Important Website Metrics Your Business Should Track

Website metrics are sets of data that show the performance of your site in various ways. There are many different things you can do with this data. For example, you can use it to ensure that your site is performing optimally.

Yet with so much data that can be gathered via digital channels, how do you know what information is important and why? To understand this, you need to realize that there are two types of important metrics you need to distinguish between.

The first is data that pertain to the performance of your website, while the second important set is more about your business performance. Understanding metrics like this and how to source and leverage on the data is vital for online success.

Why is Website Performance Important?

Websites that perform poorly will tend to not attract as many customers, lose more potential customers, and affect the reputation of the business owner. Let’s take a closer look at how these three areas can impact your business.

Today’s customer is more tech-savvy and thanks increasingly powerful digital devices and Internet speeds, they have become less patient. Did you know that

• 53% of visitors will abandon a mobile website taking more than three seconds to load.
• Every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%.

Aside from that, search engines today are also smarter and will try to divert visitors not only to sites with better content, but also those which perform better. This means that if your site is slow it will affect one of your key avenues of lead generation.

Finally, there is the brand impact to consider. Imagine a customer who is trying to use your website and getting frustrated by slow loading pages. The customer is not isolated and many today often turn to social networks to voice their frustrations not just loudly “ but in full public view.

Because of these reasons, you need to ensure that your website performance is optimal. Consider the data you need to monitor to ensure that this happens as your core metrics.

Tracking Core Metrics

Although there are several metrics that many people will consider important, the ones that pertain most keenly to your website performance are server response speed and uptime. The first directly impacts how quickly your site can load, while the latter shows how reliable your site is.

Server Response Speed

The first thing to realize is that server response speed and website load speed are not the same. The server response speed is a subset of overall load speed. This speed is important because it is something that you have little control over “ except in your choice of web host.

A partnership with a good web hosting solutions provider can mean the difference between consistently stable server response speeds and irregular performance. Keeping an eye on this will allow you to quickly notify your hosting provider if you notice something out of the ordinary.

Uptime

Having the fastest site in the world is great but this needs to be paired with reliability. Your website needs to be available to customers at any time, all the time. If your site isn’t available, they will simply be going to a site owned by a competitor.

Keeping an eye on these two key metrics serves as an indicator of whether you might have no choice but to migrate your site to an alternate service provider if your host is not able to live up to expectations.

Planning for Best Performance

Before deciding to make a move, try to find the right web hosting service provider to work with moving forward. There are some great websites that you can use as resources such as TrustPilot and Bitcatcha.

 

TrustPilot relies heavily on user feedback on services to offer a better idea of what to expect from those companies. Although this might not be the most accurate way of judging a service, it works by consensus if you’re willing to spend the time to read through many user reviews.

Bitcatcha, on the other hand, is a fantastic resource that is able to check server response speed from 10 different locations. The best part is you can get more detailed information such as first contentful paint (LCP) and total block time (TBT) – useful for SEO optimization.

Business Metrics Come Next

Now that you know your core metrics, it’s time to see how other website metrics can help improve your business.

1. Website traffic

There is a reason why almost all website owners obsess over their traffic and that is because it is one of the most basic indicators of success. Your website visitors are potential customers. In sales speak, they are your leads. The more leads you have, the more sales you will be likely to have.

 

Tracking how many website visitors you get is one of the easiest things to do. All you need is to make use of a tool. One of the most common tools you can use for this is Google Analytics. This powerful (and free) tool from the king of the search will allow you to track many different performance figures for your site.

Tip: Tracking your website visitor volume can also help act as an indicator of the success of any campaigns you might have executed. As a very basic example of this, let’s say you observe a significant increase in website traffic after your post and article about a product. This might be an indicator of interest in that area. If not, you can try something else.

These numbers may not tell you everything you need to know about your potential customers, but it is a good way of estimating the general health of the website.

2. Conversion Rate

Once you’ve gotten used to keeping track of the volume of website visitors, you next need to know how successful you are in turning them into paying customers “ and what influenced them. To learn this, you need to know at what point they decided to do what you wanted them to.

For example, if you need customers to fill out a form, the conversion rate is how successful you are at doing that. Knowing at what point they decided to do so can help you funnel your traffic more effectively.

