There are so many factors that need to be assessed when evaluating the success or failure of your website. So many website owners are stuck worrying about ranking in the search engines instead of paying attention to making the current customer traffic happy.After all, happy customer traffic should reflect somehow to the overall money that you make in business.
There are 4 potential ways to measure how happy your website visitors are:
1. Number of repeat visitors
2. Number of pages they look at
3. How much total time they spend on your website
4. If they bounce off your site immediately or once they hit a specific page
In the last two Nuggets I explained repeat visitors in some depth. Today I'll explain why the number of pages someone reads is important for your website, and how you can use it as a "measurement of visitor happiness."
When it comes to jewelry websites, the average number of pages a visitor reads is 4.8. In your own Google Analytics you can find this number on the "All Traffic" report. You get to that report by clicking on Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic. Look for the number below the chart that says "Pages / Visit." Any number above 4.8 means you are ahead of the average, below it means you have something wrong with your website.
The number of pages people view tells you how engaging your website is. Websites that have product catalogs are more likely to have higher number of pages per visit because visitors tend to click through many products. On the other hand, websites that spend most of their time building content through their blog will probably have a lower number of pages per visit.
Your website needs to provide a good assortment of different types of information to appeal to the jewelry buyer. The product catalog is a must, followed by a blog that provides related content, like product reviews, for the catalog. Each blog entry should link to a product in the catalog, and those catalog items should also link back to the blog.
Linking from page to page within your site is how you can increase the number of pages that people read. Naturally the more they read also means they are staying longer to explore your site. They are also more likely to share what they are reading to their friends.
Websites with less than 20 pages will have a hard time getting visitors to read more than a few pages. You really need to bulk your content drastically. On the other hand, those with hundreds of products and dozens of blog posts should easily have higher than average page views per visitor. Something is wrong if you don't.
If you have a big website but your pages per visitor are less than the 4.8 average, the first thing to look at is your navigation. JavaScript dropdown menus can sometimes malfunction, or they might be confusing for people to use. I've seen dropdown menus that looked nice but reacted in unexpected ways in different browsers or when users moved their mouse too slowly or too quickly.
The design of your website might be another reason why users do not read many pages of your site. People will simply be frightened away if the design is too confusing. Do you have a lot of other ads on your site that break up your real content too much? Many sites have horribly structured blogs that break in half because of advertisements right in the middle of the page. These sites are difficult to read and disgusted readers won't bother to read more than a page before leaving.
As part of your overall search engine optimization and marketing you should pay attention to this measure of the number of pages per visit. Good things should happen to your business if you can get that number to increase. Talk to your SEO professional and website designer about ways to make this number better.
