Having a great website is critical to building your presence online. More people than ever visit sites to get information about products they want to buy. But when 88% of consumers don’t revisit websites after bad experiences, it isn’t easy to get people to keep coming back to your site.
Luckily, there are metrics you can track that will help you optimize your site and retain your visitors.
If you want to learn more about how to get traffic on a website, you’ll need to measure what your current traffic and marketing methods are doing. Below are a few of the critical website performance metrics you need to track for your website.
Total Traffic
Your total traffic is the first and most important metric to track for your website. All your work is for nothing if nobody reads your site. If you want to measure results, you’ll need to know how many people visit.
A simple tracking script can help you understand how many people visit your site. You want to measure every page visit on your site to get your website’s total impressions every month.
This is important to know how well your marketing methods are working. If you run ads on your site for revenue, you’ll also need this number to pitch potential advertisers.
Page Response Time
Your page response time is one of the next essential website metrics to track. People don’t have large attention spans these days. When they visit a website, they expect it to load in a few seconds.
If it takes longer than that to load your site, you’ll lose visitors. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to test your page speed on your device and a single device. You need data from multiple internet connections and devices.
Tools like Google Pagespeed Insights will give you the information you need. You can measure the page response time on multiple devices and see which page elements slow down your loading time.
Traffic Sources
Traffic sources are another vital metric to track when looking at your website. The chances are good that you’re engaging in marketing campaigns on different platforms. This can be organic social media work or SEO.
If you want to know how well those campaigns are working, you’ll need to understand where your unique visitors are coming from. You can get this information in your tracking scripts.
For SEO, you’ll be able to see which website pages are getting the most search engine traffic. You can see which individual posts are sending traffic to your site for social media.
You can use this data to optimize your high-performing traffic sources to send more traffic to your site.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is an important metric to track to measure how people respond to your content. You can find this information in your visitor tracking script.
Your goal for this will depend on what you want your visitors to do.
Take informational content, for instance. You may not have a low bounce rate if you run ads and simply want ad impressions and clicks. You want your visitors to get answers and get ad impressions to make money.
Your visitors probably won’t stick around in this case.
The same isn’t true for an eCommerce store. You want a low bounce rate since visitors are browsing your site and looking for products. You’ll need to create better pages to get your bounce rate down if people leave after they arrive.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is a critical metric for any business owner that needs to make data-driven decisions. You spend a lot of money on ads, which means you need to know how much of your money is wasted and how much is producing new customers.
Your conversion rates tell you this information. You can set up goal pages on your website and track when someone from an ad makes it to your goal page.
Your goal page can be anything from an email signup confirmation to an order confirmation page. Once someone is on that page, you can assign a dollar amount for the page. This information will help you determine which ad campaigns are making a profit and which ones you need to cut.
SEO Ranking
Your website will inevitably rank on Google when you add enough content. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll rank on the front page for everything.
If you want to maximize your chance of ranking, you’ll need to look for easy wins. You can use a ranking checker like this tool to see where your site ranks on the search engine. From there, look for the pages closest to the front page.
Start optimizing those pages. Once you get higher rankings for those pages, you can check the rankings for your other pages and continue the process until you have more front-page results.
Social Shares
If you’re like many websites, you now post your website content on social media. People follow your social accounts to learn about your updates. If someone likes what you post on your site, they’ll share it with friends.
You can learn more about what content performs best by monitoring your engagement on social platforms. Which posts get shared and commented on the most?
This information will help inform your social posts in the future. The more you post great content for your fans, the more they’ll head back to your site and promote your content with friends.
Collect All the Website Performance Metrics You Can
It’s simple enough to set up a website these days. It’s much harder to optimize your website for your visitors and generate website traffic that grows your business. Collect the website performance metrics above to track your results and optimize your website for your visitors.
Head back to the blog to find more posts that will help you build your marketing strategy and grow your business.
