[00:00:00] Josh: Hello friends. Welcome into the podcast. This is episode 217. It’s just me here with you with this one and I’m very excited to dive into a topic that has been highly requested.

[00:00:11] Josh: And I know you’re super curious about, and that is how to measure website conversions and results. So I wanted to dedicate a solo episode to this topic. And the reason this is so important is because the, the trick of being a web designer nowadays, is that you don’t wanna be seen as a commodity, meaning anyone can design a website, but the question is, can you design a website that will help your clients grow their business?

[00:00:41] Josh: That is how you get premium clients. That is how you raise your rates. And that is how you build a sustainable six figure web design business. And it really all goes down to the type of results that you get for your clients, with the websites that you build. This also ties perfectly in with a couple episodes we recently did on the podcast because in episode 2 0 9, we talked about.

[00:01:02] Josh: The fact that you don’t luckily have to do all digital marketing services, you just gotta add more value into your websites. And then, uh, just a little while ago, an episode, what was that? Uh, two 12, we talked about how to offer strategy as a, as a website service, but in both of those episodes, I promised you, we talked about conversions.

[00:01:20] Josh: So that’s what we’re gonna get into here. And I actually have 10 tips laid out for you about how to measure your website conversions. Now, a couple important notes before we dive into. These tips are kind of basic. These are things that I’ve implemented as a web designer of over a decade. Things that I kind of learn , uh, some, some ways the hard way I kinda learn to take conversions seriously.

[00:01:42] Josh: So there are some basic principles. Some of these ideas are gonna be like, Oh, well, blah, that’s a simple idea. It’s elementary, but sometimes those easy ideas are easy to overlook as well. So these are the basics of measuring conversions, but we will go deeper moving forward and I’m gonna have a lot more resources coming out for you.

[00:01:59] Josh: In fact, here pretty soon, I’m gonna be bringing on my SEO guru, Michelle bourbon year. To specifically talk about, um, conversions when it comes to tracking and goals. But anyway, that’s beside the point. So these are the basics, but the good thing is the tips I’m about to give you are not going to include paid tools or paid resources, unless I happen to mention something that you.

[00:02:20] Josh: May want to eventually look into or upgrade to a premium account. So these are just basic things you can do on your websites. Um, some, most of these, if there is some sort of premium option, there’s generally like a free way to, to generate a report for conversions. And then you can upgrade eventually. But primarily this is a, like, I’m not gonna be plugging certain tools for this.

[00:02:39] Josh: This is a, a no paid tools type of episode. These are just generic, best practices, ways to measure results. Now, one really important thing before we dive into these 10 tips. The idea of a website conversion and a result needs to be so clear with your clients as to whether the website is actually generating a sale or whether the website is generating somebody to get into the sales funnel.

[00:03:07] Josh: So let me say that again, because this is a really important note. If your website is selling a product or a service via the website, then that’s quite frankly way easier to measure conversions because there’s a sale on the website. If your website is a tool to get somebody into the sales funnel for your client that is going to take different measurement results. And we’ll cover both those scenarios here in this episode.,

[00:03:31] Josh: but just make sure that you and your client are on the same page with what the goal of the website is. Because some clients who have some sort of sales funnel, maybe the website is actually converting them really well, but then maybe their sales team sucks or maybe their, their product needs work.

[00:03:50] Josh: That is a very, very important note. I wanted to make on the offset of this, because you may be doing amazing work with your website and converting people to, to get them through the door, but it is your client’s responsibility to actually sell them if that’s the case. Uh, obviously you can say that in a more tactful way, but I wanted to make sure you knew there’s a very big difference with like an eCommerce site that is selling something via the site versus. Service based type of client where you just wanna get people through the door and then it’s up to the client to actually sell them. So very, very important thing.

1) eComm Sales

[00:04:20] Josh: So that leads me to point number one, we’re gonna start off with a softball and as far as 10 ways to measure, uh, website reversions and con conversions and results, number one easiest thing is online sales. This is particularly true when you’re running any commerce site. So obviously we’re gonna wanna kick it off easy here because eCommerce sites are so easy to track. Like I just mentioned, there’s a difference between selling a product on a website and then getting people through the website to then get in the sales funnel.

[00:04:54] Josh: So with an eCommerce site, you just look at the sales very, very easy. If your client had maybe a previous website with whether you’re using WooCommerce or Shopify or whatever it is, maybe they’re using a tool when. Their sales are like a thousand dollars a month on average, and then you rebuild their website and then you look three months later, and now they’re getting like $5,000 a month on average, that is a five X increase in that I’m sure paid off for the website in the first month. Very easy to measure.

[00:05:25] Josh: And it’s interesting because. Like I said, some of this is like, well, duh, I didn’t really, you know, it’s an elementary idea. It’s a simple 1 0 1 style idea. But when you’re busy doing so many other things in web design, it’s easy to overlook how important it is to measure conversions and results.

