A successful website is measured by its performance in terms of user experience, organic traffic, search engine ranking, authoritativeness, click-through rate, viewer retention and other relevant metrics that enhance the website goals. In reality, it can be very difficult, though not impossible, to perform excellently well in all areas. However, website administrators should continuously strive to do well in all areas.

Understanding Remarketing

The concept of remarketing was popularized by marketing guru Philip Kotler in an article he titled”The Major Tasks of Marketing Management”. Remarketing is a strategy in response to faltering demand. Faltering marketing occurs when sales continue to decline and is likely to continue if remedial actions are not taken. The marketing task required to reverse this trend is remarketing.

Remarketing involves a review of the entire marketing strategy to start a new life cycle. It is a revitalization of the marketing effort to relaunch the product back into the market.

Common Signs of an Underperforming Website

There are specific key performance metrics (KPIs) you can use to see how well your website is performing. Below are some of the most common signs of an underperforming website:

1. High Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your website after only viewing a single page. A high bounce rate – typically above 50% – can be a sign that people don’t find your website helpful. However, don’t just rely on your bounce rate to decide on the effectiveness of your website. It could just mean that people were able to find their answers on your website easily.

How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

• Avoid a “text-heavy” website. Essays belong in college.
• Make it easy for people to find information quickly (hint: better navigation helps)
• Give them something to do (and make it obvious). This is known as a call-to-action (CTA).
• Improve on website speed. One study by Todhost revealed that poor website speed was a primary reason for high bounce rate.

2. Low Number of Leads

If you have a low number of lead contacts, then it’s likely a sign that your site isn’t performing well. When your website is difficult to navigate or offers a bad experience to people, it impedes your ability to generate leads. Tracking email signups and other opt-in submissions help you determine which obstacles are causing people to avoid your company.

How To Increase Your Leads

• Invest in content marketing. Some ideas for content might include email marketing and blogs. 
• Make it obvious to people what you’d like them to do (yes, CTAs are important enough to warrant another mention).
• Work on your CTAs. Yes, they’re important enough to warrant another mention. People need direction on your website.
• Use basic A/B testing to determine how much your solutions and content meet the needs of customers and visitors.

3. Decreased Website Traffic

Low amounts of traffic to your website is usually a signal that your website isn’t optimized to appear in search results. Tracking the number of sessions or visits to your website will help you spot areas you can improve throughout your website.

How To Increase Your Website Traffic

• Get your business’s name out there. One popular way to “there” is social media. Social media platforms can be incredible media to reach out to a large number of people.
• Consider blogging on other websites that are within your industry. Guest blogging may not be a bad idea. Where the opportunity arises, take advantage especially for platforms that cover your industry. You can reach a lot of valuable customers through guest posts. One thing you should consider with guest blogging is the authority and credibility of the website you want to post on. Avoid websites with high spam scores, very low domain authority and trust flow.
• Invest in paid advertising. This is a great option if you’d like to see quick results.

Further reading:

• A Guide to Manage Google Algorithm Changes
• Tips and Tricks That Improve Website Conversion Rate

4. Low Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is a metric usually associated with paid online advertising. It measures the number of people that click on your ad after seeing it. For organic search, this metric also works equally well for determining your website’s competitiveness in search results. Just like site traffic, a low click-through rate can show that people aren’t interested in clicking through to your site. 

How To Increase Your Click-Through Rate

• Optimize your page titles
• Shorten your URLs.
• Improve your meta descriptions

5. Low Number Of Pages Per Visit

When people view multiple pages on your website, it’s a sign that they’re more engaged and willing to explore more of your site. But when there are a low number of pages per session, visitors aren’t that engaged with your site and may be dissatisfied with the overall user experience. A low number of pages per session results from many things, including stale content, a cluttered design, and confusing navigation.

How To Increase The Number Of Pages Per Visit

• (Re)design your website to improve navigation and overall layout
• Make your content understandable for non-experts (i.e., your customers).
• Link the pages of your website together. This is called internal linking and is great for SEO.
• Speed up your website.

Strategies for Remarketing a Poor Performing Website

Improving in the indices used to identify poor performing websites can be a great way to improve performance. You can quickly fix issues with your website performance by addressing the issues listed below.

Keep in mind that Remarketing involves starting a new life cycle for a product. It is a complete rejuvenation and thus involves an analysis of the products and the markets to determine the necessary changes that can drive the new and rejuvenated product. If your website is performing poorly, here are some of the changes you will need to make to rejuvenate its performance.

1. Website Design Review

It is not enough to have an attractive website but the first impression anyone will make of your website will come from its look. Follow standard principles of good website designing. Use colors, spacing and images to build your website attraction and keep people on your website for longer than average. Ensure that your website is mobile friendly that can be viewed on all mobile devices.

2. User Experience Review

User experience is a key performance metric that affects how people relate with your website and how search engines rank our website. You should be concerned about how much time people spend on your website, how many pages they visit, are old visitors returning to the website or are you just having more of new visitors, are the visitors converting by performing the expected task such as making a purchase, filling a form and so on.

3. Focus on User Needs

When people visit your website, they do have a need they want to fill. You should be able to determine how much your website is able to meet these needs. One way you can do this is to examine the search terms that bring people to your website and the landing page through which they reach your website. Then check the page to see how in depth it deals with the topic. Google Analytics can be very useful here.. Visit your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You should view the performance of individual pages. You will now be able to review how the specific page that is pulling traffic to your website is performing.

4. Content Review

A non-performing website is an indication of a non-performing content. People like content that is in depth and takes them through the much they should know to improve their performance. Take time to review your content by asking some basic questions and see how your content addresses them. If you do not find the right answers, you will need to improve on your content.

5. Review Website Speed

Speed is important for your website ranking and also for user experience. Poor website speed has been linked to high bounce rate and can discourage return visits. If you are able to combine good website speed with content that addresses visitor needs and answer their questions, you will likely be having more visitors to your website.

6. Avoid Unethical SEO

One thing that will seriously hurt your marketing efforts is unethical SEO. That will include, but not limited to, aggressive link building, link exchanges, using exact match keywords in titles, keyword stuffing.

7. Learn from Competitors

Learning from your successful competitors can be a good way to gain some advantage with little effort. You can learn more from this on how to benchmark competitor practices by reading this detailed article on Complete Guide to Website and Competitor Analysis

3 Tools To Track And Improve Your Website’s Performance

Search “track my website’s performance” in Google, and you’ll likely see hundreds of companies trying to sell you “special” tools for tracking your website. But you can follow your website’s performance for free using accurate data provided by these three tools: HotJar, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.

HotJar

HotJar creates a heatmap of your website that lets you track how far your visitors scroll, where they’re clicking, and how they’re interacting with your site. By ranking sections as either cold (unpopular) or hot (popular), HotJar lets you quickly identify opportunities for improvement on your website. 

Google Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can track your website traffic, your bounce rate, top referring channels (i.e., social media, email, organic search, direct, etc.), and more. Using the data, you can create goals to improve your metrics and ultimately, drive more leads and conversions.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides valuable data such as click-through rate, impressions, and the top keywords that searchers are using to find your business/website. It also gives you insight into penalties (i.e., spam problems, incorrectly structured data, unnatural outbound links, etc.) against your site and offers solutions on how to fix them.

Tracking your website is a crucial step in improving and optimizing it for conversions. Keeping track of how your website performs can help improve your company’s online presence. Be sure to monitor specific KPIs to measure your site’s performance regularly. Using improving your website based on data – not guesses – you’ll be able to optimize your website for a better online presence.