Metrics for a website are data points that help compare how well an organization does online to its overall goals. They show how well the content, features, and services of a website teach visitors and turn them into paying customers. Knowing the different metrics for looking at how well a website is doing can make you a better manager and help you make better decisions that help an organization work better. In this article, we talk about website metrics, explain why they're important, and list 15 website metrics that can help improve a site's ability to reach clients.    

Website Metrics

Website metrics are numbers that show how well a website is doing and how well it is moving toward business goals. Businesses look at a number of things about their visitors, like how often they come back and how long they stay and what they do on the site, to learn more about them. Learning how people use a website and making the right changes to better communicate with the people you want to reach can help websites and long-term business results.  

Importance of Website Metrics

You can use website metrics to find out how well a website converts customers, which means how well it gets visitors to buy something. They tell you if a site's articles, pictures, videos, and other features and functions meet customers' needs and expectations. Some of the good things about using website metrics are:

• Figuring out which parts of a site don't work well and fixing them.
• Figuring out who visits the site, when, and why.
• Figuring out how well different digital marketing plans work.
• Figure out what customers want and why they want it.
• Using current data to predict future trends.

 

15 website metrics to consider

Websites make a lot of different kinds of information. Here are 15 metrics that can help you improve the performance of a website:

1. Website Traffic

Tracking the total number of visits to a website gives a company an idea of how well it can bring in customers. If you see more people visiting your website after posting a certain type of content, that could mean that people like it. Content that brings in more and more visitors could help build a regular audience.

2. Bounce rate

The bounce rate metric tells businesses how many people visit their website and then leave right away. If the bounce rate is low, it means that more people stay on the site longer and look at the content. A longer visit could also mean that the visitor found the service or product they were looking for on the site. This could give you a better chance of getting them to buy digital products or services from your company.

3. Top pages

Getting information about a site's best-performing pages can help you figure out which pages bring in the most traffic. Find out what people like by looking at the most popular pages on your website. For example, if a certain blog gets the most traffic, it might be worth putting in more time and money to write more blog posts.

4. Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who do what you want them to do, like buy something. A company that sells goods might, for example, offer an online coupon. To figure out conversion rates, you divide the number of people who used a coupon to buy a company's product by the total number of people who saw the ad. For example, out of 100 people who see an offer to buy a pair of sneakers, 25 may take advantage of it. To find the conversion rate, you would divide the 25 people who bought something by the 100 people who visited the site. The result is 0.25, or 25%.

5. Customer's Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount a single customer brings in, and it can be used to measure how well an offer works over time. To do this simple math, add up all the sales over a certain time period and then subtract the cost of the ad. For example, a customer's lifetime value would be $950 if they bought $200 worth of takeout food from a restaurant over five years and used a coupon for $10 off each purchase. You can multiply this number by the number of repeat customers to get a rough idea of how much cash flow a certain online coupon might bring in.

6. Average time spent on site

The amount of time people spend on the site or each page is another important metric to look at. If people stay on your site longer, it could mean that you have good content. To get people to stay on their website longer, content creators might want to make more of the same kinds of content.

7. Returning visitors

The number of repeat visitors is another way to figure out how good a website's content is. More repeat visitors means that more people are coming back, possibly because they like what the site has to offer. To figure out how many people come back to a website, divide the number of return visits by the total number of visits. For example, if you have 4,000 repeat visitors and 10,000 total visitors, you would divide the number of repeat visitors by the total number of visitors to get a 40% conversion rate.

8. Cost Per Conversion

The cost per conversion (CPC) metric measures how much it costs in advertising to get one customer. This can help you figure out how well your advertising campaign is working. To figure out how much it costs to make a sale, divide the cost of getting traffic by the number of sales. For an ad campaign that costs $100 and leads to 10 conversions, for example, you would divide $100 by 10 to get a CPC of $10.

9. Landing page results

When running a unique website campaign, the people in charge often make sections that are just about that topic or offer. The landing page is the first page of that campaign, and it can show how well your work is doing. Focus your analysis by getting some of the page metrics, like the number of visitors, how long they stay on a page, how often they leave, and how many of them come back. If any of those seem low, you might want to change the offer or the content.

10. Exit pages

When a visitor leaves your site, the exit page tells you where they went. Often, this is the same as the landing page, especially if a site has a high rate of people leaving right away. If you find that most people leave on the same page, you might want to update it to make it more appealing and easy to use. For example, if a business notices that customers tend to stop placing an order halfway through, it might think about making the ordering process easier to finish. You can also add links to other pages to get people to keep looking around.

11. Device sources

The type of device that visitors use to get to the site is another important metric to keep track of. It's important to know how people get to your site because that tells you how to organize the content. For example, if people are accessing the site from their phones, you might want to create content that works well on phones.

12. Page times

Visitors to the web have many options and often expect pages to load faster. Making sure load times are as short as possible can help make a website more enjoyable. Page loading times are also important for search engine optimization (SEO) rankings and keeping visitors on the site so they can buy things or do other things.

13. Pages per visit

This metric shows which parts of a website a visitor have looked at to figure out how long they've been there. Use internal links to increase the number of pages per visit. Adding more links to other pages makes it more likely that people will stay on your site and become customers. Divide the total number of page views by the total number of visitors to get this average. For example, if a company's website has 1,500 page views and 150 visitors in one day, you can divide 1,500 by 150 to get a page-per-visit number of 10. This means that, on average, people look at 10 pages in one visit.

14. Traffic sources

Traffic sources show where website visitors are coming from, like a link from another site or an organic search engine result. Getting to know what brings people to a site can help you improve how you distribute content and market it. The data can also help people who run websites and make content decide where to spend their time making content.

15. Social sharing

If you share a lot of content on social media, it means that you're giving your audience information that they find useful. Most social share buttons on websites have counters that show how many people have shared your content on various social media sites. When your numbers are high, the social share buttons can also show visitors that an article is worth reading.