[00:05:41] Josh: I’ve had multiple colleagues tell me the most important thing for high paying clients is that they see conversions and results with their website, but you gotta. And this is, I just wanna reiterate this because you gotta have this in your frame of mind, particularly when you’re selling websites, don’t say that you’re just gonna build a website, say that you are going to build a site that helps your client grow their business, and then have a plan to measure what the website is doing for them.

[00:06:08] Josh: Whether this plan is three months out, whether it’s six months out, whether it’s a year out, whether it’s month to month with a hosting and maintenance plan, and you Inc you kind of implement measuring, uh, reports and statistics. There’s a bunch of different ways you can do it. But number one, the easiest way is to just look at the sales. That’s the easy.

[00:06:25] Josh: Now, if you’re doing products that is, that’s the best way to go. It’s the easiest way to go. If it is a service that you’re selling, you can still do that. Like if your client, like, for example, one of my clients did paid workshops for, uh, their, their clientele. And when we launched that in their site, we use WooCommerce as a part of their site and they were able to see like, yeah, we’re getting five signups for this one. We’re getting 10 signups for this one. A lot of those were like $500. So, you know, they make, they may make 2,500 or $5,000 on one workshop.

[00:06:56] Josh: That was awesome. A couple of those paid for their website. That was almost a $10,000 job that I did. So a handful of workshops that they sold through the website covered that, and then it was all profit from there.

[00:07:07] Josh: So that’s another great way to make sure that you show your clients that if they’re selling a product or a service or a workshop, the results through the website, through the sales. Often make up their investment very quickly and then it’s all profit from there. So number one, easy peasy. E-commerce sales.

2) Contact Form Submissions

[00:07:25] Josh: Now, number two, another aspect of measuring website conversions that you can do in any website without complicated or paid tools is contact form submissions. Now this will be something that is more service related and I actually so vividly remember. When the idea of conversions kind of hit me in the head years ago, I met with a local colleague of mine, David, who ran a, an agency called via forge.

[00:07:52] Josh: You can still look them up if you want to go to via forge.com. Um, but we were just having a chat. He was a local colleague of mine. Um, some would say competition. I viewed it as coopetition. I loved chatting with him because he was, he was more of a full service stack, digital marketing agency. And I, I really enjoyed hearing what was working from him at that time.

[00:08:12] Josh: I think I can share. He was, he was making that like, He was making in between like the three to $400,000 range at one point with his agency. And so he was kind of the step ahead of me. So I was asking him about what type of projects he did. And, and then he ended up talking about how they measured client results.

[00:08:29] Josh: And you wanna know how they did it. Through contact form submissions. I, so remember this one conversation where he and his digital marketing gal, we were just having a meeting. And he said to her, like, how many, how, how many, uh, contact forms did this client have with our new website? It was like a 50% increase or something like that.

[00:08:48] Josh: And that’s how he measured it. And it just dawned on me like, wow, it’s that simple? For, particularly for service based businesses, whatever that is, whether it’s like a, a home inspector or an auto mechanic or something that has like request a quote or contact us anything like that, contact form submissions.

[00:09:07] Josh: That is the biggie. That is the surest way to measure conversions because you are gonna get people through the door, ideally through a contact form. Now. The form submissions may be in different categories too. So a general question contact form is very different than a, like get a quote contact form. So if you have a website that has general questions or get a quote, you may want to either consolidate that or just measure the, get a quote form, because if you just measure like questions, that’s not really, that’s not conversion related, that’s just getting more inquiries through, but that doesn’t mean that’s gonna lead to sales necessarily.

[00:09:46] Josh: Now it could, that said I’m gonna contradict myself because you may get a contact form submission in, and then they may actually ask questions about this product or service and then, you know, make a sale. But more often than not, you’re gonna measure some sort of direct, like get a quote form, uh, but either way. Contact form submissions, get a quote, form submissions. Those are the surest way and easiest way to measure website conversions, because you’re actually gonna see how many people, you know, filled this form out and are ready for a sale, or at least went through on the website.

[00:10:18] Josh: Cause again, In this case, if it is on your client to sell, then you, my friend have done your job. You got people to the website, into a funnel, into the contact form. Now it’s your client’s responsibility to close them, but you did your job so well done contact form submissions, easy peasy. I wish somebody would’ve told me that years ago, cuz I would’ve looked at that as far as a, a result to be able to measure for clients.

3) Add “How’d you hear about us” in Contact Form

[00:10:40] Josh: Now while we’re on the idea of contact forms number three, here I, oh gosh, this is such a gold one. That is to add a, how did you hear about us field in the contact form? And you could do this via the, get a quote or a general contact form for sure. But this is so, so valuable because you can guess it. You want to know where people came from and how they heard about you.

