Top Web Metrics You Can’t Afford to Overlook

Having a business website is awesome, but what are you learning from it?

Without tracking your web analytics, you’re missing key ways to digitally optimize your website.

Knowing your web analytics helps you determine who, what, when and why people are visiting your website.  In turn, this can help you grow your business with the help of digital initiatives like:

  • Better website copy
  • Targeted marketing strategy
  • Engaging Social content
  • Personalized email campaigns

Getting started with analytics can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. It is ok to start small first. All you need is to install an analytics tool like Google Analytics, then get to tracking these top web metrics.

Visitors

To deem your website successful or profitable, you need online visitors. The more visitors you have on your site, the better chance they will buy something or request more information from you. Therefore, tracking your visitors is very important.

In analytics, visitors are the number of people who visit your website in a certain timeframe. This is usually narrowed down to visitors from the current day, a week ago or even a month ago. If you are new to analytics, start by looking at your unique visitors. This number allows you to see the amount of individuals who are new to your site and visiting for the first time.

How This Helps You

Monitoring your unique visitor count helps determine if your website is doing its job. It is also great because it signifies the size of the audience that you are reaching through your marketing efforts. For instance, if you run a paid search marketing campaign for a week and don’t see a slight surge in online visitors, you may need to reevaluate the campaign or landing pages.

Referrals

After you’ve looked at your visitors, you want to know where these visitors came from. Tracking your referrals will let you know.

If you have an online presence, visitors can enter your website from many different channels. From social media to search engines, the referral report will show you exactly how people found your website.

How This Helps You

Knowing the source of where your visitors entered your site only helps you with your marketing. With the referral information in hand, you can pinpoint which marketing channels are working and shift your strategy as applicable.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is one of the most important web analytics metrics. It gives you the percentage of people who have followed through on taking an action on your website. These actions are described as goals and can be anything from buying a product to filling out your contact form.

How This Helps You

Your conversion rate can tell you a lot about your website. On average, a good conversion rate is around 5 percent. If you have a low conversion rate, it may mean your marketing is targeting the wrong audience. A low conversion rate could also mean an integral part of your website like your Checkout page or Sign Up page is broken.

Exit Pages

When a visitor visits your website, naturally they will exit after clicking around. The page from which they exit from is considered the exit page by analytics.

How This Helps You

While some pages like those used to convert visitors will naturally have a high exit rate, there are some pages you want to be relatively low.

Pages like your About us page or Services page often include pertinent information about your business. Ideally, you want people to stay on these pages longer and then move to your contact form instead of exiting.

By knowing which pages people routinely exit from, you are able to fine tune the content or layout of the pages to help lower the exit rate.

With these web analytics metrics by your side, you can make your website better and go from working harder to working smarter.

Do you have a question about how digital optimization can help grow your business? Contact Belo Media Group to learn more.