This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
What can you learn from your website analytics? You know, your statistics. There's a way if you have a website to go and look and see how many people are visiting, where they're coming from, what their behavior is, which pages are working more than others, which search terms are most effective. There's just so much data out there, but of course, so much data can be overwhelming. So when you're a side hustler, when you're setting up your first website, what do you actually want to focus on?
And by the way, thank you for tuning into Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. We're going to answer listener questions from entrepreneurs, side hustlers, all kinds of interesting people around the world. Today, we've got Melody in Charlotte. She runs a shop selling, I believe, handmade candles.
So she's looking at these website analytics and is like, what do I actually need to pay attention to? There's lots of fancy graphs and charts and numbers, but what really matters? You know, we could also call this episode the key metrics every online shop owner should know, and not just online shop, but really any kind of website, any kind of web presence. Then there are a couple of things you can focus on that make all the difference. I'll tell you about them in this episode.
Detailed question and my answer coming right up. Hi, I'm Melody from Charlotte. I own an online shop selling handmade candles and I came across your podcast while searching for e-commerce. So I've started looking at my website analytics, but honestly, I don't know what I'm supposed to be paying attention to. There's all this data like page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, and I'm not sure what it's telling me or how to use it to make better decisions.
What should I focus on and how can my analytics actually help me grow my business? Hey, Melody, I hear you. Website analytics can feel overwhelming when you look in, you know, you log into the platform and you see like all this stuff. But the good news is you really do not need to focus on everything. Just ignore most of those tabs, most of those shiny options.
If your analytics software is trying to upsell you on anything, you probably don't need it. You really just want to notice a couple of key metrics that tell you how visitors are behaving and how that impacts your sales. Okay, so here is what I recommend. Number one, start with conversion rate. Okay, this is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action and the action could be making a purchase, but it could also be signing up for your email list or otherwise fulfilling any kind of action, right?
Like you might have heard of call to action or CTA, whatever action you're trying to get people to take, what is the percentage of visitors who take that action, right? So for an e-commerce store in particular, this is arguably the most important metric. Typical e-commerce conversion rate is something like one to 3%. So if yours is lower, that's where you should focus, right? If you're getting 100 visitors, hopefully one to three of those visitors are making a purchase.
If not, you want to consider are your product pages clear and enticing? Is the checkout process smooth? Is there some hurdle that's preventing more people from checking out? Next, you want to pay attention to bounce rate. Bounce rate shows how many visitors leave your site after viewing just one page.
So if your bounce rate is really high, like over 50%, it could mean your homepage is not engaging or visitors aren't finding what they're looking for. So look at the pages with the highest bounce rates and ask like, does this page load quickly? Is it visually appealing? And does it have one of those clear calls to action? Next, and it's just going to be three of them, right?
We've got conversion rate, bounce rate. Third thing is your traffic sources, understanding where your visitors are coming from, whether it's search engine results, social media, paid ads, whatever it is that can help you focus your marketing efforts. So if most of your traffic comes from Instagram, for example, doubling down on that platform might give you the best return on investment. On the other hand, if you're spending lots of time on Instagram and you're not actually getting traffic from it, maybe you should be doing something different as opposed to just spending time on things that are not effective. So pay attention to your traffic sources.
It's going to give you some very helpful information. There are a lot more metrics we could talk about, but honestly, if you do those three things, you're going to be in a much better place than someone who just ignores it. So the last thing I want to say is don't try to improve everything at once. Focus on one metric at a time, boosting your conversion rate, reducing bounce rates, whatever it is, so that you can measure the impact of your changes. Melody, everybody else out there, let's make some improvements this year.
I'm trying to do it in my business as well. I've got lots of systems out there that were set up years ago and I don't always go and update them. So I'm trying to do a better job. I'll take you along with me. You can hold me accountable as well.
I'm excited for all that we have to share. www.sidehustleschool.com/questions If you have a question for us or a comment, of course, much more is to come, always completely free, almost 3000 episodes and counting. You can subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now, though. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
