Once they are there, how are you tracking them? How do you know your efforts are effective?
There are a few key website metrics to track in order to help you to optimize your marketing efforts, understand how the site is doing, continuously improve your website, and to allow you to report to others in your company about where the focus of marketing needs to lie.
First off, you need to determine what your goals are per marketing activity. How are you performing on these goals now? What are doing to affect those goals? How will you measure it? Identify not only your main conversions, like a form completion or a purchase, but soft conversions like a newsletter sign-up or a PDF download.
Next, either review your metrics based on these items or put in these metrics to track moving forward.
Here are some commonly reviewed and important items to track. Most of these will be familiar to you, but #6 can be a game changer!
1. Time on Site
This metric allows you to see an aggregate of how long your audience spends on your site. If your site is centered around exploration and information, you will want this number to increase over time.
2. Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit your site, but only visit one page and then leave. Google Analytics defines it as the user only visiting the site for 0 seconds, then they exit. This means they see one page of your site, but the analytics does not have enough time to trigger a duration of their session.
Several reports lean towards an “Acceptable” bounce rate can range between 26 to 70%. But this is a large range across multiple industries. Look deeper to learn what is considered “acceptable” in your industry, because a high bounce rate absolutely depends on your industry and the goals of your site. For example, if you are a restaurant and the visitor simply visits to grab your phone number, then you have reached your goal!
This should be looked at in combination with the other analytics in this article, since looking at the bounce rate alone will not tell you an accurate story. Researching a good bounce rate for your website type and industry is fantastic, but also look to see where you are today and then focus on reducing it (if appropriate).
3. Number of Pages visited
Again, if your site is more informational and built to provide a “next step” for exploration with your users, than you will want this metric to increase. If the number is closer to 1, but you focus all your traffic to a single page, than you should look deeper into that single page’s analytics, before you are concerned with this number.
4. New vs Returning Visitors
In Google Analytics, there is an overlap in these numbers. “New Visitor” is a unique visitor visiting your site for the first time, on a specific device. If you visit a site once on your phone, then again on your desktop, you will be counted as 2 new visitors.
Once the visitor visits your site again, on a device they already used, they will be counted as a, “Returning Visitor” for the next two years (then the clock starts over again).
This could be a great metric to use when you are running a campaign in different areas or industries, for example. If you pay close attention, you can see which campaigns garnered more new traffic.
5. Traffic Sources
Analytics programs will report to you where your traffic is coming from, which illuminates the more and less popular sources. It will also provide you referral sites, which helps you to see your ROI if you partner with others to send traffic to your site.
Seeing how each traffic source performs for you will continue you on the path of honing what works well for you (and what does not).
6. Search
The most crucial advice we provide our clients is to track your in-site search.
This is done as an admin in your “view settings” for Google Analytics. The reason this is so very powerful is it provides you exactly what your visitors want from your site.
A behavioral studies from the Nielsen Group and other research findings show that more than 50% of people visiting a start page on a website go straight to the internal search box in order to navigate. Those figures prove that search box becomes essential navigation tool on every website.
From this data, you can organize, adjust or create your content plan. You can revamp your navigation or the order at which content is laid out on your site. You can write relevant FAQs or shift your focus from one audience group to another. The reason this can be so compelling for your business is because you are directly answering the needs of your audience.
These will get you started!
Many more metrics exist which can help you to analyze your effectiveness in your marketing tools and traffic sources, but these six are the best ones with which to start. Once you have defined what is important for you, continue to review your analytics over the course of time so you can continually optimize your site’s effectiveness.
Your website is a living and breathing entity that needs nurture and care to continue its growth and work harder for your business. If you need help with a strategy to define and determine which website metrics to track, contact us. We’d be glad to help.
