from working with thousands of funeral homes in North America through FrontRunner Professional.
