How to use website social proof: strategies and examples that work
Nov 27, 2024
With so many website metrics available, it's hard to know where to focus. Tracking every metric may seem appealing, but many don't offer provide useful insights. To optimise your B2B website effectively, it's essential to concentrate your efforts on the metrics that truly matter.
Most resources on this topic will tell you to look at vanity metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and pages per session. With the right context, metrics like these can provide some insight, but they fail to capture the true measure of your website's success – its impact on revenue and business growth.
To understand your website's contribution to your organisation's bottom line, you need to start by measuring its direct influence on revenue. From there, work backwards to identify the leading indicators that influence future revenue.
A revenue-centric approach lets you prioritise metrics that directly correlate with business growth. This means you can allocate resources effectively, make informed decisions, and implement strategies that drive business growth.
The lifeblood of any B2B company is its ability to generate revenue and build a robust sales pipeline. Looking at commercial metrics first allows you to see if your website is helping to meet the business's overall revenue and sales goals.
Tracking the number of people you convert via your website that become customers, and generate revenue for your business is the best possible sign of success.
It means your website attracts, engages, and converts visitors into leads that later become customers. If this metric is good, it shows that your website is helping you achieve your business objectives.
To track website revenue generation, you need the right software in place. You'll need:
We recommend using HubSpot for a complete suite of built-in, connected tools that give you a website platform primed for growth and sofisticated CRM for tracking contact information.
Similar to revenue, measuring the amount of sales pipeline generated from your website demonstrates its contribution to the overall business objectives of revenue generation. If you're waiting to see the impact of website changes on revenue, monitoring the pipeline can provide earlier insights into success, while still being tied to commercial value.
This works in the same way as tracking revenue, you'll need:
A high-intent lead is somebody who's declared explicit interest in your offering. This is often done via a:
High-intent leads convert into revenue at a high rate, making it an excellent website metric to monitor. This can be measured and seen immediately, which means it can be directly attributed to any website changes you implement, as any modifications will ultimately impact conversion rates.
Monitor the number of high-intent form submissions received through your website. You can manually collate this data, but a more efficient approach would be to use your website, marketing, or CRM software to collect this information and present it in a report automatically.
Website traffic is an important indicator of how effectively you're creating and capturing demand. Successful marketing efforts should translate into increasing website visitors across all channels.
When analysing website traffic, it's crucial to take both an overall and granular view, examining the overall trend as well as the trends for specific sources, such as:
Segmenting website traffic by source provides a more realistic picture of where your visitors are coming from, preventing the data from being skewed heavily by a single channel. For example, if you spend an extra £10,000 on paid search one month, it's important to understand that the increase in traffic originated from that specific source.
Google Analytics is the most commonly used tool for tracking website traffic. It's a free web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and reports website activity. It provides valuable insights into user behaviour like traffic sources, and much more. To use Google Analytics, you need to add a tracking code to your website.
Aside from Google Analytics, many website platforms and content management systems like HubSpot Content Hub have built-in analytics tools that track and report website traffic. These tools can provide valuable data on page views, visitors, referral sources, and more.
We recommend paying particularly close attention to direct and organic traffic, since these are often the most valuable sources when it comes to predictable, sustainable results, and they're less easily gamed by an increase in budget. If you're increasing organic and direct traffic then it's a great sign that your entire marketing efforts are working to create and capture demand.
SEO plays a key role in your website's success. So understanding how your website performs in search engines is valuable, as it allows you to optimise it to attract more visitors. Key metrics to monitor include:
For keyword rankings, look at SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, which allow you to input target keywords and see where your pages rank across search engines and locations. Google Search Console will help you track SERP click-through rates, giving you the data on what queries you're being found for in search and which ones drove traffic to your site.
ahrefs organic keyword report.
Website speed is an important factor in user experience. It can impact engagement, retention, and conversion rates – B2B buyers are time-poor, and a slow website will only lead to frustration. Additionally, website speed is a ranking factor for Google, so a higher-performing website will improve your chances of ranking well in search results.
Google's PageSpeed Insights can analyse your webpage's performance, providing mobile and desktop scores from 0-100 based on metrics like loading times and user experience. It highlights areas for optimization like image compression, JavaScript minimization, and resource optimisation to improve page speed.
While website speed is important, obsessing over minor improvements is unnecessary. As long as your site loads quickly enough to keep visitors engaged, shaving off a few milliseconds won't have a significant impact on overall performance.
Website speed is sometimes compromised to accommodate higher-quality visuals. This trade-off may not necessarily be detrimental, as visually appealing elements could boost conversion rates, but it's a consideration to keep in mind when optimising your website.
While metrics are crucial for marketers, obsessing over the wrong ones can negatively impact your website. Here are a few metrics you should avoid over-emphasising.
A high bounce rate doesn't necessarily indicate a poor website. In fact, it can sometimes mean the opposite. If you're providing high-quality content that answers a visitor's query on a single page, your bounce rate will likely increase, which is perfectly acceptable.
You should expect lower bounce rates on commercial pages, but even then, if a visitor finds the information they need on one page, it doesn't mean it's a negative outcome. B2B buyer journeys are complex, and a single-session visit does not mean they won't return in the future.
"A 90+ percent bounce rate on content that you've created to educate your buyer is normal, to be expected, and it's fine. If you're doing good B2B marketing, I would actually expect bounce rate to go up rather than down, which is counterintuitive to a lot of advice marketers are given."
Phil Vallender, Co-Founder at Blend
B2B buyers have diverse needs and behaviours. Some may require only 30 seconds to understand your offering and convert, while others might need 10 minutes. Session duration does not directly correlate with conversion or your website's commercial success, making it less relevant for optimisation efforts.
Attempting to increase this metric could even be counterintuitive to your website's user experience, as you might add unnecessary content or information solely to keep visitors on the page longer.
The number of pages a visitor views depends on various factors, such as the amount of information on each page, their stage in the buyer journey, and the content type (e.g., blog vs. commercial page). What matters is whether visitors can access the information they need in the most effective way possible, whether that's on one page or across multiple pages.
Trying to encourage visitors to view more pages than necessary can be counterproductive to the user experience. Instead, focus on metrics that have a more significant impact on the outcome of their visit.
Tracking the right metrics is crucial for identifying the areas of your website that need improvement. But once you've identified those areas, you need to understand what elements on your website to change to improve performance and create the most effective B2B website possible.