[00:11:06] Josh: This is really important if you’re doing SEO or if you’re do, or if your client is doing like multiple forms of marketing. When I added this in my contact form and in transit studios, I was amazed at how many people said Google search. Because at that time, my business was primarily an almost completely referral based.

[00:11:28] Josh: As I started to put more projects out there and as my agency name and just, my name got out there, particularly here locally in Columbus, Ohio, but even abroad people started to just find me via Google or they would look at a site I design and then they would Google me, or people would often Google web design, Columbus, Ohio web designer, Columbus, Ohio, and later on, people would eventually Google WordPress web designer.

[00:11:51] Josh: If they were more long phrase, uh, long tail keyword type of searches. How do, how would I have known where they came from? If I didn’t have some sort of how you hear about a section or field in a contact form so that my friends is another good one. Let’s say, for example, you’re doing some SEO work and then you add that field that they have to, to fill out, like, how’d you hear about us now?

[00:12:14] Josh: You could make it optional, but I like making that required because it is the surest way to measure results for the work you’re doing. Let’s say your client is doing social media, but you’re just doing. SEO work. And then they say, I Googled you or whatever it is, that is the service way to say, Hey, you had, you know, 10 contact form submissions here.

[00:12:34] Josh: And four of them said they Googled you. So 40% of the leads that we sent your way through the website this month came from our SEO work. Are you seeing how impactful that is just having a field in your contact form that says, how’d you hear about us that can help you measure the work that you are doing.

[00:12:53] Josh: And it’s also not going to confuse the other marketing efforts that your client might be doing, which we are gonna talk about here, because that it does get muddy. It’s difficult sometimes to measure website conversions particularly. All right let me just real quick I’ll just say it here. We’ll come back to this, but let’s say your, your client prefers to get a phone call.

[00:13:11] Josh: I had this happen, particularly with some home inspectors that I worked with. They all prefer to just get phone calls and. It was kind of hard sometimes to measure the website results because it, they may not even go through the contact form. They may go to the website, they, it may convert them, but then what’s the call to action. They call.

[00:13:27] Josh: So we’ll, we’ll get back to that, but it, it is kind of difficult, which is why in the case of a contact form, it’s so beneficial to have a how’d you hear about us now? You could follow that up as a, as a side. You could follow that up when like you could talk to the client about their sales team asking about like, how did you hear about us?

[00:13:45] Josh: Or if you work with a client, follow up with a review process that says, how did you originally hear about us? That’s always an option as well, gets a little more intricate, but I would say to start, add a how’d you hear about us field in your contact form, your contact form and your clients, and then you can google, you can add all the different places that you’re marketing potentially, or you could also add like sites or referrals or things like.

4) Goals & Campaigns UTM’s

[00:14:10] Josh: Now number four, this is a biggie that again requires a little deeper dive into which I am really excited to, to dive into this more with you. Again, I mentioned in the outset of this, my colleague, Michelle Bourbonierre who is my personal SEO guru, uh, come to find out.

[00:14:27] Josh: She, she knows quite a bit about goals and tracking, particularly when it comes to SEO results. So I’m gonna bring her onto the podcast soon. We’re gonna talk about this more in depth, but number four is click throughs with. Goals or tracking. And you’ll often hear this when you get into the, uh, tracking world, you’ll hear UTMs, and these are links that basically track any sort of conversion goal that you have set.

[00:14:54] Josh: Now, these, these could be with ads, they could be with free links. Um, whatever you’re doing, you’re gonna generally have some sort of like UTM tracker. Uh, I actually didn’t know what that meant. So I looked it up. I found out today that it stands for a urchin tracking module. If you would know what that means more enlighten me.

[00:15:15] Josh: Leave a comment on this podcast episode at Josh hall, doco slash two seven. I’d love to know a little more about that without personally having to read too much myself anyway, UTM tracking that is going to, to come up a lot. As you take a deeper dive into setting up a goal. Now setting up a goal what the heck does that mean, Josh?

[00:15:33] Josh: Great question. There’s a couple different ways you can do this. There’s actually a variety of different ways, depending on whether, whether you’re using just a link that you want people to sign up for, whether you’re running an ad through social media that gets people through the door. Um, in which case you can set up goals through like Bitly, which we’ll talk about next, or you can set up a goal through analytics.

[00:15:55] Josh: Now, if you’ve been with you for a while, you’ve probably heard me talking about the fact that I switched my analytics to fathom. Uh, I do have an affiliate link for that. If you, if you’re interested in checking that out, is Josh hall doco slash fathom. Those are GDR compliant, GDRP compliant, um, analytics.

