STOP nodding and smiling when your web designer presents your site’s analytics and START understanding for improved questions and impressive site growth.

Traffic: The number of people coming to your website – whether new guests or loyal customers.
Measure: It’s tempting to compete with last month . . . resist! From month-to-month, it’s nice to see growth, but variables like holidays and sales make it hard to compare November to December. That’s why it’s important to look at previous year’s reporting and show improvement between February 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Bounce Rate: This metric sounds harsher than what it is. Bounce rate simply indicates the number of one-page visitors to your site. (Aka: they came in on one page and didn’t click to another area of your website.) To make this even more palatable, the industry average is 50%.
Improve: Look at the language or information on your site’s bounciest page and massage it to make it more intriguing, add more interesting imagery and create additional opportunities to inspect other pages on your site through hyperlinks or suggested pages/articles.

Pages/Sessions: The number of pages visited by a guest in a single visit. This is what you hope to turn the “bounce” visitors into by creating more compelling pages.
Measure: A good goal is 2 pages per session. This means that your guests are compelled to take another step and stay a little longer with your brand.

Average Session Duration: This represents that average time that ALL guests combined remain on your website. This is a sticky area for the ego because you want them to stay hours upon hours, pouring over product pages, reading blogs and shop, shop, shopping!
Measure: The reality is that a 2-minute visit is good and a 3-minute visit is great. Consider today’s demand for attention and you’ll see that receiving 120-180 seconds of someone’s focus is a fantastic reward for engaging content and compelling products.

Percent of New Sessions: The number of people coming to your online showroom for the very first time. This is an outstanding unit for understanding the effectiveness of brand awareness campaigns, as 70% of consumers report responding to brand bias.
Measure: Look for a nice mix of new and returning guests. So, a number between 45-75% is a great aim.

Click Thru: This is the number of people who click on your name when you show up in their search results. You can add a layer of the aforementioned customer bias to this, but you also have to give a nod to paid advertising.
Measure: 2% is a nice showing for your efforts.

When looking at your website’s analytics, you can lean on one component 100% of the time. There are different filters to apply in each area, as well as individual pages to inspect, to determine the effectiveness and areas for improvement for your online showroom. However, a baseline understanding of the individual components builds your foundation on a rock.

From this level of understanding, though, it’s essential to remember that analytics are not a silver bullet. They’re simply another tool in your sales kit that helps you understand what your guests are looking for, how they find it and what they do when they find it.

What questions do you have about website analytics for your online showroom or agency? Where do you struggle to understand the importance of analytics? How do you take the information given into account when making changes to your site? Leave a comment below so we can all help grow the home furnishings industry to be the win we all need.