Remember, in order to get the best results from your website it is important that you are continually improving it. The process of continual improvement involves a continuous series of cycles. Each cycle should be made up of 3 phases and take approximately 4-6 weeks. The three phases are:

Measure > Review > Tune 

1. Measure: You should allow at least 1 month for collecting data. (1 month)
2. Review: At the end of that period you then need to look back at the results to determine ways to improve the website further (1day)
3. Tune: Once you have determined the priorities for improving you then need to implement these (approx 2 weeks)

Without the measurement you never really know if the changes you are making to your website are improving it or actually making it worse. So the first step to start improving your results should be measuring your website's performance as it stands.

We can recommend ideas and changes to improve your website and we have plenty of articles to help you, but every website, business, target audience, industry and niche is different. Yes the more experience you have and the more you have studied best practices the more educated your ideas for improving your website will be, but no-one really knows for certain without measuring.

Incremental changes - An iterative approach

We recommend that you make the improvements to your website in small increments for each cycle.

If you make too many changes to your website and you find out later in the cycle that you are seeing a negative impact, it is a frustrating and time consuming task to determine which of the many changes is causing the negative results. Often the only way to find the problems is to wind back your changes and begin the cycle over again. We also understand that you have limited time and resource to dedicate to the website. There is only so much you can do each cycle to improve your website.

So with this in mind it is important that you focus your efforts on those changes that are hopefully going to have the greatest impact. The changes that are going to generate the greatest number of sales or leads.

We recommend that you schedule a regular period for reviewing your website results and making improvements.

How to measure effectively

With reporting and statistics, there is often too much information and it is easy to overload. We understand you probably have little time to analyse your reports, so we have designed our reports to deliver the most important stats to help you make a quick informed decision.

But still there is an art to understanding these reports, hence the purpose of this article. What you really need is a process or step by step guide to reading and understanding reports. You need to be able to quickly and easily find the problem areas to fix or the areas that are going really well which with some further improvement will provide the greatest return on investment.