AP 0619: How Do I Know How Well My Site Is Doing?

AskPat 619 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 619 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from Kyle, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks. So check it out. If you are an entrepreneur doing whatever it takes to make it, you'll want some FreshBooks in your corner. You know, FreshBooks makes super simple cloud accounting software for small business owners that will save you tons of time and is a total joy to use, really. So with invoicing for example, it creates and sends perfectly crafted invoices. It literally takes less than 30 seconds. Online payments—your clients can pay you online which could really improve how quickly you get paid and also mobile. In expenses, you could take pictures of receipts on your phone using FreshBooks mobile apps and makes claiming your expenses a million times easier. So, for your 30-day free trial go to Freshbooks.com/askpat and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again that's Freshbooks.com/askpat.

All right, thank you so much and here's today's question from Kyle.

Kyle: Hey Pat. My name is Kyle. I'm from studywebdevelopment.com. My question is, I just want to find out, how do I find out how well my site is doing? Just to give you a bit of background, I launched my site about a month, a month and a half ago. I got about 500 Facebook likes, 90 Instagram followers, 12 Twitter followers, along with around 15 email subscribers, and I'm approaching around 1300 unique visitors. My bounce rate is sitting at around 65% and my average time on my site is just over two minutes. My question is again, how do I figure out or determine how well or how bad that is. Because to me, 65% bounce rate seems quite bad. I don't know if that's just me, but, again, on social media, perhaps the follow-up question is, I pretty much post exactly the same on all my social media channels, but how come my Twitter following, is perhaps so bad. I'd really appreciate your feedback on this and keep doing a great job. Keep it up, cheers. Bye

Pat Flynn: Hey Kyle! Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate you've been up for about a month and a half and it seems like you're doing okay. Just from my general experience and how I know that these things go. It might seem like a slow start to some, but it also depends on how much time you're putting into it, what your goals are, what resources you're providing to it, also, kind of what is actually happening on the other end.

Are you doing this for specific reason? Are you actually getting any of that? I say that because maybe it's just sharing a message or maybe it's actually driving sales or something, or getting clients. So, you didn't mention any of that so I don't know if that's what's happening. Maybe you're just in the audience-building phase right now, which it might seem like it. It seems like it to me at least. When people ask me, “Well, how do I know if I'm doing well? I always ask, “Well, what are you trying to do?”

And so, I ask you Kyle and everybody else out there, “Well, what is your goal?”

Is goal to have a huge Twitter following? And if that's the goal, then you're not doing so well with that. And you'll have to make changes to make that happen. I would just, as a side note, recommend sharing your Twitter account on your Facebook page and maybe sharing some unique content on each of them to sort of cross promote. Because if it's the same thing across all those pages, people are going to follow you where they want to follow you and not be compelled to go onto the other ones. If you drive some of that Facebook traffic or Facebook followers onto your Twitter page, it's going to just give you more of a chance of getting even more people to, in a more viral aspect, follow you.

So if your goal, going back to your goals, is to get Twitter followers, then you're not doing so well. But if your goal is to get Facebook likes, well then it seems like you're on the right path and you're doing well. 15 email subscribers—again email is very important—that seems pretty good at the month and a half mark. But again, I don't know how much time or effort you're putting into this and if it's just sort of more passive, you're just sort of casually or organically getting people to subscribe, then that's not bad. But you might be able to drive up more than that by taking action and really focusing on that.

So my question to you Kyle, is, “Well, really what is it that you're—what's your end game here?” What is your goal eventually? Is it going to be to sell a course? Is it going to be to get clients? You need to know what it is that you're going for here, so that you know what to do. When you do that, then you know whether or not that you're doing well or not.

Because if your goal is to get more clients, for example, the way that you go about it and the way that you find success is a little bit different. You would find success by how many people could you interact with. Maybe those 12 Twitter followers, which might seem like not that much, maybe they're super engaged. Maybe they can lead into client work and that is gonna help you. That would mean that you're doing pretty well, because if you imagine those 12 people, well, they are actual people who could potentially be customers. If you found them in a way where you know that they're people who could benefit from your services.

So, this is a loaded question. How do you know if you're sites doing well? Now, in terms of some of those other metrics like time on site, two minutes, that's actually pretty good. Bounce rate, 65% that's probably average, really, but I would try and focus on getting that down, if possible.

That all depends on what happens when people come to your website. What can they do? What options are you giving them? Is it easy to do that? So, again like I said, loaded question, but I would say by far the number one thing you do is determine, well, what is it that you're goal is. What are you trying to do? Because then, you'd have a thing to measure and that which is measure in proof.

Now the quote yesterday from Carl Pierce, which I want to reiterate here, because it's very important. So, you're measuring stuff, but for what? So depending on what your goal is, you're going to have to determine what metrics mean something to you. So, Kyle, that's the big question. And I hope you can answer that.

So, as you study web development, hopefully you can study internally, what is it that you're looking to do and what your angle is and by when you want that to happen. Once you measure those things, you can take the right action to improve on those elements that are going to help you and support that.

So, Kyle. Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. And for everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

I also want to thank again, FreshBooks for their continuing support of the show. To help pay for the production and all that great stuff that happens to make this show happen. So, thank you so much. If you want to check them out for free for 30 days, go to Freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter ask pat in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

All right, Thanks so much. I appreciate you and to finish off this episode and the week, here's a quote by Seth Goadin. That quote is, “Our job is to connect to people. To interact in a way that leaves them better than we found them. More able to get where they'd like to go.”

It's all about that transformation people. Cheers. Take care and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.