The one website statistic that most people don't track, but really should

A great question we get asked often by small businesses - in effect, they are asking what they need to track to see if their website is working.

For most small businesses, we would say the four main things they should track to start are:

Monitoring the number of website visitors is essential for evaluating performance, understanding user behaviour, and if your advertising is working. When you launch, it's going to be low but as time goes on your website visitors should increase.

Recognising where your site's visitors come from should guide your marketing efforts. For instance, if Facebook ads perform well, focus there. If your blog gets no visits, explore why it's not working. If you get a lot of visits from LinkedIn, it means that your regular posts are working.

Many small businesses don't keep track of the number of enquiries from their website, like contact form entries etc. This makes it unclear if their site is effective, and If not, they should explore why. Maybe they're not encouraging people to get in touch or the content doesn't match what visitors seek. Are they speaking their customer's language? If they are not getting enquiries, but they get visitors, they need to look at why this is.

Most small business owners look at the top three and then quantity if the website is doing well or not, as they have this idea you need hundreds of enquiries per month with hundreds of thousands of visitors, but in reality, small businesses don’t need that many.

Let's say you have 100 visitors per month and 4 enquiries, that's 4 potential new customers. Over the year if you only convert 1 per month with an average sale of £6,000 - that's not a bad return at all. You can then use this data and look at how you can get more visitors and where to improve your website to get more enquiries. But there is one other thing that is often overlooked….

With that said If you go back through your last 20 enquiries, when did you last follow up? How many times did you follow up? As you could be missing out on a lot of business which is slipping through your fingers.

So the result might be that you have enough enquiries coming from your website, you just haven’t followed up properly and your results are less than you want simply due to the sales process you have in place, or lack of.