When it comes to running your company’s website, it can be challenging to see what you need to improve and how you need to improve it. Looking at a Google Analytics page can be confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The trouble is, those website metrics are important. In fact, they’re essential to increasing your company’s brand and its revenue.
What are Website Metrics?
According to WebFX, website metrics is the term you use to measure your website’s performance.
Data in website metrics includes everything about the traffic that visits your website. Through website metrics, you find out if that traffic is organic or paid for, the bounce rate for visitors, the top pages viewed, and more.
But the website metrics are just the numbers…
What Website Analytics Do
When you take that data and analyze it to determine the behavior of the visitors to your website, you start getting into website analytics.
Website analytics takes the website metrics that you have gathered one step further. It creates a customer and habits for that customer. It helps you identify the web activity of that customer.
Why Website Analytics is Important
When you understand the customer, you can begin to see the flaws in your sales journey.
Analyzing the metrics can tell you where you’re losing customers.
For example, if your email campaign has a 50% click-through rate, it means that 50% of the people who open your email end up on your website on one page or another.
However, if your site also has a 75% bounce rate, that means that once those people arrive at your website, they aren’t staying long. They look at one page, and then they leave. Likely, you have to improve your landing page, or you have to improve the way you direct them to other pages.
In this way, website analytics helps you identify the website’s problem areas that you can focus on.
Website Metrics to Measure
There are dozens and dozens of website metrics available to you. However, some are more important than others. Below are some of the most important metrics to analyze as you look at your website.
Unique Visits
Unique visits are one of the most basic measurements. This tells you how many people are visiting your website.
Unique visits count every connection from a unique internet connection.
If your unique visits count is low, your website isn’t getting much traffic.
You need to improve your website’s SEO to generate more organic traffic. One of the best ways to do that is to create content for your site through something like blog posts. Content generates SEO-friendly material, which in turn generates organic traffic.
Average Duration of Visit
The average duration of a visit is how long someone spends on your website. If the average duration of visit is 10 seconds, people are leaving your site fairly quickly. They don’t find your website interesting enough to explore further, or your website isn’t loading fast enough, and they’re fed up with waiting.
Look at the speed of your website and evaluate your landing page (usually the home page) to determine if you can make improvements.
Conversely, if the average duration of visit is several minutes, then it means that your website is doing well in keeping visitors engaged.
Remember, the longer a visitor is on your site, the better your chance of making a sale.
Page Views Per Session
Page views per session measures the average number of different pages a person visits during a stop on your website. If they view one page and then leave your site, there’s room for improvement.
Consider adding links to other articles the visitor might be interested in on blog pages. On the homepage, add links to your latest blog posts or most viewed blog posts so people will navigate to your blog. Find ways to make it easy for them to navigate through your website.
If the visitor visits multiple pages before leaving your site, you’re offering great information. You have piqued their curiosity enough that they want to navigate to other pages on your site. Well done!
Average Time on Page
Similar to average duration of visit, the average time on page measures how long a visitor stays on a single page.
You can use the same standards as the average duration of visit to determine whether that page is productive or could use improvement.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures how many people look at a single page on your website before leaving the site entirely.
Much like page views per session, if you have a high bounce rate, you need to make sure blog posts link to other blog posts people might be interested in. In terms of the homepage, make sure it’s linked to other interesting content.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates measure active efforts to connect with your business. This can be everything from making the sale to signing up for an email list to completing a form. This is an active effort by the visitor to continue contact with your business.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic measures the percentage of visitors visiting your website from organic searches. That means that they were searching for something through a search engine like Google and your site showed up in the search results. Through that, they clicked on your website.
Organic traffic is one of the most valuable types of traffic for your website, in part because it’s free.
Additionally, organic traffic drives more warm business to your website. These people actively searched for something through a search engine and then came across your website. You have the information they are looking for.
Devices Used
The devices used metric can help you identify how people are accessing your website and potential flaws in the way your website appears to other people.
With more and more people accessing websites through mobile devices, if your website is not properly configured to be mobile-friendly, it could contribute to your bounce rate or the average time on page.
For details on creating mobile-friendly content and website connections, check out this previous post here.
Website Speed
Website speed is another good way to identify if something other than your content contributes to a high bounce rate or low average time on page.
Website speed tells you how long it takes for your website to load for a user. A good website speed is approximately 2-3 seconds. Anything over 5 seconds is something that needs to be fixed.
Images are one of the biggest reasons that a website loads slowly. Optimize your images by making sure you’re using smaller file sizes. JPEGs are better than GIFs or PNGs. Also, you may need to resize your file because it’s too large.
Broken Links
Broken links are the number of links on your website that don’t direct to an existing page. Usually, they link to a 404 error, or you see “Page Not Found” when you follow the link. That’s not a good sign for search engines.
Too many broken links tell a search engine that your site may not be credible or up to date. Your site is less likely to appear at the top of search results when there are too many broken links, negatively impacting your ability to drive organic traffic.
Measuring Website Performance
Other metrics to consider when analyzing your website include keyword rankings, backlinks, and top search sources.
Keyword rankings tell you which keywords your site ranks for on search engines like Google and Bing.
Meanwhile, backlinks tell you how many outside websites link to your site. This can help you improve the overall domain authority of your website.
And top search sources tell you where your traffic is coming from.
These data sources can help you cater to your target market or adjust your website to better cater to your target market.
Conclusion
While it may seem like a lot of work, a frequent audit of your website and adjustment can help build your business in the long run.
Whether justified or not, ranking higher in search engine results gives your business instant credibility with the person searching. Most of us rely on Google or Bing to rank the search results from best to worst.
Your goal is to appear at the top or near the top of those search results every time.
Written by Erika Towne
For other tips on how to keep your website healthy and productive, check out this previous post here.