[00:16:14] Josh: So it’s a little bit different than Google analytics. Now Google analytics is about to roll out GA four. Next year at the time of recording this, I have a feeling they’re gonna somehow make it compliant, but I just chose to go with fathom just cuz I, I really enjoyed the interface. It’s like a cleaner version of Google analytics, but I say that to say, you can set up goals in tracking.

[00:16:35] Josh: Goals and conversions and campaigns in those tools. Now I’m gonna put some resources for you for each one of those. There’s actually my gosh, you could just search how to set up a goal in Google analytics and you’ll have a bazillion resources. I don’t personally know of a colleague with a, an ideal resource for that.

[00:16:54] Josh: So, um, we’ll put a couple links into the show notes again@joshhall.co slash two seven for you, but you can just Google how to. Goals into Google analytics and tho you’ll have plenty of results to give you the basics of that, particularly because GA four is rolling out. I’ve never used GA four. I don’t know exactly how to do it in there.

[00:17:13] Josh: So there will be some resources for you, but with fathom, I am gonna, uh, direct you to a, uh, tutorial that I actually use to help me set up a couple goals. So that’ll be again, the show notes@joshhall.co slash two seven, where there’ll be some additional resources to help you with setting up goals and campaigns, because these are literally the, like, you can see the clicks and you can see where people end up and a, a secondary note on this.

[00:17:39] Josh: It’s really, really common that your goal page is not gonna be the page or an actual button itself. It’s gonna be on a confirmation page because for example, if you want people to sign up for a webinar or sign up for a workshop, you’ll likely, and hopefully you have like a thank you page or a confirmation page that says, got it.

[00:18:00] Josh: Your C is registered, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what to expect. That is generally where you’ll see confirmation pages. You can, and this is often found with like Facebook ads. For example, when I, I ran some Facebook ads, uh, for a little while. And, uh, my awesome social media guy, Kevin helped me create some of these UTMs, these tracking modules.

[00:18:22] Josh: And what we would do is often put ’em on a certain page. And Kevin actually took an interesting approach, which I think is pretty common in social media with ads where you’ll have a landing page that may be for like, Just, you know, basic traffic, but then you’ll have a separate landing page that is the exact same page, but it is only the page that traffic gets sent to via your ad campaign.

[00:18:46] Josh: So for example, if my, if my ideal page was like, you know, new workshop, I would have new workshop as the main link, but then Kevin would have a page that is SM new workshop as in social media. And then all the ads point to that social media page. So this is an interesting tactic because you could technically create like a more detailed type of click through or conversion page.

[00:19:12] Josh: So you can have your main page that may be just basic Google traffic and stuff like that. But then you’ll have a page that may even be hidden. That is specifically for ads that way, cuz oh, what a man, this is really important, especially when it comes to people, investing in ads. YouTube ads, Google ads, social media ads, whatever they wanna make sure they’re not kind of muddying in traffic with organic stuff.

[00:19:36] Josh: So I don’t even have this written down, but it’s a really important note to potentially have two different conversion type pages, one for just organic referral traffic and then one for ad traffic. So there you go. That’s a little caveat and a little additional bonus point to the idea of these goals or campaigns.

[00:19:54] Josh: Um, so again, that’s just kind of the high level. At goals and campaigns, how you set those up will be very dependent on what tools you use, particularly in the analytics world. If you’re using Google analytics or fathom, uh, we’ll have some links for you at the show notes for this episode. But really, really important points when it comes to clickthroughs and goals.

5) Onsite Pretty Link or Bitly Link

[00:20:14] Josh: Now the next handful of points here are some high level stuff. Some of this is, um, it’s kind of interesting, cuz it’s gonna be a, a per case basis, but while we’re talking about these clickthroughs and goal pages, there’s a couple tools that will make your clickthroughs really be. And that is to use a link shortener.

[00:20:34] Josh: There’s a couple link shorteners that I love the most common one is Bitly. You’ve likely seen these links on social media and out there in the world where it’s like B I dot Ellie Bitly, uh, or L Y excuse me. These Bitly links. The cool thing about Bitly is there is a free account. That’s really powerful, but if you go pro there’s all sorts of tracking, it is kind of like dipping your toe into the analytics analytics world, because it gives you pretty detailed tracking.

[00:21:01] Josh: If you ever work with a social media, digital marketing agency, or if you’ve been in that world, it’s very likely you’ve been using Bitly for a long time. But if you’re just from the design world or business world, you may be like, I don’t even know what those links are. What, like I see this weird link that starts with a BT dot L Y what, what is this? It is a way to track conversions through clicks and you can get pretty detailed with that.

[00:21:25] Josh: Now there’s another. Option and tool for short links that I personally love. And, and I do use both, but that is the plugin pretty links. Pretty links is awesome because you can take a long link and you can make a pretty link. This is just for WordPress specific. I’m not sure if there’s, I’m sure there’s other tools out there for other builders, but as a WordPress guy, I love pretty links.

