7 Tips to Measure and Increase the ROI of Your Membership Website
Your membership website is the foundation of your membership organization’s online marketing and all of your other online marketing efforts drive potential new members to it. But after spending a lot of time and money on a new membership website design, how do you know that it brings a good ROI (Return on Investment)?
In this article, we will look at 7 tips that will help you to measure and increase the ROI on your membership website.
Unique Website Visitors
Before we begin, you need to make sure that you are using a program to view your membership websites analytics, for instance, Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics your unique website visitors are called “Users”. The number of users refers to the number of visitors that have visited your site in the given data range. The success of your membership website is measured by an overall upward trend. Although in the first instance, the number of new unique visitors to your website may be slow, it is important to keep working on getting the upward trend as new visitors equals potential new members for your organisation.
Marketing campaigns and online promotions will help to increase the spike in visitors on your membership website. One tried and tested example is adding useful and fresh content (such as blog articles) to engage new users and potential members. Also, make full use of social media to share your content for maximum exposure and better SEO.
New Visitors and Returning Visitors
Google Analytics lets you compare how many of your unique website visitors are new and how many are returning. Ideally, you would like to see your returning visitors number at around 15%.
In one sense, a larger percentage of returning visitors means that you are providing enough valuable content on your membership website to keep users coming back to see what is new, or to re-read your most useful content again. On the other hand, if your returning visitors number gets too high, around 30% or so, this could mean that you are not generating enough new visitors to grow your membership organisation with new members.
To keep a healthy balance between your new and returning visitors you need to keep creating lots of excellent content and allow potential members to sign up for a regular blog recap. Also, use your social media to reach out to both potentials and repeat visitors.
Referrals
“Referrals” in Google Analytics will show you how many other sites other than search engines are sending traffic towards your website through inbound links. Inbound links provide a good boost in SEO as well as bringing in targeted visitors to your membership website.
When people link to a page or blog post on your website it means that they found it valuable. In Google Analytics you can click on each referrer to see exactly where on their site your link is located, as well as seeing what they linked to. This will show what kind of content on your website is working and from this, you can create more successful pieces of content.
Page Popularity
Measuring the popularity of your page can help you to understand what exactly is drawing users to your website. In your website’s analytics look at “behaviour” > “Site Content” > “All Pages”, and here you will be able to see the most popular pages in your data range.
Once you have seen which pages are bringing in the most visitors, ask yourself if the content supports your overall goals and is drawing in the right kind of visitors to your membership website, if it does then create more content like it. If some of your older pieces are still performing well, consider going back and optimizing them for a better lead generation with effective calls to action to maximise on ROI.
Indexed Pages
Google indexing your pages is essential for them to be found by search engines. You can find out how many of your pages have been indexed using Webmaster tools.
To ensure that you get pages regularly indexed by Google you should continue to add quality content on a regular basis, optimise your pages for SEO and share them on social media.
Landing Page Conversion Rate
Your landing page conversion rate is a number of visitors to your site who take out an action such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
In the case of conversion rates, the higher the better. When you have a high conversion rate you know that your content is drawing the right leads to your website. It can also reflect consistency in your brand messaging.
Website Bounce Rate
Your website bounce rate is the number of visitors that leave your membership website with our viewing more than one page or taking an action. You should aim to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.
To keep your bounce rate low you should provide your readers with great content that keeps them going from page to page on your membership website. If you see an increase in the bounce rate on your website you should look at your website’s navigation to determine if it is intuitive. If a user can’t get around your website easy it will cause them to get frustrated and leave. Similarly, if your website is slow to load, or is lacking in call-to-actions it can also cause people to leave your website.
A high bounce rate can damage your SEO, so you need to aim to get it as low as possible. For more information on how to reduce your bounce rate, you can read our article “6 Ways to Reduce your Website Bounce Rate”.
