Understanding which website metrics are important to track, and which ones you can forget about, can be tricky.
The health of your business and website can often depend on it!
So:
If you aren’t already tracking your key website metrics, then this post is the one for you.
Your key website metrics should help you to analyse everything from sales volume, to how many minutes visitors are spending on your site.
And:
Where they’re going, what they’re doing, and give you insights on how you can improve your website’s customer journey and overall experience.
Therefore, it’s essential to know your numbers, and identify which metrics are most important to track for your business. Everyone is different!
Not only can tracking your website metrics lead to improving your website performance, but it can increase your visitor engagement and click-through rates, meaning more sales and sign-ups for you.
This blog post will cover 11 website metrics we think should be at the top of your tracking list, in order to improve your website based on visitor needs, and boost overall engagement.
Let’s get started…
What Are Website Metrics?
Most important of all, you need to know what website metrics are.
They are best explained as indicators to check exactly how your website is performing, helping to investigate if the website experience you are offering to visitors is good enough!
If your business is on the smaller side, website metrics are equally as important and it may be useful to record them using Google Sheets or Excel to keep all of your information in one place.
Alternatively, you can easily make a Google Data Studio Dashboard for free, that shows you all of your leading indicators in one place.
For businesses with higher volumes of metric information to keep track of, using a marketing automation tool such as Zapier can help to organise the data for each metric for you.
Ultimately, for your business to continue to improve, gaining visitors and boosting engagement, analysing metrics is the best approach to understand operations and detect any potential obstacles within a customer’s website journey.
Now, you may already be tracking leads or website visits, but analysing page views, click-through rates, and exit pages can be even more beneficial for your business website.
But more importantly:
Don’t focus on trying to measure all of your website metrics all at once. That’s a sure fire way to drive yourself insane!
But focus on a few at a time instead, as this allows you to solve the more time-sensitive problems first.
Before we dive into the metrics, let’s run through exactly how to track them!
How to Track Your Key Website Metrics
We will keep this section short and sweet as tracking metrics may be second nature to you, but we thought it important to include a ‘How to’ section just in case.
In order to track metrics and keep an eye on how your customers are interacting with your website, implementing analytics tools can be useful.
Using tools to track metrics allows you to see exactly how users are behaving on your website, for example which pages are most visited, or using transaction data to work out which pages drive the most sales.
Some tools work better than others, and some software’s offer free and paid options so it’s important to explore different options.
To begin with, we suggest taking a look at options from the list below:
- Google Analytics
- Oribi
- Hotjar
These tools should do the work for you as they will collate the website data and from there you can make changes accordingly to improve each customer’s journey.
Now that’s been covered, let’s get into 11 website metrics you should focus on, and track as a marketer.
Bounce Rate
Let’s start off with Bounce rate.
In a nutshell, this is the percentage of visitors who load one page on your website, then leave without interacting with your website any further.
Hence the term bounce, as visitors bounce off your website, and go elsewhere.
Therefore, a high bounce rate can often equal poor website performance. So, as a marketer it’s important that you identify why visitors are clicking off your website, by finding the pages with the highest bounce rates.
It may be that your website navigation is confusing, or perhaps your site doesn’t offer enough in terms of design and content compared to others, knowing these areas means it’s easy to act on them and improve.
The most likely causes of bounce rate are;
- Low-quality content
- Extended loading time
- Error 404
- No CTA
- Inaccurate Descriptions
This is where we’d start to fix them…
How to Track and Improve
First of all, comparing the pages on your site with both high and low bounce rates, will help you to identify where you are going wrong.
You can get this data straight out of Google Analytics by going to Audience > Overview, and then bounce rate should appear among other metrics such as, average session duration and page views.
These comparisons will highlight what can be removed, and what can be improved, as you can analyse what it is specifically that is causing visitors to bounce.
Think of user intent.
- What do the people visiting this page want to get out of it?
- Are we serving that intent?
- And what can we do to serve that intent even better?
If your bounce rate remains high, it means your potential leads are probably going elsewhere for their information.
Improving on these bounce rates may include setting up external links to open your pages in new tabs, or improving page load time to keep your visitors’ attention.
Page Views
This metric is as simple as it sounds, and helps you to measure the number of times a page on your website is seen by a visitor.
This includes reloading the same page, as any time a page is reloaded this counts as a separate page view.
This can be useful for measuring return visitors too (which we will dive into later in this post!), as it helps to highlight which visitors are returning on separate occasions, and which visitors are just reloading the same page several times.
Page views can be particularly useful if you are looking to track traffic to a singular webpage.
For example, your overall website visits one month may be pretty normal, however when you analyse individual pages, you may see that a lot of page views were on your pricing page or your blog.
This can help you to identify which pages are working well as part of your customer journey (getting people to make a purchase or sign up for a free trial), and which pages aren’t attracting a lot of traffic.