[00:21:48] Josh: Like, for example, I recently hosted a, uh, kind of a Q and a session webinar about accessibility. I did it through zoom. Now that zoom link is like horrendous to say, I, of course, I’m not gonna say like, you know, go to zoom.us dot L one three H two. Of course. I’m not gonna say that. But what I did is with the free version of pretty links, I set up Josh hall.co/webinar, and then you can put the long link as your pretty. In there. And that way I can just say, go to Josh hall, doco slash webinar. That’ll zip you over there. Um,

[00:22:20] Josh: I, I have a ton of these and actually every podcast episode has a pretty linked with it because in this episode, Josh hall.co/two seven. If you go there, you’ll notice the URL is actually long URL, but my awesome VA cam sets up a pretty link for you. As a listener to make it easy, to get all the show notes and resources all by using the free version of pretty links. I’m actually about to upgrade to pro though, because number one, I wanna support them. Number two, they have you guessed it. More advanced tracking.

[00:22:51] Josh: So you can actually use pretty links to look at like how many clicks you got on that link. Now, again, you may wanna have additional tracking on like a confirmation page because just because somebody clicks a link for a sign up does not mean that they actually sign up very, very important difference.

[00:23:11] Josh: So for example, If you’re running an ad campaign, or if you’re making a landing page for a lead generator for your client and you use a pretty link and you say, look, you got like 200 links or 200 clicks, but they say, well, only 10 people sign up. Then it’s like, oh shoot. Yeah, that’s a different style of measurement.

[00:23:28] Josh: So what, in that case, what’s interesting about whether you’re using Bitly or pretty links is that you may see the initial funnel to like get people over to the page is doing pretty well, but you may need to do work on the actual page itself to help conversions. That’s why more often than not, when you’re measuring website results and conversions you’ll generally have two or three layers of conversions.

[00:23:54] Josh: You’ll have like the first link that is any sort of ad. Blog post or whatever it is that gets people to a landing page. You’ll have the actual submission on the landing page. And then you’ll have some sort of like confirmation, ideally, sometimes all three of those may have their own links. And it’s a great way to measure, you know, the, the kind of the top of the funnel, the middle part and the back end.

[00:24:15] Josh: And then if you’re, it’s a, if it’s a service based thing, like for example, if I do a live workshop, I may do an ad on social media that gets people to the landing page to sign up for the workshop. Then I’ll have a actual, you know, confirmation and then I’ll host the actual workshop. But then I may have one layer back of the people who like purchased a course or a program on the back end of the workshop.

[00:24:37] Josh: So again, Just heads up when you’re measuring conversions and you might wanna talk to your clients about this. It may be like three different levels or four different levels of things that you wanna measure not to overwhelm you or scare you. Uh, but this can actually pre be pretty cool because you’re gonna look like a rock star with your clients when you start talking about this and they’ll be like, whoa, I didn’t even think about that. I just thought about getting clicks to a.

6) Bounce Rate

[00:24:58] Josh: Now speaking of traffic on a website, these last few points are more around just basic website, uh, and SEO kind of stuff. Number six, here, you can look at your bounce rate, the beautiful thing, whether you’re using Google analytics or like with myself using fathom it’s so, so easy to measure bounce rate on a website, no matter what tool you’re using, which essentially if you’re not sure what bounce rate means, it means that people.

[00:25:24] Josh: Bounce from your website. It means that people go onto a page, maybe your homepage, maybe a landing page, and they leave without doing any action. Now, the tricky thing about measuring bounce rate kind of goes back to a point. I talked a little bit about, uh, ago or a little bit ago about if I saying that a few times, and that is phone calls because I had a lot of clients who were local businesses who wanted phone calls.

[00:25:48] Josh: So bounce rate was not a metric that I used to measure conversions. Like I said, these are gonna be a per case basis because if my client’s goal was to get a phone call, then technically their bounce rate on a contact page may be a hundred percent. So we don’t necessarily look for like bounce rate on a contact page if they’re wanting a phone call because they’re gonna call ideally, and then they’re gonna leave the page.

[00:26:14] Josh: So that’s a bounce. Now if your goal for your client is to get a quote through a contact form. Then bounce rate is very important because if that get a quote page or that contact page is like, you know, 97% bounce rate that’s Ooh, that means 97 people out of a hundred are leaving without, you know, getting a quote.

[00:26:35] Josh: So we need to do some work to get that. There’s a lot of debate on ideal bounce rates. I think it very much depends on what page they’re on, on your website and what the funnel looks like. Like I have some pages that I don’t care if it’s a big bounce rate because they don’t need to go any further or like if it’s a registration page or whatever it is, maybe it’s taking a little differently or more seriously.

