Top Website Metrics for Monitoring Success

Now that your new website is live on the internet, you will want to monitor the website metrics to determine how it’s performing.

However, you will encounter a vast array of metrics and a screen replete with confusing numbers and charts. Here are some tips on which metrics to focus on and how to use those metrics to improve performance.

Let’s take a look at the big picture first and answer these two questions:

1. Who is your target audience? Understand who you are trying to reach with your website content. This includes:
   Demographic information such as their location, age, gender, education, and income level
   Psychographic information such as interests, lifestyle, and values
2. What is your conversion goal? A conversion goal measures visitors’ actions on your website. Examples include:
   Submitting an online form or call for a price estimate;
   Buying a product or service.

It is crucial that you carefully create your website sales funnel. Once you have answered the two questions above, you can analyze the website metrics.

Which Website Metrics are Most Important?

Which metrics are important and where will you find them? If you have a WordPress.com site, these statistics are built-in to provide you basic metrics. If you want to dive deeper, you can upgrade the account and install the Google Analytics plugin.

If you are a larger business with a more complex website, we still recommend that you start with these metrics for a foundation to understanding how your website is performing.

1. Total traffic. How many total pageviews does your website receive? Is the number trending upward or downward? Are there any seasonal fluctuations? What geographic location is your traffic coming from? Within that data, be sure you distinguish between pageviews, users, and sessions, since these specific stats can provide you with valuable information.
2. Traffic source. What sources are driving your traffic? How many organic Google searches lead to your website? Look at Inbound links from other sites and paid traffic from digital ads? Social media should also drive traffic to your website.
3. Time on site. How much time are visitors spending on your site? The more time they’re spending, the more engaging your content is to your target audience, and the more likely you are to convert that visitor to a paying customer.
4. Bounce rate. What percentage of people leave your site after viewing one page? If 100 people come to your homepage, and 80 of them leave the site without clicking on another page, your homepage has a 80 percent “bounce rate.” However, if your product page has a 50 percent bounce rate, you might analyze whether paid ads that direct traffic to your product page perform better compared to ads that link to your homepage.
5. Top performers for posts and pages. What pages or blog posts on your site generate the most traffic? If specific categories or tags on your blog posts are generating more traffic than others, you should create more of those posts.
6. Conversion by traffic source. Is traffic generated by your promoted pins on Pinterest converting to sales at a much higher rate than traffic from your Facebook ads? If so, you might want to allocate more of your ad budget to Pinterest. Use the customer lifetime value (CLV), or you risk spending more money to make a new customer than a new customer is actually worth to your business.

Now you have your target customers, your objectives when they visit your website, and metrics to measure your sites performance in relation to your objectives. Use the metrics to make continual improvements to your site and your business’s profitability.