Top 5 Website Key Performance Indicators Financial Advisors Should Be Tracking

If you want to improve your website and make sure it’s performing as it should be, it’s important to consistently audit what works and what doesn’t. To do this, it’s important to know what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should be looking at to ensure your website is performing well.

For a high-level overview, watch this video from Twenty Over Ten and FMG Suite’s Chief Evangelist, Samantha Russell, as she discusses the KPIs that financial advisors should be tracking in Google Analytics. Read on for a deep-dive into what the metrics mean, and how to find the data in your Google Analytics to measure website performance and boosts site optimization in 2022 (please note, Twenty Over Ten’s CMS has direct, one-click integration with Google Analytics).

Top 5 Key Performance Indicators Financial Advisors Need to Be Tracking in 2022

Google Analytics measures an astounding 10,000 metrics, but these are the Top 5 you need to be tracking when auditing your website for performance:

1. The Average Number Of Total Visitors Per Month To Your Site

The first KPI is the total number of visitors per month, and typically we see just under 300 visitors per month.

2. The Number Of Pages A User Will Visit Per Session

While it can vary, this is usually just under two pages per session. When most people come to your site, whether they’re reading a blog post or browsing your home page, they typically visit one to two pages per session.

3. The Three Most Visited Pages On My Website

Many times if you are regularly blogging and creating content, your top ranking pages will be your blog posts. But if we’re looking at more of the static pages, then the 3 most visited pages in order are the home page, the “About Us/Me” page, and the contact page, which you might have listed as “Learn More” or “Get Started.”

4. The Bounce Rate

The next thing is the bounce rate. Generally, it’s good to see the bounce rate be somewhere between 45% and 65%. Though this will vary depending on the layout and design of your site. For example, scrolling sites often have a higher bounce rate. Or, if you are blogging a lot, your overall bounce rate also might go up as visitors come to your website, read a blog post, then leave.

The real problems can arise, if you have a high bounce rate on your homepage because that means people are finding your website, landing on it, and quickly realizing that you’re not what they were looking for. In those cases, you want to go back and edit the wording on your homepage to be more clear about who you are, what you do, and what niche you serve.

5. The Conversion Rate

What’s a good conversion rate? If you can get just 1% of visitors converting to a booked meeting, that is fantastic. The average advisor sees under 1%, typically closer to a .75% conversion rate.

How do you Track These KPIs in Google Analytics?

Now that you know the top metrics to track, HOW do you use Google Analytics to measure website performance and optimize?

Total Visitors Per Month

This statistic is important to see how many users visit your site. Benchmark that website performance metric and use it to see how you hold up against competitors. How do you do this?

• Step 1: Log Into Google Analytics
• Step 2: Go to the Audience Tab
• Step 3: Click on Active Users
• Step 4: You can change the date in the top right corner

The Number Of Pages A User Will Visit Per Session

When visitors come to your website, they generally visit one or two pages. They may quickly check a blog or article, and then leave. Maybe they were browsing the homepage and wanted to find out about the team. Whatever it may be, you can check it out in analytics by following the below steps:

• Step 1: Log Into Google Analytics
• Step 2: Go to the Audience Tab
• Step 3: Click on Overview
• Step 4: You can see the Pages/Session on the right-hand side next to the graph.

According to our analytics from December 21-December 27, visitors are averaging 1.68 pages on the Twenty Over Ten website, so just over 1.5 pages per visit.

The Three Most Visited Pages On Your Website

For more financial advisory firms, the top 3 most visited pages of their website are

1. Home page
2. Team/About page
3. Contact Page

As a website owner, you need to know which pages are generating the most traffic, so you can understand what really drives visitors to your site. If you notice that a page is not being visited very often, then figure out why and see what may need to be optimized in order to generate more traffic.  To track this KPI for your financial advisory firm’s website, follow these steps:

• Step 1: Log Into Google Analytics
• Step 2: Go to the Behavior Tab
• Step 3: Click on Site Content
• Step 4: Click on “All Pages”

The All Pages report is a good section for financial advisors to check regularly, as it provides a high-level overview of what pages of your website are getting the most visits. This will lump in the “static” pages (such as your homepage, services page, etc) with dynamic pages, such as each individual blog post.  In the “All Pages” report view, you’ll also be able to see at a glance “average time on page” (how long, on average, your visitors are spending on that page overall), “entrances” (how many visitors come into your website from that page), and “exit” (how many visitors visit that page last before leaving your site)

Bounce Rate
We briefly touched on how to find the bounce rate of your website. A quick recap shows that bounce rates represent the percentage of visitors who visit your website and then navigate away from it after only viewing one page. Your goal is to decrease this, as that’s mean more visitors are spending a long time checking out your website and seeing what you have to offer rather than just browsing and quickly leaving. The image below shows bounce rates in the blue outline. To find this, you should:

• Step 1: Log Into Google Analytics
• Step 2: Go to the Behavior Tab
• Step 3: Click on Site Content
• Step 4: Click on “All Pages”

From there, you can see where all the different analytics are broken down in a column to the right.

Conversion Rates

With this, you can read the report and analyze the conversion rate percent of your pages.

• Step 1: Log Into Google Analytics
• Step 2: Go to the Audience tab
• Step 3: Click the Audiences tab under the main one

You can set the Goal Conversion Rate so that, like everything else, you can constantly try and improve your site and get more conversions from your webpage. You can find the conversion rate in the column to the right along with other facts and analytics about your advisor website.

Wrapping It Up

There is so much more to Google Analytics, and the above is simply touching the tip of the iceberg. These 5 points are incredibly important, and just by reading those Key Performance Indicators, you can already tell so much about your website. So, if you have not already, we strongly encourage you to use Google Analytics to learn more about your website and how to perfect it, while also utilizing Google Search Console, as these two tools can greatly improve your performance and really go hand in hand.

Editing note: This article was originally published August 7th, 2020 and has been updated to ensure consistency.