5 website metrics to analyze to get you started:
You have a website and that’s a great place to start, but now you’re wondering how it’s performing? Is it converting your visitors like you want to? How is the site speed? Are people leaving upon entry? Are they interacting with your CTA’s (Calls to Actions) like you want them to?
These are all important questions to have answered so you can know how well your website is performing, and how that is helping your business generate new leads and create more sales.
Fortunately, we have data and ways we can answer all of these questions! How great is that? I promise you that if you take the time to dive into your analytics, and find out what is and isn’t working, you will see an increase in the success of your business.
But what are the most important analytics that you should be looking at and why? Let’s dive into 5 important metrics that you should be looking for in your Google Analytics account.
1. Visitors
You need to know the type of traffic that is coming into your website. Visitors will tell you both how many total visits your website has, and also how many unique visitors it has. Unique visits are what I like to look at the most because that number represents the number of individuals that have visited your site.
For example, if visitor number 1 goes to your website on Tuesday, and then shows up every day for the next week it will still count as just one unique visitor. Meanwhile, your total visits will be 7 for the week. Thus, 1 unique visitor and 7 total visits.
Visitors are important because it shows you the size of the audience that you are attracting. The best part about this is you can sort by specific timeframes. This is great as you can see how a certain marketing campaign or promotion is affecting the amount of visitors to your website.
This can go a long way in helping you to understand how well your marketing strategy is working, and also how big your reach is.
2. Referrals
Of course, knowing where your visitors are coming from also can be pretty helpful I’d say huh? Referrals are great because it tells you how and where visitors are finding your website. This will track whether it was direct, a link from a blog post, an organic search, or from a social media platform.
Direct means the user typed in the url directly and will probably be the result of a returning visitor. Organic means they found you with some type of search query.
This is a great tool to find out where in your marketing you are having the most success. Is it through social media and your campaigns there? Maybe it’s the strength of your SEO and how high you are showing on search results. Perhaps your website resonated with users and you are getting a lot of direct traffic.
This will help you with your overall marketing strategy as you can narrow in your efforts on the strengths and weaknesses of your referral traffic.
3. Average Session Duration
Personally, I feel this is a really important metric to look at. What this metric does is measure the average length of time that a visitor spends on your website. This is important because it signals whether or not the visitor is finding content they deem valuable on your website.
Also, it can be a way of measuring your marketing funnels and making sure you are targeting the right audience for your website. You don’t want to attract visitors to your website that won’t find it interesting. You want to be targeting users that find your website valuable and may even decide to make a purchase from your website.
Make sure that you are looking at the amount of time spent per page as well. If a user is spending a lot of time on one page, that may indicate that there is too much information on that page. An exception of course is if that page is a blog post or has educational content.
Having each page not be too long and having them move through your website according to your website’s CTA’s and mapped out journey is important for conversions.
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate means how many of your website visitors came to your site, and then directly left after entering. This can mean they hit the back button or they closed out of your website.
This is an important metric because it tells you that the user probably didn’t find what they were looking for on your website. This can be for a lot of reasons but knowing the percentage of visitors that do this is important for your overall marketing attack.
Remember the average session duration before and how that helps tell you that your visitors are finding your content interesting? Well this is the metric that tells you they find it boring or not helpful.
You can combine this with your referrals and find out what source of traffic is resulting in the highest bounce rate. Then you can adjust accordingly and make sure you are targeting the right visitors with that platform.
You will never have a bounce rate of zero but getting it down is important for the success of the website and will help drive up the percentage of our next, but very important metric.
5. Conversion Rate
This is one of the most important metrics to accurately track because it tells you how many visitors are completing a goal on your website. This can be many things like filling out a contact form, subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase, or viewing the primary page you want viewed.
The higher the conversion rate, the more successful your website will be. You ultimately want as many conversions as possible and ensuring the previous 4 tips are executing properly will set your conversion rate up for success.
A low conversion rate will tell you that your visitors are not liking what they are seeing, or not getting enough value from your website. There are many reasons for this, but focusing on having a high conversion rate will be very helpful in making your website, and ultimately your business very successful.
Make sure you are designing and developing your website with primary and secondary goals so you can help guide your visitor to convert when they visit your website.
Conclusion
There are many other important metrics to look at as well like exit pages, top 10 pages, interactions per visit, and pageviews for example. However, I wanted to make sure that you take it one step at a time as it can be overwhelming to consume so much data.
These five metrics are what I consider to be the most important and the most telling of how well your website is performing. They all tell a story and are mixed with each other as you may have seen while reading the blog post.
You want to have a beautiful and well designed website, but you also want to focus on making it conversion centric. What good does a beautiful website do you if you aren’t attracting more leads or earning more revenue?
Have any questions? I’d be happy to answer questions to your specific needs and go over your website with a FREE website strategy call.