[00:26:58] Josh: The homepage of my website is really important. Um, as of right now, I’ve got my bounce rate to in, in the 30% tile on my homepage, which is a huge plus from where it was a few years back that helped with good messaging and just a better navigation and stuff, because I want people, if they go to my homepage to keep on going, I want them to find the right resource.

[00:27:20] Josh: They say, if you can get your bounce rate under 40, 30 to 40% on your homepage, that’s pretty good. I would back that up as well, but again, different pages are gonna be different with how you measure that. So bounce rate though is a really easy metric to look at with Google analytics or fathom, because you can just say, Hey.

[00:27:36] Josh: This landing page that we set up for you, like, you know, 70% of the people are moving forward or they’re taking more action on your websites. That’s really good. Again, just be aware of the phone call clients, because that’s gonna mess up the bounce rate and exit rate situation when you’re reg or when you’re viewing, uh, analytics.

7) Average Time on Site/Page

[00:27:54] Josh: Now, number seven, similarly, when it comes to looking at the traffic on the website, I’m gonna share with you a key that is so underrated in business today in the online world. And I look at this metric across not only my website, but also all my videos. You can look at this with podcasting, although podcast, uh, looks at downloads a little bit differently.

[00:28:17] Josh: I don’t even know if, if there’s measuring tools for this on podcast, but it’s primarily with videos and, and websites, but that is average time on site or average time on a page. Average time spent is one of the most important currencies you can have in the online world. I can’t believe not more people talk about this.

[00:28:37] Josh: I am like super passionate about maybe talking about this in, in more detail, because when I focus on something, whether it’s a video, a, a blog post or whatever it is, average time is one of the key metrics I look at cuz you don’t want people to go on your site real quick and. And Google looks at this Google likes sites that keep people on there.

[00:29:00] Josh: Now, if your website is more of a brochure, like scan, pretty quick type of website, and there’s not any like meat in the content, then again, like I said, per case basis, average time may not be a huge metric to look at however, If your site has blog posts and content that you or your client’s site, that you wanna keep people on.

[00:29:21] Josh: And maybe there’s like a video that you wanna keep people on. It’s really, really important. And that is something that you can show your clients. You can say, like, you know, previous to this, it looks like your average time on your site as a whole was like 30 seconds. People were just getting on there and getting off pretty quick.

[00:29:35] Josh: Well, now it’s at like two minutes. People are actually engaging with the site longer or looking at different services because average time can be. It can be tracked per page or it can be track. By your site as a whole, you can do this with, with the tool that I recommend fathom or with Google analytics as well.

[00:29:53] Josh: And you could look like that’s a great metric. You could say, look, if you had Google analytics on your site previous to us doing your design, and it was 30 seconds, that means people probably went on your homepage and maybe one of their service page and got off if they didn’t move forward. But now look at it.

[00:30:09] Josh: Now they’re looking at like five or six different pages, maybe they’re on a blog post, then another blog. Maybe they’re going to your team page and then going to a, get a quote page or contact page. Maybe they’re watching a video suddenly that duration may be two or three minutes as opposed to 30 seconds. That’s so valuable. Average time spent on a page or a site as a whole big time metric to be able to utilize with helping your clients measure their website traffic. Uh,

8) Keyword Research/SEO Rankings

[00:30:36] Josh: the next one kinda similar to. It’s it’s offsite, but it definitely, uh, contributes to this number eight. We’ll get to the last couple here. Uh, again, shocker, I thought this was gonna be a 10 minute episode. We’re already at a half an hour, but, uh, have you been moving for a while? This is no surprise, but how fun is this to dive into this in detail? Right. I hope you’re having a good time. I’m having a good time sharing what I’ve learned with this stuff.

[00:30:57] Josh: Uh, but number eight, where were we? Keyword research. Keyword research and SEO rankings. So th this is one of those things where, like I mentioned, you could do things for free. In fact, I have a free tutorial on how to do keyword research for free. If you’d like to do that, just Google, how to do keyword research for free Josh hall, you’ll find my YouTube video.

[00:31:16] Josh: Um, but you can also track that with your SEO rankings. This is where I mention there’s free ways to do this, and there is paid tools to do. I use managed WP to manage websites and update plugins. The cool thing about manage is that they have an SEO option now. Well, they’ve had it for a while and you can do basic keyword rankings and SEO reports.

[00:31:37] Josh: So really, really beneficial, very low cost. Now we’ve talked a lot about SEO on the podcast. So I’m not gonna dive. I’m not gonna rehash all that, but there’s a bazillion tools out there, including seom rush ORFs to do really advanced SEO ranking and keyword research. But the other thing you can do is just do a good old fashion free Google search.

[00:32:00] Josh: Google your clients a few months after you launch their website and or better yet do one before you launch their website. See where they are. Maybe they’re page, like maybe they’re on page three for their ideal service. And then three months later, do another Google search. Do the same one if you want.

