Are you familiar with who’s visiting your website? The primary goal of your website is to educate and convert visitors into prospects.
Your website is your 24-hour salesperson; it won’t ask for time off, bonuses or ever get sick! This digital content hub should be a resource for prospects (and clients) to gather information, conduct research, contact you and even compare you to the competition. If your website is lacking in any key area, you run the risk of being viewed as outdated, unimportant and even replaceable in the eyes of your prospects and clients.
An informative and high-performing website does not have to be expensive or difficult to manage. A good template—with solid messaging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)– and an easy to use content management system can go a long way in building a strong web presence.
Once your site is up and running, one of the most important ways to keep users engaged and repeatedly returning is by adding content regularly to your site. At Carson Institutional Alliance, we recommend advisors use blog posts, market commentaries, videos, fact sheets, infographics and white papers as ways to add information-rich content that will attract new leads as well as support and communicate with existing clients.
After building a strong website and creating content, it is important to ask yourself a few questions:
- How many users are viewing my website?
- What pages are they spending most of their time on?
- How long are users staying on my website?
- What locations are users coming from?
- How did they get to my website?
Google Analytics provides a free tool available for businesses to analyze website traffic and performance. Not only does it allow you to answer the above questions, but it provides an audience overview of who, where and how users are behaving on your website. It provides the real-time measurement of your 24-hour salesperson’s effectiveness!
Using Google Analytics for Financial Advisors
To create a free account login to (https://www.google.com/analytics) using an existing google account or create your own, something like (FirmNameAnalytics)@gmail.com is often easy to remember. Once you are in your account, you will be prompted to add the source code to your website, this is something your web developer or website support team can easily help you with if you aren’t sure how.
Once your analytics are up and running, return to the homepage of Google Analytics to begin tracking your data. There are seven main numbers you want to pay attention to.
(Pro Tip: if you hover over titles on the Google Analytics dashboard a box will appear with definitions of all of the terms, like above)
Engagement
- Bounce Rate – The percentage of single-page site visits
The lower your bounce rate the better, but too low likely means something is not working properly on your website.- 0%-25% – Something is likely broken
- 26%-40% – Excellent
- 41%-55% – average
- 6%-70% – higher than average
- 71%+ – Something is likely broken
- Pages per Session – An average of the number of pages viewed during a visit on your site
The unofficial industry standard is two pages per session – but the higher the number, the better. It means visitors are sticking around your site longer increasing your chances of converting the lead to a client. - Average Session Duration – Average length of all site visits combined
This metric takes the average time spent on page 1, plus page 2, and page 3, etc. and finds the average total time spent on your website by a particular visitor. A good session duration typically ranges from 1 minute 30 seconds to 5 minutes. This statistic can be very helpful but does have some flaws. For example, if a user is directed away from your site to view a PDF, news article or other piece of information their session duration is cut off as soon as they navigate away from your page.
Acquisition
- Traffic – the number of visits and visitors to your website reported as sessions and users
The more traffic the better, but getting your web traffic about 250 per month will allow you to run outreach and retargeting ads using Google Adwords.
Percent of New Sessions – An average percentage of first time visits to your site
A range of 30%-65% is a good target range for this metric. You want your number to be higher than 25% to continue to add new visitors to your funnel, however if your number is over 70% you are only generating new traffic and not retaining any of your old visitors.
- Click Through Rate – The percentage of clicks resulting from a search impression
Industry average is 2%. Click through rates are a tricky metric, while they track how many visitors are coming from a particular source they do not track all sources. For example, the click-through rate on Google Analytics is determining what percentage of your visitors are searching your firm name in google and then clicking on your website. A high click-through rate might be good for organic searches, but as you add advertisements and other sources that organic click-through rate will drop.
Goals
- Conversions – The quantifiable measurement of expected or desired site outcomes, reported as goal completions and conversion rate
Industry standard is 2%. Google analytics has some very powerful goal setting and tracking tools for power users, conversion tracking is one of those tools. You can set and track conversion goals on specific campaigns including retargeting and outreach ads. Your conversion rates should be similar to your sites click-through rate.
Staying up to date on industry trends, changes in Googles tracking algorithms and the important Google Analytics stats on your website are all critical to make sure your 24-hour salesperson is doing the best possible job for your firm. At Carson Institutional Alliance, our marketing team monitors Google Analytics for all of our Alliance Partners’ websites. We can monitor trends and make recommendations to optimize performance, so that their firm is truly benefitting from their web presence.
Do you know who’s visiting your website? Are you continually updating content you share via blogs, newsletters and postings? Share your thoughts, questions and tips by using the hashtag #WebsiteAnalytics and tagging @CarsonAlliance.
Sources: https://www.spinutech.com/blog/digital-marketing/7-website-analytics-that-matter-most/
https://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics/
https://jimmydata.com/blog/session-duration-calculated-google-analytics/
For advisor use only. Not intended for client distribution.
