Setting website goals

Whether you’re into resolutions or not, the end of a year (and a decade) is a time for reflection. It’s a great opportunity to review what your site has done for your business. As well as what is possible in the new year. And with that information, you can set website goals if you’d like.

Keep in mind that these are not “must have” goals. If you get excited about any of these elements, let that gut feeling be your guide into what goals you set for your website for 2020.

Pageviews

One of the easiest metrics to track on your website is the number of people who visit. More specifically, the number of times a page is viewed. Which could mean that I’d count for 4 pageviews if I refreshed your homepage 3 times.

Why I love this metric for business goals is two fold. First, it tends to help folks get started with Google Analytics if they aren’t using it already. And second, it can break us out of that “no one reads my blog” rut that often happens.

Nerd Alert: If you don’t have Google Analytics on your site yet, this post will help you add it. You can’t go back in time to see data, but you’ll be ready for next year’s website goal setting!

To see your Pageviews, log into your Google Analytics account + click on Behavior > Overview in the lefthand column. That will take you to a dashboard view of your overall site pageviews.

My 2018 Pageviews

Since 2019 isn’t done yet, I’m sharing my 2018 numbers. I had 39,229 pageviews with 37,112 of them being unique. That’s pretty awesome for a service-based solopreneur / microbusiness, if I say so myself.

And no, that’s not a humble brag. The reality is that when I sit down to write a blog post, there are more than a few times I’ve asked myself “is this a good use of time if no one is reading my updates?”

When you work for yourself, by yourself, these feelings + thoughts are hard to ignore. Which is why I love the metric that shows me people are in fact reading these posts! It’s a great way to realize you are seen.

Goal setting: In order to turn pageviews into a goal, it’s best if you have data to compare it to. If you just installed Google Analytics on your site, try tracking pageviews for 1 week. After that week, multiply that number by 52 to guess your pageviews for the year.

In my example, I shared that my stats for 2018 were just over 39,000. I’m on track to break into the 40,000 mark this year. Knowing both of those data points, I’m setting a goal to pass 50,000 pageviews in 2020.

It’s a big jump, but not crazy. And I know that in order to reach that goal, I need to work on getting my site in front of more people. Along with making it more enticing for them to stick around to look at even more pages. This is the perfect way to set smaller, more actionable website goals for yourself + your team.

Conversions

If tracking pageviews is the baby step into metric goals for your website, then tracking conversions is the “training wheels off” metric. Simply because it requires that you know 2 things — how many people came to your site + how many people signed up for your newsletter.

Similar to pageviews, you can track your site visitors with Google Analytics (they are labeled as users in your GA dashboard). Head to Audience > Overview + you’ll get your stats on the main dashboard.

Once you know how many visitors came to your site in a set period of time (it’d be great to look at all of 2019 to prep for 2020), look at your newsletter size. If you know how many subscribers you had as of 1/1/2019, you can subtract that from your current total to get your sign ups for the year.

Take your number of subscribers for the year + divide it by the number of site visitors (users) to get your conversion rate. If you are working with one month or one week, that’s fine. Just make sure you compare the same 2 time periods to understand how well your site converts.

Goal setting: A great way to set a conversion goal is to increase your current rate. It’s pretty common to see conversion rates of 1-5%, so I’d recommend not jumping your current rate by much more than 0.5%.
But if your 2020 game plan is entirely focused around growing your list, you can set a bigger jump + get after it!

I added an exit intent pop-up to my site in late 2019 + it upped my conversion rate by 0.5% alone. So I’m going to set a goal to increase my conversion rate by another 0.5% next year to keep that upward trend going.

Post sharing (goin’ viral)

I know that the idea of “going viral” is a bit of a cliché, but I think there’s smart business webite goals to be made here.

When most people talk about something going viral it means that it was seen by lots of folks in a short period of time. That is easy to track, but not so easy to make happen.

Instead of focusing on making viral content, why not set a goal for post shares? That way you can easily get your metric for tracking but are also focused on something you have a bit more control over.

To track this metric, it depends on the goal you’re setting. If your aim is to grow your traffic from Pinterest, then you’ll use the handy Pinterest link (https://www.pinterest.com/source/[yourwebsite.com]/) to see what content from your site has been shared + exactly how many times.

The closest thing I have to viral is a Pinterest post that’s gotten 5,880 impressions in 30 days!

If Pinterest isn’t your thing, another post sharing goal would be to get a blog post shared so many times on facebook or a youtube video seen x number of times. It really is about your business focus + where you are putting your efforts in 2020.

Goal setting: Once you’ve picked your social platform, pick a number that feels a tad bit scary for this goal. The reason is because we often underestimate ourselves. Plus, once something starts building momentum, it’s a lot easier for that counter to tick up + up + up!

In this upcoming year, I want to get that Pinterest post I mentioned over the 10,000 mark. I would also like to get a handful of article promotion tweets retweeted at least 4 times each. It may seem like a small goal, but post promotion on twitter is something I’m not super at + I’m looking to get better.

Not getting hacked

This concept is for my folks that are not much for setting goals. (If you’ve read this far, that likely isn’t you.) I think it’s a great goal that doesn’t require any metrics tracking.

Are you not quite sure how to secure your site? Take the free WordPress security quiz to learn all about protecting your online business. The weak areas of your site will be exposed. But you’ll get homework to get your site security in order before it’s too late.

Goal setting: All you have to do is put in the security work routinely + avoid getting hacked. If you get hacked, your streak is up + you can try again in 2020. If you don’t get hacked, you’ve reached your goal + kept yourself from being yet another WordPress site statistic.

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