How to Analyze Audience Behavior on Association Websites

If you’re an association marketer, making data-driven decisions means you can better serve your members by delivering them what they need when they need it.

To generate the type of data needed to guide your decision-making, you can look at several factors in your audience behavior. By identifying the most effective metrics and performing full, regular, data analyses, these reports on audience behavior can provide you with impactful insights you can use to help accomplish your association’s digital goals.

You can learn to analyze your audience’s behavior on your association’s website by asking these questions and understanding the following benchmarks:

Where do your association's members come from?

Your marketing channels report will help you identify where your current and prospective members are coming from. Is it Organic, Referral, Social Paid Search, or Direct? Knowing where they’re coming from will help you see which channels are working well for you and which ones need a boost to drive membership signups and renewals! 

How many visitors are new and how many are returning? 

Understanding if your visitors are new or returning will give insight into the loyalty members have for your organization. While you always want to attract new members to your association's website, you also want to ensure that once they join, they keep coming back to your site. 

How long are members staying? 

If you’re creating content, you want your members to read it! Look at their average session duration and pages per session to get insight into whether your website and content are resonating with your members and prospective members. 

Benchmarks

• Avg session duration: over 2 minutes is strong
• Pages per session: 3 pages per session is very good 

What is causing members to leave? 

Bounce rate and exit rate will tell you how quickly members and prospective members are leaving your website. A high bounce rate means most visitors are viewing only one page and then immediately leaving your website.  

Benchmarks

Bounce Rate: 40-60% is ideal

Are members converting?

Common conversions on an association website are email signups and downloads. Ensure you’re tracking these within your analytics systems so you can see if your members and prospective members are signing up for your emails or downloading your content. The more conversions you have the better engaged your audience is. 

Benchmarks

Conversion Rate: 2% is very good 

What can I do to improve member signup and retention? 

Optimize channels that are key drivers of site traffic and boost lower-performing channels. Craft engaging content and clear calls to action for conversions. Address any breakpoints on the site and build a seamless member experience. By addressing these areas, you can create incredible user experiences for your members that help them find what they need and help you achieve your digital goals. 

Note: Benchmarks for this post have been compiled from Rank Monsters' Website Analytics Benchmarks and from client analytics data.

By following this process and revisiting these questions and benchmarks, your association can better understand its members to provide them with more impactful content. Learn more about our website behavior analytics services or our experience working with associations. You can also contact us with any questions about how you can leverage your website analytics more effectively.