Turning your website into a growth machine and tracking it with ease
Websites are essential for businesses and startups. Apart from hosting information for users, investors and shareholders, it’s one of the main acquisition channels. With pandemic resulting in mass cancellation of events and trade shows, online acquisition channels became the best way to scale fast and across markets.
Website is also one of the most flexible owned channels. You can build as you envision it, without having to mold it to a certain platform (unlike your social media accounts or YouTube).
After letting your creativity run free and providing all valuable information for your users on your website, you’ll want to focus on getting as many eyeballs as possible on it. And this is a big challenge.
You’ll be heavily engaged in improving SEO to help your website rank higher, timely releasing relevant content, running paid campaigns to increase your traffic and monitoring your results. Create, publish, track, repeat.
In this article we’ll cover the main aspects of the entire process. Especially website performance tracking. And how to make it easy for you and your team.
Read on!
Your website core vitals
Infamously over 80% of people browsing the Internet don’t click to the second page with search results. Given that each page of search engine results usually contains 10 organic listings, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for everyone.
Even ranking within the first page plays a huge role with click-through rates falling down from 31.7% for the first position to 9.5% for the fifth position, and only 3.1 to the tens search result. So, the competition is fierce.
If you aim at appearing on top of search results, pushing your website rank will be vital. You can use this free Google Rank Checker tool to see your rankings for any keyword and a website. It will show you where you stand strong and where you need to improve.
To boost your ranking you can follow these SEO rules:
· Do your keywords research to see what your potential users are looking for. Also check your competition – what their key phrases are, and how they use them. Use these keywords in your content too, but avoid over-using. Google will detect and discard such pages.
· Engage in link building – process of establishing hyperlinks within your website (link relevant product pages or templates to your blog articles). And try to place links to your website on other high credibility websites (media, external blogs, partners, social media). High number of quality links will push your website up.
· Generate content that is highly relevant for your audience. You can add pages that cover in detail your use cases or start a blog (a go-to for startups). Here the list of keywords will come in handy. But use them wisely. Excessive repetition will not only push away your website visitors, Google might penalize you for that.
· Use images optimized for speed. Google won’t put heavy, slow to load images in front of users. And generously compliment your images with relevant alt text. Because Google can read it (unlike text on the actual images).
· Keep an eye on your website speed. It is a big ranking factor too. Make sure your website is hosted on a fast reliable server. Forgo bounty of high res images and other visuals thatl take too long to load.
If you’re looking for an effective tool to track your website speed, try our Get Google PageSpeed insights. You can also benchmark your performance versus competitors’.
When organic is not enough
You might be doing a stellar job on SEO and pushing your website to the top of search engines ranking, but organic traffic could still not be enough. Or you can take current growth as an indication of high potential and look to scale. That’s where other channels and paid campaigns come into play.
Performance campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.), paid placements with media, newsletters, collaborations with bloggers and influencers. The choices are vast, the final destination for all this traffic is often still the same – your website.
When running paid campaigns, you’ll want to monitor their effectiveness to see how well they bring you leads, what kind of leads and how well they convert to the users. Most platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads will provide analytics with key performance metrics for you. Media and creators would also generate and share campaign reports based on data from their tools.
But you’ll likely also want to check in your own data source to see all incoming traffic (direct, organic, paid) and analyse what performs best.
Google Analytics is a great platform to monitor your website performance. It is an integral part of most startup toolkits. It’s powerful, feature-rich and built for results. But is it always smooth sailing? Not so much…
There are typically a couple of issues most of marketer needs to solve:
· You will want to share the key insights across your team, but Google Analytics is a tool that takes time and skills to navigate. Not everyone on your team would be able to see the key trends and data they’re interested in at a first glance.
· You don’t necessarily want to give everyone access to Google Analytics. Especially if we’re talking stakeholders, investors or third party collaborators.
Truth is, Google Analytics is a powerful, but a complex tool. The platform can easily get overwhelming for those who aren’t using it every day.
It also doesn’t provide the easiest setup for sharing selective data with both internal and external stakeholders. Many teams often have to create multiple custom reports to share with their team and separate ones to send to your board of directors, investors, and advertisers. Been there, done that?
We feel you! And that’s where Rows spreadsheet comes in.
A new tool to track your website with ease
You can create a Google Analytics dashboard in Rows and share it with the entire team. It will look slick and work well on any device, and you can share it with virtually anyone on your team or external partners.
You can choose what metrics to monitor to focus on the trends and overall performance exactly with the level of details you and your team needs.
Modern design and gorgeous charts that live in a dedicated place will make your website dashboard easy to understand and work with.
Another great function to use is automation. You can set the report to automatically update data with any frequency you need. You can define to run hourly, daily or weekly updates and the spreadsheet will update the data automatically.
Share the dashboard with your team and define access rights. So, anyone on your team (and beyond if needed) can look at it without having the access to your Google Analytics account, and without complexities of the platform.
You can share a private link with the people inside and outside your company who need to see it most. Or you can publish it to the world to appear in Rows Community (the first ever open platform for public spreadsheets). It’s an amazing feature if you’re writing a blog, have your own course or would like to showcase your work to the world.
For more beautiful ways to create streamlined reports to be shared with anyone, be sure to visit our Templates collection or the world’s first public spreadsheets library – built entirely by our awesome community. 🙌