[00:32:17] Josh: And then you can show them. Whoa, you’re on page one. Now maybe you’re at the bottom or maybe you’re on page two and we’re like making progress. Worst case scenario, maybe they were on page 50 and now they’re on page, you know, 10 that is still a huge boost. And that can be as easy as a free version to just do a Google search on their keyword or their ideal service before you go live.

[00:32:38] Josh: And then a few months after I would definitely give it a few months because Google takes a little while. Now you don’t have to wait three months. I would check like monthly look at where you’re at a month later, two months later, and a few months later. And then you’ll likely see a lot of big changes as long as you build a solid SEO framework for your website.

[00:32:57] Josh: So number eight keyword research. Now that is a whole nother topic. Measuring results with SEO. That is a, a whole nother topic. Um, but the, the, the high level of it, you could do some basic keyword research with just good old fashioned Googling. And those are rankings that you can share with your clients, uh, or results.

[00:33:14] Josh: Excuse me, based off their rankings, you can share with your clients again, free, easy, you know, high level stuff. You can get wild and do really advanced rankings. If you’re, if you’re working with an SEO person, if you’re doing, uh, advanced keyword research yourself or SEO rankings yourself. Just use Google for free. That’s the, the easy, free way to go.

9) Lead Generation Sign-ups (if Applicable)

[00:33:33] Josh: Last couple number nine. This is a really easy one. If your client wants some sort of email lead generator, or if they have like a, a workshop or a webinar, just track their signups. Now you could do this practically going back to point number four, with like goals and campaigns and these UTM tracking codes.

[00:33:52] Josh: But you can also just look at how many signups they. So if your client is launching a live webinar and you’re helping out with that, and you have access to their CRM, their email platform, and you’re creating a lead generator on the site, if they say I’d love to get 50 people to this webinar, and then they get 75 signups, boom, you just increase, you just overshot that goal.

[00:34:15] Josh: And. But that is an easy way to look at if something has worked and it’s easy to track, cuz you just literally look at the signups, very similar to contact form submissions and e-commerce sales except signups. Generally the value in that is you get an email, you get an email specifically that is like targeted to something, to an e-book, to a webinar, to a masterclass, to a free training, to a challenge, whatever it is.

[00:34:41] Josh: Signups easy to track. I know a lot of you have done this, but maybe you haven’t thought about looking at your signups as a metric to, to see if the website is working. But again, just remember, just because you get somebody to sign up for something, it doesn’t mean that your client is gonna understand that the website is working. If they need to sell, they may, the impetus may be on them for them to actually sell and convert. But again, you, you got signups, you got 75 signups, say one to 50. Well done. My friend, you did your job. So make sure you relay that to the client.

10) Overall Business Sales (if Constantly Talking With Client)

[00:35:12] Josh: And then number 10, lastly, really quick, you can’t, this is, this is a, a tricky one, but if you look at overall business sales, you can do this as far as when you launched your web, the, the new website for a client now.

[00:35:27] Josh: This is generally gonna be with a client that you have a little bit of a deeper relationship with, who is likely gonna be on your hosting and maintenance plan and is often gonna be somebody you’ll probably do like a quarterly strategy call with or something like that. This is something I talk about in my maintenance plan course, where if offer a higher tier maintenance plan than you can actually get with your clients monthly or quarterly or annually B annually, and you can talk about just the business growth in general.

[00:35:56] Josh: And then if you see that their business is growing after you launch their new website, chances are the new website contributed to that. Now all of the things we’ve talked about, you can utilize to help measure that. But one thing I would say is you wanna look for the commonalities when it comes to like your client succeeding and the, the efforts that you’re doing, because there are some things that are gonna work pretty well.

[00:36:19] Josh: And there are some things that may not work that. As far as measuring. Um, and it’s, this is one of those things where, like, I remember we, okay we were talking about home inspectors for, for a, for a little bit a while ago. Um, I had one home inspector that we designed his new site for, and his business grew dramatically like the year or two after we designed his new site now, is that growth 100% solely because of the work that me and my team did for them.

[00:36:48] Josh: Uh, absolutely. No, I’m just kidding. Probab, there’s probably a lot of factors to it, but I have no doubt that the new website that we designed for him and he had his SEO in this case, rankings like blown apart because he had his neighbor build a WordPress site and his neighbor, he didn’t know anything about SEO.

[00:37:07] Josh: He just knew how to design a nice site and completely. Killed his SEO stuff. So we had to rebuild his SEO presence essentially. And I have no doubt, a lot of his growth and a lot of the progress we we made in those couple of years were contributed to this new website. So I had to talk to him about that because he was unfortunately a client who was a little bit flighty and like he’s known to kind of churn through marketing agencies and marketing people.

