Metrics hold invaluable insight into your website’s performance, and not analyzing them constantly and thoroughly will most likely put your online presence on the skids sooner or later.
Website metrics are much more and more nuanced than you might think, and together paint a full picture that reveals what’s working and what isn’t.
Pro Rank Tracker has compiled the 10 most important website metrics you absolutely have to track on a regular basis.
1] Value Per Visit
Value per visit is essential as it helps you gage the quality of your traffic. However, this metric can be quite hard to define as it’s often somewhat intangible.
While value per visit for e-commerce businesses is more straightforward and tangible as it’s usually tied to purchases, even though there are other types of value as well like comments and recommendations, for other businesses this metric is even harder to pin down.
A universal way to measure it, be it somewhat limited, is to divide the number of unique visitors by the money generated in a set period of time. This way, you’ll know roughly how much each visit is worth, and can respectively set a maximum cost per lead.
2] Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is basically your success rate, as in how often a visitor becomes a lead or a lead becomes a customer. Your conversion rate equals the number of unique visitors divided by number of conversions.
Analyzing and juxtaposing pages with contrasting conversion rates is a great way to see what’s working and what isn’t. Furthermore, you should look at the conversion rates of new and returning visitors separately in order to get a more nuanced understanding of successful and unsuccessful elements of your website.
3] Lead Generation Cost
Lead generation cost is the other side of the story you should never forget about when looking at your value per visit and conversion rates, regardless of how high they might be. If you’re spending too much money on generating leads, then you need to be more selective about your lead generation tactics.
4] Bounce Rate
The “bounce” in this context means a case of a visitor leaving a page very quickly or without interacting with it at all, so you want it as low as possible.
A high bounce rate can be attributed to poor traffic and/or issues like slow loading times, bad design, or landing pages that aren’t user-friendly or relevant.
5] Traffic Sources
There are three types of traffic sources: direct visitors, who type in your URL manually, search visitors, who go to your website by finding it in a search engine, and referral visitors, who end up on your website from another one.
Tracing back your visitors to the source is important for understanding what’s working. For example, if you don’t have a lot of direct visitors, this might mean your website address isn’t memorable, or certain adverts like billboards aren’t delivering.
6] User Demographics and Interests
This metric makes your audience profile a lot more detailed, which is something any business benefits from. The more you know about your visitors, the better you can anticipate and respond to their needs, as well as understand the reasons behind their reluctance to convert and how to overcome it.
7] Exit Pages
Those are the pages on which visitors leave your website and when examined in the context of the stage of the conversion process at which people leave, can allude to low-quality content, technical issues, or something else.
For example, for e-commerce businesses, the exit page is often equivalent to an abandoned shopping cart, which might mean the purchasing process isn’t user-friendly enough.
8] Top Pages
You always want to know what kind of content performs the best in order to generate more of it, as simple as that.
9] Average Session Duration
Generally speaking, the longer the average session duration, the better, as it’s usually attributed to the high value which visitors find. Plus, long session duration is something like the opposite of a high bounce rate, and is recognized by Google as a sign of the content’s quality and relevance to the search term and respectively rewarded with a higher ranking.
However, there can be another side to this story as well – sometimes, visitors stay longer because they’re struggling. Even though that’s not too likely since people often just leave in such cases, it’s worth looking at this metric together with interactions per visit.
10] Interactions Per Visit
Interactions here refers to comments, moving on to other pages, etc., so the more, the better, even though a lot of people don’t have the habit of commenting or might be on your website for something very specific.
Even so, it’s definitely worth monitoring as it can show you what kind of pages provoke more interactions.
There are some other insightful metrics out there, but for now, those will help you fill in the gaps and make efficient adjustments to your strategy.
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