Whether you’re currently redesigning your website, thinking about redesigning your website or just managing your current website, it can be difficult to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Your website may receive thousands to hundreds of thousands of visits per month, which can cause analysis paralysis. However, there are several ways to show the overall success of your content, promotions and digital marketing using the data available in Google Analytics (often referred to as GA4). You can identify views of certain categories of content and clicks on important calls-to-action, as well as see more general metrics related to how engaged your visitors are. Let's explore how to get the data you need to measure success.
Choosing When to Analyze
Typically you’ll want to do a performance check before or after some changes have been made on your website to determine if they helped overall performance. This includes:
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Launch of website redesign or refresh
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New pages added to website
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Organic optimizations made to specific pages
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Campaign launched to increase lead forms
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Launching new features like chat
Whenever possible you should ensure that you have some benchmarks available prior to these changes being made. In many cases this will mean you’ll want to customize your GA4 tracking beyond what is offered by default, though there are ways to measure success without customization. You’ll also want to make sure you’re giving your changes enough time to gather data before you start assessing performance. Typically one month after changes are made is enough time for comparison, though changes for SEO can take several months since you’re relying on search engine bots to crawl and rank your site.
Tracking Success Without Custom Analytics
Adding tracking to button clicks and promotional features on your website can be immensely helpful in tracking success – something typically done by an experienced agency. But not everyone has the time or resources to configure custom tracking. In its absence we can use some of GA4’s more basic metrics to determine success. The most helpful included metrics are:
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Engagement Rate: The percentage of users who view more than one page per visit, trigger a conversion event or stay on the site long enough to trigger the Engaged User event (default is 10 seconds)
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Average Session Duration: The time, in minutes and seconds, that the average visit lasts from start to finish.
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Views per Session: The average number of pages viewed in a visit to the website.
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Average Engagement Time per Active User: The time, in minutes and seconds, that the average user has a page open in their browser tab.
In instances where you’re optimizing campaigns or making changes to your website, you will want to check if these basic metrics are increasing after the changes are made. If your homepage is updated in a way that is supposed to drive users to additional internal pages, success would be users viewing more pages when they visit the site (Views per Session and Engagement Rate increasing).
If you’ve added new website content that is intended to improve SEO and provide more context around your products, success would be longer visits and more time spent on those pages (Average Session Duration and Average Engagement Time per Active User increasing). Additionally when making changes for SEO you can measure the number of visits (Sessions) that start on your optimized pages (Landing Page).
GA4 also does offer some additional Event tracking including PDF downloads, Form Submissions and Clicks to some third-party sites. While it’s not guaranteed that GA4 will track those accurately, you can measure increases in those Events if they are associated with the changes you’ve implemented.
Tracking Success with Custom Analytics
Custom Analytics is shorthand for adding additional tracking to your GA4 account outside of what is offered by default, most commonly by tracking additional Events. Often these are clicks to promotional areas on your homepage, call-to-action buttons associated with products or submissions of forms or online applications. Since every website is unique and the process is manual, the names of these Events will vary, but it’s important to name them so you’ll be able to differentiate these clicks when you view a report. Also it’s very helpful to have Custom Analytics implemented prior to your website redesign, campaign launch, or content optimizations so you’ll be able to compare to the time before the change was made.
If a new promotional area is added to your homepage you should see how often it is being clicked, but also whether the overall homepage clicks have increased. Check to see if clicks decrease on another promotional area when the new one is receiving clicks. Additionally GA4 allows you to create custom Segments in the Explore section where you can see what actions are taken after a user clicks on the promo. One way to measure success is to check the pages viewed and events triggered after the interaction on the homepage.
If you’re doing a full website redesign it can be very helpful Buttonto implement Custom Analytics on your current site during the build of your new website. In addition to giving insight into whether Events and Conversions increase on the new site, you can use the data during the redesign process to inform design and development decisions. While your redesigned site won’t be an exact 1:1 comparison with the old site, you can still compare whether engagement is increasing in terms of clicks to promotional banners, call-to-action buttons and completion of important forms.
Setting Goals and Choosing Benchmarks
With any changes to your website, big or small, you’re hoping they will have a measurable effect on performance. With the proper tracking in place you can see how engagement metrics or conversions are increasing, but how much of an increase is considered a success? Using past data you can set a baseline of historical performance:
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Engagement Rate: For the last 12 months, note the monthly highs and lows of this metric to set an average, as well as determine average variance. If your average Engagement Rate is 57% but has been as high as 64%, it would make sense to set your Goal Engagement Rate slightly higher than 64%. Hitting that number would show not only an increase, but an increase beyond past performance.
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Conversions: Since every product is unique we recommend focusing on specific Conversions whenever possible and not just all Conversions. Also, as many products experience seasonal shifts in conversion, we recommend comparing year-over-year results whenever possible. Lastly, if you are able to segment your reporting to show Conversions that came as a result of an interaction with your website or campaign updates then you can directly correlate any increase to those changes. Having a year-over-year increase, especially if you can tie the Conversions back to your updates, will absolutely show success.
Whether you’re looking to assess the performance of your upcoming redesign, set benchmarks for ongoing analysis or implement custom analytics on your website, ZAG is ready to help.