Understanding the information that your personal trainer website gives you is a powerful way to measure the success of your website. A successful website extends the potential reach of your personal training business and could bring you more business.
Having a good grasp on these metrics will allow you to maximise the performance of your site and help you ensure you’re putting your time and effort into the places so you can have the best fitness website.
For the purpose of this blog, we'll be using the stats of one of our very own website clients, The Barracks Gym, to help walk you through the different numbers and what they mean.
1. Number Of Visitors
This metric tells you the number of people who are actually visiting your personal trainer website. If this number is low, the other metrics will matter far less because not many people will be seeing your website. If your number of visitors is too low, less than 100 visits per week, your first action step could be to increase traffic to your website.
As you can see here, we're getting a fair amount of traffic per day so we have some good data to go off of when making marketing decisions.
How to Get More Traffic
You can do this for free by creating useful content which ranks on search engines. You could start a backlink campaign - meaning that your website gets posted on other popular websites that have similar audiences that you’re trying to attract. You could also attract traffic by running paid ads on social media or Google.
If you’re already getting a good level of traffic to your site, consider how you’re performing for return traffic. Return traffic means people who have been to your site before but keep coming back because the content is engaging. If you would like to increase your return visitors, you could create more engaging content (videos and infographics often work well), improve your copy or post attractive photos, or consider being more accurate in who you target in your paid advertising.
2. Bounce Rate
A “bounce” happens when someone has landed on your PT website and then clicked straight back off for some reason (it’s boring, it wasn’t the content they were looking for, it’s not easy to use on a mobile etc).
The bounce rate is the ratio of people who have bounced and the people who stay and visit for a while. A high bounce rate is important because it makes your website appear lower in search engine results.
The bounce rate is the ratio of people who have bounced and the people who stay and visit for a while. A high bounce rate is important because it makes your website appear lower in search engine results.
A bounce rate can indicate a mismatch between what your client is looking for and the content on your site. You can check the bounce rate of each page on your website by using your Google Analytics page.
How to Lower Your Bounce Rate
If you would like to improve the bounce rate on your website, there are two things you could do:
- Search engine optimise your site so it attracts the right kinds of website visitors.
- Improve the content of your personal training website so people stay longer without clicking off.
- Refine your audience to attract a better quality of visitors that are interested in your personal training services.
3. Average Page Views
The Page Views metric will tell you how many pages of your site your unique visitors visited. The average number of pages viewed per session is a metric which could be considered a measure of how interesting your website is.
People who spend longer on your website, viewing more pages and consuming more of your content are more likely to take the call to action that you offer - whether that’s signing onto an email list or booking a call to discuss their problem in more detail.
People who spend longer on your website, viewing more pages and consuming more of your content are more likely to take the call to action that you offer - whether that’s signing onto an email list or booking a call to discuss their problem in more detail.
In our example, the page views are much higher than the unique visits which means when someone is landing on the website, they're sticking around to view several pages at a time.
How to Increase Page Views
If you want to improve this metric, your website user experience needs optimising. Try to think about what a website visitor would want to see on any given page and give them that. Then try to match that with their next logical step and use that next logical step as a call to action.
For example, when someone lands on your home page they probably don't want your eBook. They're looking for what you do and how much it costs, so that should be the call to action - See Services or See Pricing.
How to Increase Page Views
If you want to improve this metric, your website user experience needs optimising. Try to think about what a website visitor would want to see on any given page and give them that. Then try to match that with their next logical step and use that next logical step as a call to action.
For example, when someone lands on your home page they probably don't want your eBook. They're looking for what you do and how much it costs, so that should be the call to action - See Services or See Pricing.
4. Session Duration
This measure relates to how long someone was active on your website, moving through and clicking on things. For service pages, your session duration will usually be quite short. For blog pages, provided your content is good, session duration would be much longer.
If your website is an online personal trainer website, with users perhaps following along with a workout for 30 minutes or more - Google would consider them inactive and think that session was over (when your clients might be fully attentive and engaged).
So this may or may not be a useful metric, depending on the sort of website you’ve designed.
If your website is an online personal trainer website, with users perhaps following along with a workout for 30 minutes or more - Google would consider them inactive and think that session was over (when your clients might be fully attentive and engaged).
So this may or may not be a useful metric, depending on the sort of website you’ve designed.
5. Average Time On Page
Again, this could be considered one of the most important metrics to get an idea of how actively engaged your audience is with your website, or it could be useless. It all depends on the goal of your site.
This is a measure of how long visitors are spending on each individual page of your website. This measure is particularly interesting for personal trainers who spend a lot of time creating content for their websites such as in-depth blog articles and could give an indicator of what sort of content is most interesting to your visitors.
6. Top Traffic Sources
A traffic source is a place the visitors see the link to your personal trainer website and where they come from to get there. For many personal trainers with active social media accounts, this will be the source from which they drive much of their website traffic.
By digging into this metric you might learn something about how your audience prefers to engage with your website content. Perhaps people who are on your mailing list spend more time reading your blog that people linked from Instagram. This can be useful as it allows you to be more targeted in where you promote your website.
In our example, most of the traffic comes from search engines because we spent some time search engine optimising the website to get more traffic.
7. Device Used
This could relate to the physical device people are using to browse your website (phone, tablet, desktop), their preferred operating systems (iOS, Windows, Android) or even the browsers they’re using (Chrome, Firefox, Safari).
This is useful because you are better able to optimise for these user choices to improve their experience of your site. It might give you some insight if you’re planning on running paid advertising to your site, too.
This is useful because you are better able to optimise for these user choices to improve their experience of your site. It might give you some insight if you’re planning on running paid advertising to your site, too.
8. Search Terms
Search Terms refers to the keywords someone types in to Google to find your website. If you website isn't ranking yet, you won't get any data for this, but if it is, you'll find a goldmine of information you can use to decide where to invest your marketing dollars.
A quick search of The Barracks Gym domain name shows the site is ranking for 382 keywords in Google Aus.
A quick search of The Barracks Gym domain name shows the site is ranking for 382 keywords in Google Aus.
We can also see we're at the bottom of page one, position ten for some keywords that, should we rank the website higher, would help gain more targeted traffic.
For example, an ideal client of The Barracks Gym would be interested in "adf assessment day questions". Who better to walk them through that process than the company who would also provide the fitness services that person might need to pass the test.
