It is a common mistake for many businesses not to track their website engagement metrics. To make sure you understand the areas of your website that need improvement and what works or what doesn’t, it is necessary to understand the data coming from Google Analytics.
As a business owner, you need to get insight into how many visits your website gets, where is the traffic to your site coming from, how much time visitors spend on your website, how soon they leave, and much more. This gives you precious information on what your marketing efforts should be focused on.
So in this blog, we’ll discuss six website metrics that matter the most.
Traffic Sources(+ No of Visitors and Sessions)
Whether running paid ads on your website or looking to drive organic traffic through search engine rankings, keeping an eye on your traffic sources matters a lot.
Traffic is the number of visitors that open or visit your website. Traffic is considered a fundamental measure of a website’s reach. However, as a business, you would want to drive traffic that is relevant to your business.
That’s why you need to pay attention to the sources driving traffic to your website. The traffic source metric gives you insight into where your visitors are coming from all over the web.
Based on this understanding, you can direct your marketing efforts effectively in the right direction.
The traffic sources include:
- Organic Search: Organic search is when people find your business directly from their search engine. Your website needs to be optimized for SEO to drive traffic from organic searches. It is a non-paid search that relates to the user’s search term.
- Social Media: It is when visitors come to your website through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook(Meta), Instagram, etc. Businesses often market their products, services, and content on social media platforms, which drives traffic to their website.
- Referrals: Referrals are when visitors from another website come to your website by clicking on a hyperlink. In short, referral traffic is generated when another website on the internet refers to or mentions your website’s link, and users visit your website by clicking on that inbound link.
- Email: Whenever users visit your website using a link mentioned in an email, the traffic is said to be generated from an email source.
- Paid Search: Paid search traffic is traffic that comes to your website by clicking on your website’s advertisement that you have paid for to appear on top of search results. Google Ads is a paid search traffic service that allows businesses to appear on top of search results in exchange for a particular Ad fee.
Apart from analyzing traffic sources, you can also identify the number of sessions on your website. The session is the total time a visitor is active on your website. You can also find the average session duration of each channel or traffic source on your website using Google Analytics.
Further, if you want to see the traffic sources of your website in Google Analytics, follow these steps:
- Open your Google Analytics account in your browser
- Click on “Reports” > Click on “Acquisition”
- Click on “All Traffic” > Select “Source/Medium”
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important website metrics that shows the number of visitors that open your website and leave immediately. They do not perform any action on your website, such as clicking a link, filling out a form, or even opening some other page on your website.
Bounce rate is essential because it helps you determine the shortcomings of your website.
In analytics, the bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of one-page visits by the total number of website entries.
Your aim should be to have as lower a bounce rate as possible. A high bounce rate may mean one or all of the below things:
- Your website is not adequately optimized
- Your website is hard to navigate, which confuses visitors, and they end up bouncing away from your website
- The loading speed of your website is slow(if your website takes 3 seconds or above to load)
- Your website lacks attractiveness or fails to capture the attention of the visitors(e.g., website UI is boring)
- You have low-quality content on your website
- The CTAs(call to action) are not clear on your website
- Or simply, your website does not meet the visitors’ intent
In fact, according to a survey , poor website functionality is why 42% of consumers leave a website.
While you can not bring the bounce rate of your web pages to 0%, you could always work to minimize it by identifying the reason.
However, remember that some pages on your website will have more bounce rate than other pages. For example, if you run an eCommerce store, your checkout page will likely have a higher bounce rate than other pages.
Bounce rates vary according to industries. And in some cases, a high bounce rate might be considered okay. For example, on blog websites, single-page sessions are expected. Therefore the high bounce rate might suffice.
While most websites have a bounce rate between 26% to 70%, the good, the bad, and the ugly bounce rate is as follows:
- A considered good bounce rate is between 26% to 40%
- An average bounce rate is between 41% to 55%
- A bounce rate above 56%, especially above 70%, is considered very high or poor
Average Time on Page(Average Time Spent by Visitors on Your Web Page)
ATP (Average Time on Page) determines the average number of minutes each visitor spends on a specific page of your website during a single session. Average time on a page is one of the factors Google takes into consideration while ranking your web pages on its search engine.
The average on-page time is a tremendous indicator of how engaging your web page content is. The higher your average on-page time is, the more effective and engaging the web page. At the same time, low average on-page time indicates that visitors are taking less interest.
