Every business’ website will have its own unique objectives that require careful consideration to ensure the most relevant and appropriate key performance indicators are tracked and reported. For example, not all websites require a short conversion funnel.
- Sites such https://www.news.com.au/ as are motivated by consumers engaging with content. Their advertising sales work around impressions. Increasing the website metric: ‘pages per session’ would be a key KPI for such a site.
- An interactive gaming site is motivated to keep users on one page for extended amounts of time, playing games, of course. The most important website metric for them might be ‘average time on page’.
- An affiliate marketing website or blog that’s incentivised for encouraging people to leave their site and visit a site that pays them commission might not be so worried about a high-exit rate on certain pages, where they are directing users to affiliate sites. This type of site would need to track external link clicks to ascertain with greater certainty what the real exit rate is. They might also use tracking from the affiliate network too that provides information on the traffic they sent to a retailer – like conversion rate.
It’s important to understand your conversion process and unique objectives before choosing metrics to monitor on your web analytics dashboard.
However, there are some key website metrics that all sites should care about. Here are the most important key website metrics that are relevant to all websites…
1. Traffic Source
Traffic source is part of the acquisition metrics. It measures the sources that drive traffic to your website. Traffic sources commonly tracked on any website are:
- Direct: Visits to your website who don’t have a defined source or referring site attached to it. This could be PDF links, direct browser entries, bookmark clicks.
- Organic Search: Visits to your website from search engine results page(s) often because of strong SEO efforts.
- Social: Visits to your website that comes from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Referral: Traffic that comes to your website from an inbound link on another website that isn’t a social media site.
Monitoring this acquisition metric through traffic source allows you to double down on the channel/s that are working well, providing traffic and/or conversions.
You can also use this data to identify channels that are underperforming. For example, if you expect more traffic from social media, or more conversions, then it may be time to re-strategize your marketing campaigns.
2. Average Session Duration
A session is defined by a user visiting and interacting with any page(s) during their time on your website.
So, let’s say a user visits your home page, navigates to a blog post on your site, looks at your services page and then leaves your website, that would equal one session. If that user spent 10 minutes on the site, the session duration would be 10 minutes long.
Average session duration measures how long users spend interacting with your business during a session. Ideally, you want to see a longer average session duration because it indicates that your website provides helpful, relevant, and valuable information for your target audience.
This is a key website performance metric to monitor as it indicates how well your pages perform for searchers.
“Is your content information keeping users engaged and moving them through the sales funnel, or do you need to improve your page content to drive longer sessions?”
It is important to note your average session duration will differ depending on the nature of your business, your goals and conversion funnel. Therefore, drilling down further to analyse the average time on page is also worth analysing. This is the time that users spend on a particular page on your website.
We suggest average time on page, as well as all averages, should be taken with a grain of salt and further investigated page by page or by grouped pages. This is because some pages should be optimised for a longer average time on page, for example blog articles and services pages. Whereas, for a login or checkout page, you’d prefer users to get through the process faster. In these circumstances, a longer average time on page could indicate a cumbersome/confusing process.
Finding the right benchmarks to aim for can be extremely helpful to improve your websites performance. Check out some average benchmarks by industry below.
3. Bounce Rate
According to Google Analytics, bounce rate measures the percentage of single interaction visits to your website.
Any time a visitor leaves your website from the same page they entered, without viewing any other pages or clicking – that’s called a bounce. This also includes visitors who remained on the page until the session timed out.
Tracking bounce rate is important because a visitor who bounces from your website will not convert. Therefore, reducing the likelihood of someone bouncing off your website will help to increase possible conversions.
If your bounce rate is high, it could be a result of one or more of these factors:
- Slow to load pages
- Low quality content
- Misleading title tag or meta description
- Error pages
- Content expectation aren’t met
Top Design Firms revealed that 42% of consumers will bounce because of poor functionality.
So, reducing bounce rate depends on analysing what is causing visitors to bounce in the first place. You can read our tips about how to improve bounce rate here.
4. Pages Visited Per Session
Pages per session is the average number of pages a user has visited in a session. This website metric allows you to track overall website engagement – do users only visit one page or do they browse around your website before ending a session?
Pages per session helps to indicate if prospects find your content and the website flow helpful and are interested in learning more from you. Their behaviour on your website can provide valuable insights on how compelling users find your content and the ease of access.
You can improve your pages per session by:
1. Intuitive interlinking: Hyperlink intuitive and action-oriented text to related pages. For example, when we write about our SEO services, instead of hyperlinking the actual word SEO, we could write something like’ “Great SEO will provide your business with the opportunity to increase sales via growth.”
2. Complement the user journey: It’s important that your website maps out the user journey and guides them towards a new page or a desired action. You can read exactly how to optimise your landing page to ensure you not only generate traffic but ensure that traffics stays and converts.
3. Use effective CTA’s: Call-to-actions (CTA’s) have the power to make or break your conversions. Without a clearly placed CTA, users may be unsure of the next steps to take, or less persuaded to follow through with their initial intentions, therefore leaving your site sooner.
5. Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate is one the most important website performance metrics to track. Conversion rate measures the percentage of people who convert (aka do what you want them to do). The most popular conversion methods tend to be:
- Submitting a form
- Making a purchase
- Downloading a lead magnet
- Downloading an app
Your conversion rate has a profound effect on the success and value of all your marketing efforts. An increased conversion rate directly reduces the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of your paid campaigns. Analyse the rise in lead conversion rate with the effect on cost per lead with this example below.
By optimising your conversion rate, you can ensure that you are getting as many of your website visitors as possible to take the action you desire.
Conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visits to your website or landing page.
6. Goal Completions
Another valuable website metric to track is Goal Completion, which can also be referred to as a conversion. This website performance metric lets you know how many users complete a defined goal on your website. Goals can be tied to sales, as well as specific objectives like filling out a form or signing up for an email list.
This is the figure you’ll use to determine your conversion rate. So, a site’s conversion rate is entirely based on their goal completions.
Tracking the number of goal completions on your website will indicate whether users are completing your defined goals, i.e., making a sale, therefore becoming a customer. If your visitors aren’t completing your defined goals, you can evaluate your pages to see how to improve.
Overall, you’ll want to optimise the number of conversions to help support your conversion rate.
7. Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is another key website performance metric all marketers should track.
Why? Your CPA gives you an estimate of how much your new customers are costing you and helps ensure that you’re investing in the most cost-effective channels, as well as helping to gauge the success of various marketing efforts.
Unlike the conversion rate, which is an indicator of success, CPA a financial metric which can also help gauge the success of your marketing efforts.
Your CPA can be found within Google Analytics and is automatically provided by the data sent from your website, however only if there is cost data available.
Some ways to lower your cost per acquisition:
1. Obsess about CRO: As we mentioned previously, an increased conversion rate directly reduces the CPA of your paid campaigns. Optimising your CRO is guaranteed to positively affect your CPA, increasing your ROI. Typically, the nature of CRO requires there to be a test-and-learn mentality the below process tends to loop over and over again until the desired outcome has been reached
2. Optimise your landing page(s): Your landing page(s) has a profound impact on conversions because it is the first thing your customer sees after clicking on your ad. Ensuring your landing page is well optimised to convert your visitors is going to make a big difference on your conversion rate and your CPA. Ensure you are following the 7 best practices for landing page optimisation here.
3. Retarget your website visitors: Retargeting/remarketing efforts help you reach users who have already visited your website. Perhaps they visited but did not convert. By retargeting them to connect again, you can hopefully convert them into customers. As a result, increasing your conversion rate by using retargeting techniques can reduce your CPA.
8. Percentage of New & Return Visits
New visitors are those navigating to your site for the first time on a specific device. Return visitors have visited your site before and are back for more!
Typically, websites tend to have a higher proportion of new visitors over returning visitors. However, it’s the returning visitors that tend to have higher engagement – they bounce less, view more pages per session, and have higher session durations. You can also expect to see a much higher conversion rate and purchase rate from your returning visitors, in comparison with your new ones.
For any website, returning visitors are important because they indicate how successful your marketing campaigns are, your loyal customers, and the strength of your brand.
But every website needs both new and returning visitors.
To do this, you need to feed the funnel with new users so you can turn them into returning users. Some marketing initiatives encourage new visits like search engine optimization, and some encourage return visits like retargeting campaigns on Facebook.
It’s important to grow both your new and return visitor rate to see overall growth in your website.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
9. Devices Used
It should come as no surprise that mobile device use is increasingly pervasive. In fact, mobile devices now account for over half (59.4%) of website traffic worldwide (source). So, tracking the breakdown of all the devices your website visitors use is best practice.
Monitoring this will help you determine if you’re meeting the needs of your website visitors, based on their device choice. This data is available in your Google Analytics dashboard under Audience.
In the above example you can see mobile devices traffic prevails for this website over desktop and tablet. So, if you’re not looking at this data and optimising your website for mobile usage you would be missing out on converting those users into paying customers.
10. Exit Rate
Exit rate is the website metric referring to the number of times visitors have left a site from a single page.
It looks at individual pages, showing the number of people who exited the website after landing on that page and comparing to the total number of view the page received. This means they are recorded regardless of a user’s prior activity on the website.
This is different to bounce rate which is only recorded if a user exits directly from the page they entered. You can read about the importance of bounce rates here.
Monitoring your exit rate helps to understand the performance of specific pages and/or page groups on your website. When you understand which page(s) people are exiting the most, and at the highest percentage, you can determine where your page optimisation efforts should take place.
Summary
Accurately tracking website performance metrics allows you to determine which metrics define success for your business, so you can better understand your company’s performance over time.
When it comes to tracking the website metrics discussed in this article, Google Analytics will be your best friend. It is the internet’s most popular analytics measurement tool for most, if not all website KPI’s. It’s free and can display the data most important to your website at any given timeframe.
If you want to double down on your website KPIs and set your business up for long-success, chat to one of our Digital Strategists today. Book in a FREE digital strategy session here.
