If you have a website, how much attention do you pay to its performance? Tom Hadfield guides you through how to make the most of your website.

Having a website is important, because the first thing a customer generally does when their insurer says: “you’re going to be taking your car into ABC Smash Repairs” is to search on the internet for “ABC Smash Repairs”, to see what the business is like and where it is located.

I know this, not just because it’s what I do when I’m looking for a product or service, but more importantly because it’s what I can see when I look into the visitor statistics for websites run by the bodyshops I have worked with. If you have a website – and it’s more than likely that you do – how much attention do you pay to its performance? Do you know how many visits you have had this month? How does this compare to last month, and the corresponding month last year? How are people finding your website? What are people looking at when they’ve found your website, and how long are they spending looking at it?

These are all statistics you should be paying attention to if you want to get the most out of your website, which means using it actively as a customer retention and a business generation tool, not just passively as an information source. Many businesses – not just bodyshops – have a website because everybody else has one, so they think they should too. Once it’s created, they pay little attention to its performance, and don’t have the time to look at whether all the content is still relevant, or whether they should be adding new pages. It’s invariably a static, online brochure, often geared more at the trade (“we have two jigs”) rather than the customer.

So, why should you pay attention to how well your website is performing? Well, it’s an incredibly tough market, and so every repair opportunity is valuable. In order to see how well your website is performing, you need access to your website statistics. Most website hosting packages come with a very basic statistic package attached, and so I always recommend installing a piece of free software called Google Analytics, which involves putting a small portion of hidden code in every page on your website. Despite being free, it is an incredibly powerful business tool that will tell you whether your website is delivering sufficient return on investment to you, and which areas you need to look at to get more from it.

What will Google Analytics give me?

Once it’s installed on your website, Google Analytics you will be able to analyse your performance within hours. Although you can’t go back in time, the software will store your data for at least 25 months, giving you plenty of data to work with going forward. Here are a few things you should be looking at in order to understand how successful your website is, and where you need to improve it - you’ll be able to see all this using Google Analytics (and some of the other advanced statistical packages):

Number of visits – per hour of the day, per day, per week, per month, and even in your own specified timeframe.

Number of visitors – how many individuals have looked at your site – some of them will have visited multiple times, so this figure helps you determine whether people feel compelled to re-visit your site or not. Visitor details – in some cases, mainly companies such as insurers, fleets and motor manufacturers, you can see exactly which company has visited your website.

Number of page views – how many of your pages were viewed in total. Divide this figure by the number of visits, and you can see how much of your content is being viewed by the average visitor. If you have 20 pages and you’re only receiving an average of two page views per visit, you may want to look at how good your site navigation is, and whether the content is appealing enough.

The bounce rate – what percentage of your visits result in someone landing on your site, and then navigating away (effectively viewing one page). This could be people deeming your site not relevant to them, or could be people looking for your phone number, finding it on the first page, and then closing their browser. Take this figure with a pinch of salt, but do not ignore it completely as it could be telling you something about the relevance of your content.

Average time on site – how long does the average visitor spend on your site? Obviously, the longer you can get users to spend on your site, the more chance you have of engaging with them.

Visitor geography – never mind which country your visitors came from, with Google Analytics, you can even see which city your visitors came from. If you run a bodyshop in Perth, then naturally you want most of your visits to come from this city. Again, as with the bounce rate figure, bear in mind that you may have insurance company claim staff looking at your website from their location, which could even be in another country or on another continent.

Your traffic sources – this shows you how visitors found you, which is in one of three ways. They either typed your website address in (Direct Traffic), clicked a link on another site (Referred Traffic), or found you using a Search Engine. In general, you would expect the bulk of your traffic to come from search engines.

Search engines – which search engines sent traffic your way? What search phrases (keywords) did people use to find your site? Obviously your company name is important, but are you receiving visits for terms such as “Car Body Repairs Perth”, “Alloy Wheel Refurbishment Perth” and so on? The statistics will tell you how many visits you received for each search term, how many pages the visitor viewed, and the time they spent on your site. I personally consider this the most powerful part of the Google Analytics software.

Referring sites – this tells you which links are sending traffic to you, and is really useful if you’re running an advertising campaign designed to send visitors to your website. Are you wasting your money on sponsored links, on Facebook or on Twitter, or are these delivering visits to you? If you have a links from business directories if will tell you how many referrals you have had from those.

Content performance – detailed statistics for every page you have on your website. Which are your most popular pages? How many views did they get? How much time do people spend on there? How many people land on a particular page from a search engine? How many people leave the site once they have found this page? Where did they go to after this page? There is no point having lots of pages if people aren’t interested in what’s on them.

Browsers – you can tell which systems people have been using while they looked at your site. Keep an eye on this data as it will tell you whether you need to be investing in a smartphone friendly website.

The depth of analysis that you can conduct on your website using Google Analytics can seem almost endless, and that’s why I think it’s a really important tool to have in your armoury, and the great thing is that it’s completely free! Using the data can make the difference between you having the same website as everybody else, or one that gives users what they are looking for and generates significant additional revenue for you. I appreciate that’s the data provided by Google Analytics might seem too much information to digest, particularly in a world of bodyshop management which is already crammed full of KPI’s and benchmark statistics, but I’d urge you to at least consider having the code installed and running. That way, you’ll have access to a wealth of information when you decide to make future investment into your website to help make it an integral part of your marketing toolkit, rather than simply an online brochure. Click to install Google Analytics or ask your website designer to do it for you.

Source: A version of this article first appeared in the UK's Auto Body Professional Magazine.