5 Key Metrics to track on Website

Web analytics can be scary. As overwhelming and complicated as they may seem, analytics can actually be simple to understand. We’ve narrowed it down to 5 key metrics we think are most important to know to get the most out of your website.

1.) Your Audience

When creating content for a website, you are creating it for a particular group of people. It’s important that your website & social media audience are lining up with your target market.  Knowing your audience is important to keep track of your content and if it is engaging with your demographic. You want to know who you are speaking to on all platforms. Paying attention to demographics such as age, gender and location are some of the most important stats to keep track of.  Websites and most social media sites make this data accessible through basic analytics pages.You’ll find an audience section on the insights tab of your social media pages and your website analytics page. Facebook can even tell you what your visitors interests are. Creepy. Knowing who is interacting with your site is critical in order to grow your audience and create better content.

2.) Traffic

All across the World Wide Web, visitors are finding your site. Monitoring the traffic to your website is critical to understanding where your visitors are coming from. Your analytics will show you traffic sources and if your website has a balanced mix of guests: Search, Referring Sites, Direct, and Social/Campaigns. Search refers to how strong your SEO (Search Optimization) skills are, relying on your websites tag words and how high or low you are ranked when someone Google’s a product or service you might offer. Referring sites are visitors that are coming from a different website that links to your products or services.  Direct traffic refers to visitors who are directly navigating to your website by typing in the URL and are most often your returning customers. Social or Campaigns are guests from email links, Facebook posts, social media campaigns etc. Having a mix of these different traffic types is a good sign of a healthy digital media presence. If you notice a lack from any traffic source, work on creating more engaging content on those platforms.

3.) What’s Popular

Now that you know your audience, what content is their favorite? Tap into your Popular Content tab in your website analytics. This will show you where your website visitors are going. Maybe your blog gets the most traction or your client work pages are killer. It’s important to keep track of what is getting clicks. On your social media pages, pay attention to your Engagement Rate. Engagement rate is a metric that is heavily used when analyzing social media to track likes, shares, and comments. To get your engagement rate- divide your number of reactions (likes/comments) by your post reach. A higher Engagement Rate is a sign of great content meaning you are doing great, in which case, do more of that content, your followers are loving it!

4.) Site behavior

We all want to be popular. One way to measure your popularity is Pageviews. A pageview  is a metric that counts how many times users click on different pages within your website. This shows they were interested enough to check out several pages before leaving the site. Another important metic under this category is Bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who navigate to your site then click away after only viewing one page. This is important to note so you can then work on improving your sites “stickiness” and keeping those future customers around! Whether that be adding more compelling content to your homepage or moving the important information to the top of your website. The less you make your visitors work to find what they are looking for, the better.

5.) Conversion Rates

So, you have people on your site. Yay! But how do you convert these visitors to customers? Even if you are not selling a product, a conversion could mean signing up for an email list or download a desktop calendar (link to our September calendar there). This is called a conversion or, in other terms, a measurement of success in getting visitors to perform a desired action. Closely track where your conversions are coming for so you can know where to focus your digital efforts, are the converting visitors coming from Facebook? An email campaign? The more you know, the more you can optimize your efforts.  Strive for a high conversion rate, meaning that your efforts are working.