For example, if you have a lengthy blog post of about 3000 words on your website but the average time visitors spend on that page is low(let’s say 1 minute), you can tell that the users are not reading the full post. It means something is not optimal in terms of content quality or presentation that makes people bounce off your page.
You can leverage this metric to understand the pages and content that make users stay on your website for longer. Then, you can produce more such content, so your average on-page time for underperforming pages increases.
Moreover, gauging your bounce rate and average on-page time combined to tweak your content strategy can work wonders for your website.
If you want to look into the Average Time on Page metric in Google Analytics, you can follow these steps:
- In your Google Analytics dashboard, go to the “Behaviour” section
- Click on “Site Content”
- From the drop-down menu, select “All Pages”
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is among the top website metrics that measure the effectiveness of your website. Consider it the desired outcome a website or a business wants to achieve when visitors land on their website.
In other words, the conversion rate measures the website user actions that will lead directly or indrectly to your sales and growth.
The desired action may include:
- Filling a form on your website
- Downloading an eBook, or some other type of content from your website
- Buying a product from your website
- Subscribing to your company’s email newsletter
- Signing up for a demo of your service or product
The standard conversion rate in most industries is 2% to 5%.
If your conversion rate is higher(5% and above), your website’s goal is being fulfilled, and your CTAs are performing well. However, if your conversion rate is low, which means it is below 2%, you will need to revise your offers, work on your CTAs, or improve the quality of your content on your website.
Unique and Repeat Visitors(+Unique to Old Visitors Ratio)
Unique or new visitors, as the name suggests, are the visitors that visit your website for the first time. On the other hand, old or returning visitors are the ones who have already interacted with your website previously.
Like conversion and bounce rate website metrics, keeping track of new and returning visitors metrics is equally imperative for your business. In Google Analytics, you can also find out the unique(new) to old(repeat) visitors ratio, which will equip you with important information like:
- If the number of new visitors is high and repeat visitors is low, it means that you are indeed generating traffic, but your retention rate is low. A low retention rate, just like a high bounce rate, is perhaps an alarming sign for businesses to identify the shortcomings of their websites and their offerings
- On the contrary, if the number of old or repeat visitors is high and new visitors is low, it might mean that your site is failing to bring in fresh traffic and only relying on old visitors, which is also an alarming sign
- However, if the number of new and repeat visitors is balanced, you will likely have a high conversion rate, which will help fulfill your website’s goal. This is a sign that your website is catering to the needs of your target audience
But maintaining a steady balance between new and old visitors might not be a piece of cake. You need to focus on a couple of things like:
- Revise your content strategy and try to come up with more engaging website content
- Improve existing product/service pages with high-quality images, copy, and descriptions
- Improve your website speed if it is lower than 3 seconds
The ideal repeat visitor rate is between 10% to 30%. For example, if the repeat visitor rate of your website is 20%, it shows that 2 out of 20 visitors return to your website.
Note: Repeat visitors who have cleared cache from their browsers or visit your website from a different device will be counted as new visitors.
Exit Pages(+Exit Rate)
Of course, you would want visitors to spend significant time on your web pages. But no matter how hard you try, visitors will leave eventually at some point. So an exit page is the last page a visitor opens before leaving your website.
Now exit pages are not always bad because even visitors with prolonged sessions on your website have to leave your site at the end, right?
However, the exit pages you should focus on are the ones that have the highest exit rates. Now, what is the exit rate? The exit rate is the exit page percentage that was last in the visitor’s session.
While many businesses expect their ThankYou or download pages with the highest exit rates, it is not always the case. Sometimes, the pages you want your visitors to pay attention to the most such as landing or product pages, may become the ones with the highest exit rate. And this is where the problem arises.
This is why comparing your low, and high exit rate pages are essential. Perhaps, the pages with high exit rates do not have clear CTAs, attention-grabbing images, engaging copy, etc. Consider all these factors and analyze where your pages with high exit rates lack.
Moreover, if your website has a low conversion rate, the website metrics like the exit page might be the best place to start finding clues. You can also work on optimizing your internal linking strategy and using exit intent popups to lower your exit rate.
Are You Ready to Make Your Website More Engaging Than Ever?
Developing a website is challenging, and so is making sure people visit it. After putting in all the effort, your desired outcome is to get maximum conversion and sales, right?
By factoring in these website metrics, you will understand what’s performing well and what areas need improvement on your website.
Are you ready to make your website more engaging than ever? Book a free 30 minutes consultation with our team to take your website to the next level.