[00:37:29] Josh: So I had to let him know, first of all, from the SEO perspective, it’s gonna take some time to grow this, but look like we did SEO for, I think a year and a half with him like advanced SEO service. And I had hired that out and we did reports and we’re like, look, you are literally making progress. You’re going from like page 10 to page seven, the next month after that you’re on page five.

[00:37:49] Josh: That is progress. So I was able to, to keep him for a long time as a high paying client, because I, and I kind of had to show him, look, I know it, it may not think it’s like translating exactly, but your business is grow. And no doubt. Look at the stuff that’s going on on the website. Bless his contact form submissions went up now.

[00:38:07] Josh: He was in one case, uh, he was somebody who liked getting the calls. So again, it goes back to the trickiness of measuring that. But I told him like, when you’re talking with leads and people who come, who come through the door or call you, ask them how they got to your business. And we did find out that the website was making a huge impact because it was getting a lot of traffic and people were checking it.

[00:38:28] Josh: So in short, you can look at overall business sales for the clients that you are really more like in touch with. And in depth with generally, you’re gonna be doing some sort of strategy session with them. This is where I mentioned the beginning. You can also plan this out to like have a results based service that is three months or six months after, or even a year after.

[00:38:51] Josh: Ideally that’s just linked in with a higher tier hosting and maintenance plan, but that’s what makes your services so valuable. And that’s what will make you not a commodity as a web designer, because you’re not just trying to build a pretty site and get out of there and take their money and run. You are interested in growing your client’s business.

[00:39:08] Josh: And the way you do that is to make sure your website is converting and you measure the results. So it’s as simple as. So there you go, guys, those are the, those are 10 ways to measure website, conversions and results. There’s a lot of more, there’s a, there’s a lot of different options though. In fact, I wanna hear from you, if you feel like there is one that was so glaringly missed or that you would love to add to this list.

[00:39:30] Josh: Again, these are not like the only 10 or a top 10. These are just 10 that I’ve done, that my students are. And then I’ve seen work well without having to like purchase expensive conversion tools. And I do wanna say there’s options out there. You can, 100% invest in a service that will help with this, but those 10 tips are, are the easiest way to go about it.

[00:39:49] Josh: Let’s recap real quick. Shall we? Number one? Sales e-commerce sales in particular, easy PS and a. Number two contact form submissions or, uh, any sort of like get a quote form submissions where it’s a good quality lead that obviously came through the website. Number three, add that how you heard about us field in those contact forms to help show where that traffic came from.

[00:40:11] Josh: Number four goals or conversions, those UTMs, those tracking codes, which you can do and Google analytics and fat. Uh, and again, there’s a lot of different ways to get more in depth with those, but just a simple goal or, or conversion metric that you wanna set up to measure your traffic and clicks number.

[00:40:28] Josh: Use a pretty link or a Bitly link to create a short link that can be tracked. And those will often feed into the goals. Really easy. Number six bounce rate, look at your bounce rate. That is such an underutilized metric to show people like, listen, this new design is helping people stay on the site and they’re not leaving so quick.

[00:40:46] Josh: That is a huge benefit that ties into number seven, average time spent on a page or a site, which what did I say earlier? It is the. Underrated metric and currency online, average time starting to rhyme now. Number eight, look at your SEO rankings. You can do keyword research advanced if you want, or just use trustee old Google and just do it before and after on SEO rankings, easy peasy.

[00:41:08] Josh: Number nine, lead generator signups, particularly for some sort of email. Sign up for a value add, and then look at the overall business sales last one, uh, and then look at the commonalities of what you’re doing on the website and see how that all, all helps. Sometimes clients aren’t gonna realize how valuable.

[00:41:26] Josh: Your work is until you say, look, your boot, your, your SEO growth is like, it’s look, look at your rankings. It’s growing, we’ve sold more t-shirts or whatever you’re doing. Our contact form submissions have gone up 50%. Um, you’re getting more clickthroughs your bounce rate is much better. People are spending more time on your site.

[00:41:44] Josh: Boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom. We just covered like most of the list that I just covered. That’s how you measure website conversions and results. So there you go. My friends, I hope this has helped again. We’re just scratching the surface. Keep an eye out for more researches or researches more resources, uh, to dive in further into conversions and results because I want to help you get higher paying jobs, better clients, and they are gonna want results.

[00:42:09] Josh: But you gotta measure ’em so I hope this helps. All right. Leave me a comment. If you have again, if you have one that you’re like, oh Josh, you should definitely add this to the last, go to Jo. Go to my pretty link. Josh hall.co/ 2, 1 7. Leave me a comment. I read all the comments on my podcast episodes. I would love to hear from you.

[00:42:26] Josh: Thanks for listening. I hope this helped and I’ll catch you on the next episode.