How to Track and Improve
If your views are spiking upwards consistently this is a sign that your SEO, marketing and brand efforts are successful.
However, high page views can be positive or negative for this metric in particular, as it could indicate either a great engaging piece of content, or site loading issues.
Fewer page views then, may not always be a negative as it may mean your site is easy to navigate and visitors are able to get to the page they need with no extra added fuss!
It depends on the nature of your website and your marketing funnel.
If you’re in B2B sales and marketing, then your probably want people to journey through the site, get to know you, then reach out. Assumedly, that’s more page views. If you’re in ecommerce though, the fewer pages the better, from interest to check out.
Investigating your page view metrics can help you to understand what is working and popular in your target demographic and means you can improve on these aspects, perhaps by creating eye-catching headlines or link through easily to other related pages on your site.
This is why keeping track of your website metrics is vital, to ensure you aren’t missing any site problems that may be directing visitors to find their information elsewhere.
Average Session Duration
Now onto session duration.
A session consists of a group of interactions with your page in a set time period.
For example:
A session is equal to one visit to your site, which could be a single-page visit or perhaps exploring your site further (which is your goal!).
This metric helps you to track how long users spend on your site on average, and can be calculated by dividing the number of sessions over a set time period, by the amount of time spent on your site in the same period.
How to Track and Improve
Calculating average session duration helps you to get a better picture of your audience engagement, which allows you to further optimise your website getting those visitors to stay put and explore everything you have to offer.
Whether this is improving your content such as blogs and videos, or dedicating some time to ensuring your load time is efficient and your website is easy to navigate, all of these strategies can help to increase your visitors session duration.
Average Time on Page
Stay with us, we know this looks fairly similar to the last section, but average time on page is the metric that tracks exactly how long visitors spend on each web page.
This is a brilliant insight into how engaging your content is, as the longer you hold your visitors’ attention, the better.
By providing quality content, you are attracting quality visitors who want access to your content and are interested in your product, services and what you have to say.
How to Track and Improve
Again this metric is all about context, as for your long-form content such as blogs, or longer videos you want your visitors to stay on your page longer, or at least until they’ve finished reading or watching!
It’s important to think about updating your content regularly to increase the average time on each page.
You need to give visitors a reason to stay longer, by meeting search intent and optimising everything on your site to meet demographic demand.
This way visitors want to stay on your site longer, and therefore you’re more likely to get yourself a lead.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate or CVR is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your page.
Whether you want visitors to fill out a specific form, or sign up for a free trial the higher the CVR, the better.
However, before you can begin to track and improve upon your conversion rate, it is important to set up a tool such as Google Analytics, as Goal Conversion Rate can be tracked within this software.
You can access goals under: Conversion > Goals > Overview, and Google Analytics will calculate: the number of goal conversions divided by the number of sessions.
This will give you an insight into the actions your website visitors did or didn’t take, and which CTA’s produce the most conversions for you.
How to Track and Improve
Your website probably has a whole host of calls to action or CTA’s, and this can be an advantage, as you can compare the CVR from all of them to see what works best!
For CTA’s that aren’t performing well, this metric can be useful to identify them and improve on them, by tailoring your offer to your target audience more effectively.
This can help to remove the friction for your visitors as it may be that the placement of your CTA doesn’t correspond with the content, or the navigation of the form or link is confusing.
Conversion rate can be split into sections in itself:
- Visitor to lead
- Lead to customer
- Customer to visitor
This allows you to identify areas for improvement and which CTA’s are gaining the most attraction, and completed actions.
Traffic Sources
Visitors will reach your page through multiple unique ways, and this metric helps you to explore where exactly the majority of your visitors are coming from.
This could range from organic search to email marketing, however you want to ensure visitors are getting to your page in the most direct way possible.
Focussing on organic and direct search is a great place to start, as this means customers have your website URL bookmarked or saved for later on their device, or have found your site through Google Search, avoiding paid ad placement along the way.
How to Track and Improve
You should be paying attention to which traffic sources convert visitors to your site successfully, and improve on the methods that are perhaps lacking in some way.
For example, if your direct and organic searches are bringing a huge host of visitors to your site regularly, it may be that you need to focus more time into including links to your site into your email marketing strategy.
This helps to ensure you’re pulling visitors to your site through every avenue possible, as the more links that are available to your target demographic, the more likely they are to come and have a look around your site.
Again, comparison is here to help, as comparing traffic sources with one another can help you to identify gaps and investigate why one source may not be working.
Revenue Attribution
Next up is CVR’s partner in crime, as revenue attribution follows visitors through their journey from landing onto your site, right up to the point of purchase or sign-up.
This metric helps you to keep on top of which of your marketing strategies generate revenue and how much they are bringing in!
