Every marketer or business owner should know the best website metrics to track for growth. These benchmarks are crucial in assessing your marketing.
Without them, you won’t have an idea of whether or not your efforts are heading the right way. How can you tell if you’ve set up an effective website then?
To help you out, we’ll go over how to measure website performance today. You’ll learn about the metrics that matter, what they tell you, and more.
Metric 1: Organic search traffic
What it is: The number of users visiting your website after clicking on it in the search engine results pages (excluding paid search results).
How to find it:
Go to Reports > Leads > Traffic acquisition.
Why it matters: Organic search tells you how many people are actually ending up on your website through an organic search result that your website is ranking for. Obviously, higher numbers are better! If your organic search traffic is low, that may mean you’re not visible enough to click on/rank for on the search engines. It is sustainable and often perceived as higher credibility by the consumer v.s through paid search results.
Dive deeper: Set up google search console and identify the split between brand organic searches, generic searches, and the specific terms that are driving traffic to your site.
Increasing brand searches and traffic indicates a stronger awareness of your brand. Identifying specific search terms can also allow you to understand the consumer behaviour of your target audiences.
Metric 2: Traffic sources
What it is: The channels your site’s visitors are coming from.
How to see it:
Go to Google Analytics and select “Reports”.
Choose “Acquisition”.
Choose “Traffic acquisition”.
Why it matters: This tells you how people are ending up on your site. It’s a good way to figure out which marketing channels are most effective at sending people your way. Among other things, it can tell you what to focus on for your next campaign.
The usual channels are: Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Organic Social, Paid Social, Video and more.
Dive deeper: Leverage on UTMs whenever you can so you can better understand specific sources of traffic. For example, if you print a flyer and include a QR code, include UTM source = Offline, UTM medium = Flyer into your parameters to better track the quantity and quality of traffic from these channels.
Metric 3: Average session duration
What it is: How long the average visitor spends on your website on average.
How to find it:
On Google Analytics, go to Reports > Leads > Traffic acquisition.
Click on the pencil icon on top right,"Customise report".
Click on metrics > Add metric > Average Session Duration.
Click Apply.
Why it matters: This is another case where higher numbers are better. Longer sessions mean people spend more time on your website. If they’re clicking off the website as soon as they can, there’s something they don’t like about it.
As for how long average sessions should be, it really depends on your situation. Niches, industries, and more vary. As a general rule, though, you want something above 2 to 3 minutes.
Dive Deeper: Basically, quantity is not necessarily good for you, if you have a traffic spike but low session duration, its often spam, or click farms. Further identify the channel and location that traffic is coming from so you can form better insights with cleaner data.
Metric 4: Bounce rate
What it is: The percentage of users visiting your site who land on a single page, then leave quickly without taking any other action.
How to find it:
This is only accessible on Google Analytics if you’re an Editor or Administrator. You have to click on “Reports” and go to one of the reports (like the “Pages and screens report”).
Select “Customise report” at the upper-right corner.
Click “Metrics”.
Click “Add metric”.
Look for and click “Bounce rate”.
Select “Apply” and save the changes.
Why it matters: Lower is better for this one because it would mean fewer users are leaving your site shortly after visiting it. Most people like to aim for 40% or lower.
The bounce rate tells you how effective your site is on many levels. Let’s say your site looks clean but has poor content. A high bounce rate in that case may tell you that your content needs work, then.
Alternatively, if you have a high bounce rate and great content, the dissatisfaction may come from elsewhere. It may even be from something like slow page loading.
Metric 5: Conversion rate, or “User key event rate”
What it is: The percentage of visitors on your site who converted (signed up, bought something, downloaded something, etc.) This metric is calculated as the number of users who performed a key event action divided by the total number of users.
How to see it:
Like the bounce rate, this might have to be added to your reports to be visible. Again, you need to be an Editor or Administrator to do this. Go to “Reports”.
Select “Acquisition”, then “Traffic acquisition”.
Look at the top right corner, find the icon that looks like a pencil, and click on it.
Select “Metrics”, then “Add metric”.
Look for and select “User key event rate”.
Why it matters: This is another one where higher numbers are better. Higher conversion rates means your marketing is working! People are taking action, engaging with your site and taking relevant actions.
Dive deeper: For commerce site, if you have your analytics set up right, purchases will naturally be recorded as a key event. However, you have the option of leveraging on tools such as Google Tag Manager to track other forms of key events such as lead forms fill, whatsapp enquiry buttons taken, and many other forms of potentially important actions on your site.
Metric 6: Page load time
What it is: How long a page takes to properly show up on a screen.
How to see it: Try free tools like GT Metrix or Webpagetest.org.
Why it matters: The longer your page load time, the more likely people are to click off your website. It’s not hard to see why: we’re all impatient on the Internet. Most people won’t wait for a slow-loading page to get its work done!
If your page load time is higher than the average (which is about 8 seconds), you should definitely do some optimisation. The lower you can get, the better. The very best webpages even get it down to 2 seconds!
Metric 7: Device type or category
What it is: A tally of how many people are accessing your website from different types of devices.
How to see it:
On Google Analytics, go to “Reports”.
Select “Tech” and open the “Tech details” tab.
Look at “Device category”.
Why it matters: This can tell you whether most of your visitors are using desktop or portable devices. This counts because it tells you what version of your site you should optimise first, or even what device you should design your site for.
If most of your visitors are on mobile, for instance, optimise for that more aggressively. You should also give careful thought to how your current web UI will work in mobile then.
Learn more about website metrics and optimisation
That should get you started on your website’s optimisation and growth. If you want to learn more about the topic, consider checking out our other articles. Alternatively, you can talk to us.
We’ve created, optimised, and expanded many websites for our clients. Throughout the years, we’ve developed various campaigns that have used client sites as key assets too.
We can do similar things for you. Contact us for a chat about your digital marketing needs today.
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