By comparing the success rates of various pages, you can concurrently build and test various strategies at the same time. Also, you can remove pages that have very low conversion rates, so you don’t have to spend the resources in maintaining them.

You can track conversion rates in Google Analytics as well, but it requires some additional effort to get to work. In your Google Analytics dashboard, you need to create and track each event you want to monitor.

3. Bounce Rate

What is Bounce Rate? Just as you should be interested in how many visitors you get, knowing how many of them bounce’ can also be useful. Traffic bounces’ are the equivalent of someone walking into a store and leaving again just as they step in the door.

There are many reasons why traffic bounces, none of them a good indicator for your site. Visitors could be leaving quickly as; they content they arrived at wasn’t what they were looking for, the website performs poorly or is hard to navigate, or even if there is nothing readily of interest to them around.

Although it’s impossible to bounce down to nothing, knowing what these people are looking for and addressing those issues might help you reduce it. Again, Google Analytics will also help you keep track of the bounce rate.

4. Time on Page

Knowing how many visitors are accessing content is one thing, but another good indicator of performance is getting to know how much time they spend on each page. The longer they dwell, the more likely it is that you’ve managed to keep them interested.

 

This metric can help you assess the quality of your content on each page and help you adjust lower-impact pages for optimal engagement. Consider what it would take to keep a visitor on each page longer and establish an average time on page that you want to work towards achieving.

5. Returning Visitors

Once you’ve started using Google Analytics and explored the dashboard a little, you will notice that there is another metric called Returning visitors. This is important since not many visitors will make a purchase on their first visit.

By keeping an eye on your returning visitors, you can get a better gauge of how likely they are to buy. Also, visitors that return many times but still have not yet made a purchase may be considering something. If you’re able to address their concerns, you will be able to convert a lead to a solid sale.

Tip: Make use of gated content to get more solid leads. Gated content is anything that requires your visitors to fill out a form to access. Craft a solid hook for your gated content to get your reader’s information for extended marketing use.

6. Backlinks Analytics

A backlink is when another website links to a page on your site. Although this does sometimes provide some traffic for you directly, the larger value it creates is in improving your backlink profile. Backlinks are one of the ways in which search engines like Google measure the quality of your content. The more backlinks your site gets, the more likely it is to get improved search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, this is something you can’t easily track in Google. Yet because backlinks are such a big thing in the war for search engine ranking, there are a ton of tools that you can use to get very detailed information on your backlinks.

 

One very powerful tool is Ahrefs, which enables complete Search Engine Optimization analysis. Aside from telling you information about your own site, you can use it to carry out competitor analysis as well. This can help you work towards a stronger content strategy if you feel that you aren’t getting enough traffic for some products.

This leads us to the next metric, which is related in a way;

7. Search Engine Rankings

If you were to think of this from a big picture’ point of view, there isn’t much to think about. Where search engine metrics come into play is when you drill down to individual content pages (which might be your product pages).

The reason why you want to keep an eye on how high each content page ranks on search is that it is a very strong indicator of how well you can draw traffic in with those pages. Let’s take for example if you have five product pages.

By monitoring just these five pages ranking on search, you can effectively work towards pushing them higher for better traffic. The movement in search rankings also tends to change as other factors come into play, so even if you get onto the top 10, keeping an eye on them will ensure you can adjust your strategy if you notice a drop.

Again, this is something that you can do with Ahrefs or if you prefer, another choice would be SEMrush.

Conclusion: Know Your Customers

Tracking, understanding, and optimizing your traffic is the digital equivalent of knowing your customers. Before that, always remember that the foundation of your website traffic is based on how well your site performs in the first place.

By using resources like TrustPilot and Bitcatcha, you can work towards establishing a strong partnership with a potential web hosting provider. Leveraging resources like this can help you avoid costly mistakes when choosing a web hosting partner in the first place.

It will give your website the strong foundation it needs to grow with. After that, it’s a matter of choosing the right tools to track data you can analyze to streamline digital operations. The data generated by your website is your best source of crafting informed decisions for your digital assets.

Gather it, sift through it carefully, and you can absorb new or better workflow in your business.