You can measure which channels and assets are creating sales opportunities and working best to provide you with revenue, time and time again.
How to Track and Improve
Basically revenue attribution is another metric that provides you with evidence of what you need to invest your time into.
Whether your social channels are successful at directing visitors to making a purchase, or a long-form blog post provides links to get visitors through to the purchase point, tracking this metric allows you to see which methods generate the most sales.
Overall, attribution reports help to show which pages drive more conversions, so you can plan your efforts and budget accordingly, plugging more into some methods over others if they are effective in creating revenue for your business.
Event Tracking
Events in this circumstance are actions such as clicking a link, or playing a video, and are central to getting visitors to those all important CTA’s.
There is no single metric that can be branded more important than the others, as all website metrics can be identified and optimised to direct visitors to the important actions you want them to take.
How to Track and Improve
You need to target your events to your audience, so it’s important to discover what people are interested in, what they’re ignoring and what information they are looking for.
For example, if you know your visitors aren’t clicking through to fill out your form, you need to identify if this is because they aren’t interested, or if there is a problem with the form.
If you are late picking up on issues you’ll find that when you analyse your website metrics that they will stand out among your data, so get ahead and make sure all of your actions are up to date and seamless on your site.
This will help to stop visitors getting stuck and abandoning ship all together, as that’s the last thing you want to happen.
In summary, to increase event completions you need to investigate problems and remove barriers for visitors to ensure they aren’t leaving your site early and going elsewhere!
Average Pageviews per Session
The more pages that each visitor clicks through to, the more likely it is they are enjoying your content and want to know more.
This metric is a great tool for understanding whether your website visitors are sticking to one single page, or exploring a number of pages on your site to access more information.
How to Track and Improve
Now there isn’t a general rule for this metric as remember, a lower amount of page views isn’t necessarily a bad thing!
Blog or video content is generally longer, therefore people tend to spend longer on these pages getting the information they need rather than clicking through or loading various different pages of your site.
It’s a good idea to dig into this metric to see what pages visitors land on and what is leading them to exit each page either to a new page of yours, or a different site altogether.
For example, if visitors are clicking through to a certain point then leaving your site, is there something missing?
It’s vital to incorporate more prompts on each page to get visitors to explore your site further by linking through to other pages such as product catalogues or more long-form content.
This way visitors stay with you for longer, as you are providing them with the information they need all in one place.
Number of Visitors
This one may seem obvious, however it’s an important metric to keep in mind.
First and foremost, without traffic to your site all other website metrics will become increasingly difficult to understand and analyse, that’s why it’s important to attract visitors to your site.
In order to attract more visitors try creating more engaging content relevant to your audience or prioritising SEO to get your content and posts to the top of your target audiences search.
How to Track and Improve
Once your website visitor numbers have increased, you need to keep on top of this to avoid losing your audience to other competing pages.
To combat this, try running ad campaigns to attract more visitors, or create a content strategy plan to ensure you have content going out on your site consistently.
This way, your name is always appearing in searches containing the relevant keywords and search terms linked to the needs and searches of your target demographic
If you are getting an increased amount of visitor numbers according to your metrics, try monitoring your return visitor metric too as this allows you to see if visitors are coming back and means you can target your content to them.
Exit Pages
Everyone has to leave your website at some point, but tracking your exit pages allows you to prolong your target audience’s visits for as long as possible.
Tracking exit pages essentially means understanding which pages are the last ones visitors engage with before they leave.
This can help you to improve on those pages that may be lacking in CTA’s, or the correct information visitors are looking for.
How the Track and Improve
To improve these pages, pay close attention to the pages with the highest exit rate and ask yourself, why are visitors leaving after viewing this page in particular?
Rather than having visitors leave the pages you don’t expect, make sure they leave on the intended exit pages including messages such as:
- Thank you
- Sign-up
- Checkout
- Download
This means that visitors have already completed the desired action, and their visit to your page has been successful.
To do this it’s useful to compare high and low exit rate pages to identify what is going wrong, then add in extra internal links or pop-ups directing visitors to CTA’s before they leave.
11 Website Metrics That Every Marketer Should Track
And there we have it, 11 website metrics that we think you should be tracking in order to improve your website experience for your target audience.
While your business may already be tracking metrics to a certain extent, there are always new metrics to analyse to improve your site and keep issues from going unsolved.
Simple metrics such as bounce rate can be vital to understanding where you are going wrong on certain pages, and improving your content or internal link strategies.
After all, the goal is to keep visitors on your site until they sign-up, download, or reach the point of purchase.
At Canny, we offer a range of services from website and brand design, to helping with your content strategy, meaning we can help to enhance your sales and marketing efforts.
Get in touch with us, and we can help to boost your content and web design to ensure that you connect with your customers, and keep your target audience engaged.
