How do I measure if my website is working?

Welcome to the Boosie Podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and I've got something special for you today. So recently I was invited by Hostfully to come and do a special webinar for them and we talked about direct bookings. We went for a good hour, it was really good. And I reached out to them afterwards and saying, could I please have a copy of that? I would love to turn that hour into a couple of short episodes of the Bruce Lee podcast. And you know, I know a Hostfully well and they said yes. So I have got a little segment of our chat to share with you now. What I love about it is that Hostfully are also sponsoring this episode. So if you're wondering who is Hostfully, then they are one that you should get on your radar. They are the market leaders for the online digital guidebooks. Please, in 2021 get a digital guidebook. The cool thing is this is free. So F R E E. We know you love the free stuff. So go to hostfully.com go get your free digital guidebook. If you ever want to upgrade and get more digital guidebooks then you do have to pay. But it's a very low cost and if you put in Boostly 2M, you'll even get a little discount which is exclusive to team Boostly people. They also do PMS software, property management software. So if you're looking to change and you want to get a good one, they are one of the best multiple award winners. Our website that we create at Boostly links straight into Hostfully. It's fantastic. We love it, it's fun, it's really easy to use, really easy to set up and your guests will love it too. So please do go check them out and do mention that you came from Boostly because they will look you for that. So let's get on with it. You're going to go straight in and what we're going to talk about today will be something very much direct booking related. The next person that you will see will be myself. You'll have David Jacoby and you'll have Brad from Hostfully. So let's get on with the show. How do I measure if my website is working and visitors are actually converting? There's only one metric to track. It's a simple one and it's so obvious. It's. It's literally how are the bookings looking? I mean, that is very blase and a silly answer. But you know there are many tools out there that will help you figure out if your website is working or not. The Number one, and the free one is Google Analytics. So many people have access to Google Analytics. Every Boostly website gets set up with Google Analytics built in. And a simple way of looking at it is that number one, it tells you how many people are coming to your website. Number two, it tells you which pages they're going to on your website. Number three, it will tell you where people are leaving your website. And the final one, it will tell you which websites are bringing traffic to your website. So excuse me, it's really, really cool and it's free tool that Google give you if you want a little bit more in depth. There's two other ones that I recommend. Crazy Egg C R A Z Y egg dot com. It records your users on your website and it records the screen. So it will show you exactly where everybody goes on your website. It's a lovely tool. I've used it for Boostly for years. I literally every Monday I geek out. I put aside 30 minutes and I just watch where people are going on the website. So it helps me to know, it helps me to know where they, where they scroll, where they start, where they click, where they don't click. Do I have to make things a little bit different? I mean you don't have to go to that extent, but I love geeking out on these sort of things. But another one, and a more simpler1 is usertesting.com so you pay 50 to $100 and it's like Airbnb but for users. And what you do is you put your parameters so you say build it around your customer avatar. So be like, I would like a 34 to 44 year old mum of three children who is based in America who has got this income coming in that is X, Y and Z to come onto my website, scroll it and I will set a task for them to do. So it could be, I want for you to land on the website, go and find out this property and then make a booking. And then what happens is that they, they will go for their database, they will get some people for you, you'll pick one, that person will then record their screen and they'll talk you through everything. So they don't know you from Adam and they're just literally going to walk you through on your website what you're doing well and not doing well. And again you can hire one person, you can hire three. I like to hire five because then you've got an odd number and you can get a real good inclination after those five people where your website needs improving. So again, those tools are really good. Both of them, at a cost. It's, it's a minimal investment. And again, every time we do something really big on Boostly, like create a new template or do X, Y or Z, I always go on to usertesting.com because it just, it's, it's fantastic feedback from people who literally do not know me, do not care about Boostly in any way, shape or form. And they're just giving me that honest, honest feedback on these things. And again, I used to do it for the granary and everybody as well. So that's crazy egg. User testing, paid, and then Google Analytics, which is free.