A website is a foundational component of any business and a visitor’s perception of it often determines its success. Users can decide whether they like your website in less than a second. Why does that matter? 75% of people judge a company’s credibility based on the website design. With this established, the next question is, what can I do to ensure my website appeals to my audience and is impactful? Start by exploring key performance data gathered from top-performing websites in your industry and establishing internal B2B website benchmarks that push you to improve. Evaluating where you are today and where you want to be can hold the critical information you need to guide ways to optimize and adjust your site to maximize positive perceptions and performance.
Why Establish Internal B2B Website Benchmarks?
Metrics and data tell a story and understanding what works best is worth paying attention to. Consistently checking and analyzing your website data and setting internal benchmarks and goals can help you identify what is working well and what is not so that you can proactively make changes to:
- Optimize Conversions: Having data behind the decisions your audience is making, and where they are making them, can uncover ways to improve lead conversions. For example, if conversion rates are low on a gated asset page and you find 50% of people are starting the form but not completing it, it might be in your best interest to decrease the form fields and remove barriers to conversion. While this is only one example, having data that gives insights into what is happening across your site is foundational to identifying areas in which you need to make a change.
- Boost Search Engine Visibility: A driver of your B2B website success is SEO. If your SEO is falling behind, so will your website traffic, conversions and so on. It can be difficult to tell when SEO might be falling behind if you are not carefully tracking various benchmarks related to SEO. If keyword rankings drop or search visibility is plummeting, you will know what metrics to investigate and start with for making changes.
- Streamline User Experience: A positive website experience is important, not only for website visitors but for the business itself. Up to 70% of businesses fail because of poor website experience. Ensuring your website has a simple user experience makes a difference and capturing and analyzing the data can help you determine where changes may be required.
- Enhance Marketing Campaigns: You will set up specific landing pages or website components for various marketing campaigns, including social media ads and Google ads. Tracking these metrics, in addition to the metrics portrayed in the ad’s platform, gives you a comprehensive viewpoint into campaign performance which is useful for setting benchmarks and making campaign adjustments.
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B2B Website Data to Track, Analyze and Benchmark
Your website collects a lot of data and while it is all valuable for different purposes, there are a handful of metrics that you should track, analyze and establish internal benchmarks to understand your overall performance and performance trends, including:
- Website Traffic: These basic metrics include website visitors and the number of sessions. The traffic volume can often be indicative of how well things like SEO and marketing campaigns are performing.
- Website Traffic Sources: These tell you where your visitors come from. Most acquisition sources, such as the ones found in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), include organic, direct, referral, social and paid advertising. This reveals what channels are the most utilized and most successful.
- Searches and Clicks: These metrics come from tools like Google Search Console and reveal what users are searching for to see your website in search results. It also shows what people are clicking on to get to your website. This can help you tailor your content development for search structure, keywords and more.
- Conversions: Every organization wants to maximize conversions. It is important to track conversions across key pages, such as gated assets and contact us requests. Track this metric over time to see how it improves, or declines based on what marketing efforts are happening at the time and what efforts make the most impact. If you find conversions are low on a specific page, brainstorm what changes to implement for improvement. Take inspiration from your higher-converting pages to do so.
- Most Visited Website Pages: What pages are your website visitors coming to most? This uncovers a few things. One is the entry point to your website as the most visited pages are often those that users first come across. Two is how well that keyword for the page is performing in search results as highly visited pages are usually near the top of search results. The third is where users are finding the most value. This third point is not always true, but if you find that one blog page has five times the amount of traffic compared to another blog and has a high number of conversions within the asset, you can conclude that users are finding value in the content, enough so to continue the buyer’s journey.
- Website Exit Pages: Just as important as website entry points are the exit points. These metrics tell you where people are leaving your site, and it is up to your team to determine why that is happening. Is the content not resonating? Is it a natural exit point, such as a thank you page? Uncovering why users are exiting and adjusting those pages to guide them to continue their journey can improve time on page and potentially conversion rates.
- Time on Page: Time on page is underrated. If users are not spending a lot of time on certain pages, they might not be finding them of value. It could also mean that they are finding what they are looking for quickly or converting on a CTA and continuing their journey, which is why analyzing time on page in addition to website exit pages makes a difference in understanding user behavior and potential changes.
- Website and Page Speed: 83% of users expect a website to load in under three seconds and if it doesn’t load in three seconds, 40% of users will abandon the website. Websites and website pages must load quickly. If they do not, users will bounce and your search engine results could be impacted as page speed falls under core website vitals, which Google accounts for when ranking your website.
- Core Website Vitals: According to Google, Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure user experience for loading performance, interactivity and visuals of a website page. In simple terms, these are what Google uses to rank your website. Stabilizing these metrics and constantly updating your website to improve overall performance can improve rankings and, thus traffic and conversions. You can check this report in Google Search Console, which will tell you any issues and how to address them.
Your website is an important driver of marketing activities and business results. Tracking key website data, understanding how other sites are performing and establishing internal B2B website benchmarks allows your team to closely monitor the impact and performance of your sites and adjust as necessary to improve results.
Looking for a team to help you boost your B2B website performance? Look no further than Launch Marketing! Our B2B marketing services in Austin and beyond have contributed to the success of over 200 clients. Contact us today or request a free marketing consultation to learn more.
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