Defining Your Website’s Goals Part 4

Marketing Guideline
Oct 18
6 min read

Updated: Dec 2

How to Measure If Your Website Goals Are Working (Without Getting Lost in Data)

So, is your website actually doing its job?

You’ve set up your website’s goals. You’ve built in features to support them. Now it’s time for the next step: making sure it’s all actually working.

Why Measuring Your Goals Matters

Setting goals is great—but measuring them is what makes progress real. Without tracking your results, you’re just guessing. Measuring helps you see what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus your energy. It keeps you from wasting time on things that don’t matter and gives you the confidence to double down on the things that do.

But don’t worry—this doesn’t mean you need to become a data expert. You just need to keep an eye on a few simple things that tell you whether your website is helping your business grow. We’ll start out slow and you can add different items as you need them.

Step 1: Define What Success Looks Like

It’s time to grab that list of measurable goals you made in Part 1: What Do You Want Your Website to Do? (Defining Your Website’s Goals). You might remember these examples:

Priority: I want my website to help me sell more pet accessories

Measurable Goal: Make at least 20 sales per month through my website.

Priority: Grow my email list

Measurable Goal: Get 50 new people to sign up for my email in a month.

Priority: Have more people learn about my brand

Measurable Goal: Have 1000 people visit my website in a month

Priority: Get people to read more of my blog posts

Measurable Goal: Increase pageviews per person visiting my website by 30%

Make It Measurable

If you haven’t done so already, or if you have identified any new ones, create a measurable goal for each of your business priorities. For example: Wanting to sell more items is a goal, but adding 20 items sold per month makes it measurable.

Give It a Timeframe

Your goals will change over time as your business grows. To really make an impact, give yourself a reasonable goal for a reasonable timeframe. For example, if you are just starting out - 10 sales per month, or 100 website visitors in a month. A month is a great time frame to use. It allows for enough data to be collected to really get a good reading on if something is working or not.

Most of these measurable goals are short term goals - and this is where you should start when measuring data. You will have both long-term and short-term goals for your website. We want to identify what is working and what needs adjustment on your website, so for this we will focus on some short term goals to see where we need to make any optimizations.

Step 2: Pick 1 to 3 Things to Track

You don’t need to track everything - just focus on a few things that match your goals.

Your data will tell you a story, to start we just want to ask it the right questions. The data points you focus on will be directly tied to your goals. Let’s look at some popular data points that probably match some of your top goals.

Examples of popular items to track:

Website traffic (How many people are visiting your site?)
Conversions (How many people are taking action—like buying, booking, or signing up?)
Conversion rate (How many people are taking action compared to how many people are visiting your site?)
Time on page (Are people sticking around to read or shop?)

Let’s take it one step further and put these into action. We’ll use our examples of measurable goals from above and identify what we should track for each one.

Priority: I want my website to help me sell more pet accessories

Measurable Goal: Make at least 20 sales per month through my website.

Data Points: Number of Conversions (sales), Conversion Rate, Add to Cart

Priority: Grow my email list

Measurable Goal: Get 50 new people to sign up for my email in a month.

Data Points: Email Sign-ups, Email sign-up conversion rate

Priority: Have more people learn about my brand

Measurable Goal: Have 1000 people visit my website in a month

Data Points: Website Visitors, Unique Website Visitors

Priority: Get people to read more of my blog posts

Measurable Goal: Increase pageviews per person visiting my website by 30%

Data Points: Pageviews, Pageviews per person

Action Item: Now take your measurable goals and list out 1-3 data points that will tell you if you’re on the right track to success.

Step 3: Set Up Analytics (Even If You’re Not Using It Yet)

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to check your analytics every day. But it’s so important to start collecting that data now—because you can’t get it back.

If you’re not ready to dive in, that’s totally fine. Just make sure you have set up your Analytics for your website. Unfortunately if you don’t set it up, you won’t be able to look back at your data from this time. It only collects data starting from when it is set up.

Types of website analytic tools

There are many different tools you can use to collect data. Some are free and some are paid. To start off I recommend doing one or both of these:

Built-in Analytics Tool: If you are using Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or another all inclusive platform then certain packages will come with an analytics tool. I highly recommend setting this up and upgrading to the package level that includes this.
Google Analytics: All you need is the free version. Though this isn’t as intuitive as your platform’s built-in tool, there is a lot of powerful information that Google Analytics can deliver. We’ll go into this more in other articles. Even if you are not ready for this tool just yet, set it up so it collects all of your valuable data so you can use it when you are ready.

Ready, Set, Go: If you have not already set up your analytics for your website, do it now. Don’t procrastinate on this, your future self will thank you for doing this - trust me.

When you are ready to dive deeper into your Website Analytics click here.

Step 4: Schedule Time For Analytics

The more you use it the more it will make sense. If this is your first time using an analytics tool then play around with it. Look at the different data points, google the terms you don’t know just yet, and just get familiar with how it all works.

When to Look at Analytics

I recommend looking at your Analytics weekly just to get a pulse on how things are going. For each of your goals, schedule a time to look at your analytics to gauge if you are meeting your goals. For example, For the Measurable Goal: Make at least 20 sales per month through my website, Plan on looking at your analytics on the 1st of the month for the timeframe of the previous month.

Calendar Time

Schedule time in your calendar for a weekly look at your analytics (about 30 minutes), plus a time each month to track your goals (about 1 hour).

After your monthly evaluations you will truly know what goals are being met and which ones are not. This takes the guesswork out of it for you where you need to make changes on your website.

Goal Setting and Optimizing Mindset

If you create a mindset that you are going to create goals, measure them and adjust them according to what the data tells you, then you will find it very easy to make the changes you need to make your website a success.

Where most people get held up

I see two very common mistakes when it comes to websites. I will share them with you, give you some advice around them, and you can take it or leave it. Your journey is your own, I just want to help smooth out the ride.

Mistake #1:

Attachment - Your website is your baby, you have or are going to put a lot of time and effort into it. You have an idea of how it should look and you get attached to it, very attached. You are not seeing results, but you feel the overwhelming urge that it needs to be this way. Be proud of your work, but if I can give some advice on this subject - Take your ego out of it.

Mistake #2:

You want your website to work, you need it to work. You create the site, but you are not seeing results right away, so you make changes. Over the next few days or a week, without enough time to see actual results, you make changes. These changes are done on a whim - I need to put more information about my products, my story should be at the top of the page, I just made a blog post - this should be added to the home page. My advice - Take a breath, don’t be impulsive.

For both of these mistakes there is an easy solution. You’ve just read all about it in this series. The solution: