WEB METRIC: PAGE VISITS

Peter Drucker is attributed with saying "you can't improve what you can't measure". There can be no truer words in the world of marketing. No matter how good you think your marketing strategy is there'll always be room for improvement. Even if you're at the top of your respective industry, resting on your laurels is a sure way to lost customers, market share and eventually impact your profit margin.

So what's to keep you at the top of your game? Data, data and even more data!

Compiling and understanding data related to your customers and their behaviour is as essential to your success as the products or services you offer. This is even more so if you operate in the digital realm. Even though, websites may now be considered a 'traditional' tool for business interaction, with the explosion of social media, websites remain a critical way to engage with your customers. Case and point, leading online retailer Amazon or streaming giant Netflix. They both have very successful apps and a strong social media presence, but neither one has removed their website as an additional medium for interacting with their customers. Could it be that data, has proven that their websites are still crucial to their operations?

How can data be used in relation to a website? Simple, data comes in the form of web metrics. According to Google, web metrics is defined as, a variety of measurements made on a given website in order to better track its performance and statistics." Mastery of this key feature will aid your business in growing from strength to strength. 

Page visits is one such metric your business may wish to track. A page visit means that a visitor reached your page from an external source. It could be that utilisation of a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing was used and your website or blog came up, resulting in a page visit. Or visitors could input your url taking them directly to your site. This would also count as page visits. 

A page visit is considered one of the four foundational metrics of web analytics. If you are a homeowner, you would understand that your home started with the building of your house. A house can only start with a foundation, from which all other elements are erected. Building a house doesn't start with the electrics, as this is among the final stages of the building process. So too, your house did not become your home until furnishings were added, you moved in and personalised it to match your unique style. Even if you bought your house furnished, that was the foundation. You then built on this, making it your own. All things must start with a foundation, web metrics is therefore no different.

Being able to track page visits will allow you to know the count of persons visiting the different pages on your site and which external sources are leading visitors to these pages. Why is this important? Understanding this, will enable you to better target and/or adjust your marketing messages either to improve or increase this metric. At the end of the day, a business' main goal is to attract customers and retain them. Analysis of visits to your page is fundamental to achieving this. 

Until next time, I'll leave you with this HubSpot blog that shares insights into this metric: https://tinyurl.com/57z32bns