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As the franchise discovery process, like most interactions, continues to move online, franchisors and web developers are finding creative new ways of optimizing their development sites to increase traffic and drive conversions. A host of new design elements are making development sites more functional, compelling and easy to use than ever before, and franchisors are increasingly seeing a larger percentage of their leads coming from their development sites.

But how can you know just how effective your franchise development site is? Once the site is built and the developer has moved onto their next project, where do you look to make sure your site is maximally productive? 

According to Michael Palm, Senior Project Manager, Digital at franchise marketing and PR agency No Limit Agency* [No Limit Agency is a sister company to 1851 Franchise], there are five key performance indicators that can tell you almost everything you need to know about the effectiveness of your development site. 

If you are looking to measure the strength of your franchise development, here&rsquo;s where you need to look.

1. Page views

Palm: First and foremost, you need eyeballs on the site. If you&#39;re not seeing any traffic, then it&#39;s probably time to think about updating your overall marketing strategy. Google Adwords and remarketing campaigns, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads and PR should all be working toward bringing traffic to your site. 

2. Contact form conversions

Palm: Once you&rsquo;ve got a steady flow of traffic to your site, the most important KPI is contact form conversions, meaning how many users are submitting a contact or inquiry form after they&rsquo;ve arrived on the site. A good barometer is to shoot for above a 0.5-percent conversion rate (1 out of 200 users). Anything below that and it&#39;s probably time to consider a new UI/UX for your development site. 

3. Bounce rate

Palm: This is an important metric if you have a multi-page site. Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A bounce rate above 65 percent could be a sign that your homepage needs more engaging content or an updated design and better user experience. This metric does not apply to one-page experience development sites. 

4. SEO ranking and visibility

Palm: If SEO is part of your marketing strategy, then making sure your website is ranked on the first page for your targeted keywords is a must. If you have wide keyword targeting, then a multi-page site is recommended. One of the benefits of a multi-page site is that every page is a new opportunity to position (rank) to target a specific audience. If simplicity, user-experience, contact form conversions and narrow keyword targets are your goals, then a single-page experience is probably the answer. Just don&#39;t expect a wide range of keyword rankings in terms of SEO.

5. Average session duration

Palm: Measured either as the typical amount of time that a visitor spends on a page or on your site as a whole, average session duration is an important indicator of the strength of your development site. Lower durations often mean visitors are losing interest or being directed away from your page, but if you have a landing page with a few paragraphs of text and lots of imagery, a user could consume the information quickly. In that event, a low session duration could mean you&rsquo;ve created user-friendly content, which is a great thing. If you have a long, scrolling, one-page website that goes into detail about your franchise offering and it has an average session duration of 15 seconds, you know something is off.

The 5 Most Important KPIs for Franchise Development Websites

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