How Does Your Website Compare to Other Financial Advisors?
This article first appeared in Advisorpedia on November 18th, 2020, and can be found here.
So, you've got the metrics for your advisory firm's website. What do they actually tell you?
Today we're diving into what's actually considered "normal" as far as metrics go, and we'll also be discussing the MOST important metrics to track- if you're curious to learn how your bounce rate, website visitors per month, conversation rates and more measure up, we've got some answers.
100? 200? 300? How many site visitors are normal for a financial advisory firm to be getting every single month? What about other metrics like how many people should be bouncing away from the page? or how many minutes on average should your visitors be spending on your page? What's normal for a financial advisory firm in the United States? Those are the questions we are going to answer today. I'm Samantha Russell from Twenty Over Ten and stick with me. I have a few metrics that I want to share that you can write down today and benchmark your own website success against these other numbers.
So as you know, at Twenty Over Ten, we specialize in working with thousands of financial advisors - hosting their website and providing them the tools that they can use to monitor their site's performance. So we have seen a lot of sites and have looked at a lot of metrics, so I'm going to dive right in and share these numbers with you so that you can benchmark your own site's performance.
1. Average # Of Total Visitors Per Month
So the first one is the total number of visitors per month. The average is just under 300 per month is what we see being typical. So again write that down. 300 per month, and you can use that to benchmark your own site.
2. # Of Pages A User Will Visit Per Session
The second metric I want to share is what is the total number of pages typically that a user will visit in one session? That is just under two pages per session. So most people when they come to your site, whether they're reading a blog post or landing on your home page, they are only going to visit one or two pages per session.
3. Three Most Visited Pages On My Website
The next question we get asked is what are the three most visited pages on my website or other advisers' websites typically? Now often times if you are blogging regularly and producing great content, your top ranking pages can be some of your really great blog posts. But if we're only looking at more of the static pages, then the three most visited pages in order are the home page, the "about page", which you might label team or bio, and then the contact page, which you might have listed as learn more or get started. So those are the three most visited pages on average.
4. Bounce Rate
The next thing is the bounce rate. Overall, what is a good bounce rate? We like to see the bounce rate be somewhere between 45 and 65%. However, know that if you are blogging a lot, your overall bounce rate might go up because you could have a good number of people that come to your website, read a blog post, and then leave. You know, they could be a current client and their reading your blog regularly and they're leaving. That would be considered a bounce because a bounce simply means someone enters your website on a page and without clicking to go to any other page, they leave. So if someone's just coming and reading a blog, that's going to be considered a bounce.
More importantly, what I want you to pay attention to, is the bounce rate from your home page because if you have a high bounce rate on your homepage, like 65% or higher, that means you're getting a lot of people who are finding your website, landing on it and quickly realizing that you're not what they were looking for. So 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 who you serve.
5. Conversion Rate
And then the next one I get asked about all the time is what's a good conversion rate? So typically if you can get up to just 1% of visitors converting to a booked meeting, that is fantastic. The average advisor we work with here at Twenty Over Ten is seeing just under 1%, closer to about .75%.
So you have those numbers. Now you can go back and look at your own website's performance and see how you measure up. Also, keep in mind that this is a benchmark. There are some firms that have a lot of advisors or some that are solo practitioners. The most important thing is to take a look at your own performance. And then over time, it should be trending upwards. That's what you want to pay attention to more than anything.