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Knowing how your website is doing can be tricky and overwhelming, especially if you don’t quite understand what it is you need to measure. It’s often the small details that create the fine line between success and failure. Granted, website statistics and metrics are far from interesting or glamorous topics that will peak your interest. However, they are crucial in measuring the success of your website and determining how you can improve it. The following are a few important metrics you simply need to be paying attention to in order to maximize your website’s performance.
Users
Getting people to your site is the primary step so accordingly, the number of visitors is among the first metrics you need to monitor. These numbers are important because they represent the size of the audience that you are reaching during a specific period. Among those numbers, look for unique visitors – that is how you determine the actual number of people visiting at least once. As you get a deeper understanding of unique visitors, expand your tracking efforts to repeat visitors. If their number is growing, it means people are eager to come back again to your website and you know you’re doing something right.
Understanding your website’s audience also means knowing where they are coming from, which leads us to the next entry…
Traffic sources
Tracking traffic
sources provide insights into how your visitors are getting to your website, namely the sources they are coming from. In terms of traffic diversity, there are four primary categories:
- Direct – visitors that directly type your URL into the browser
- Organic – traffic based on search engine queries
- Referral – traffic that leads from another site
- Social – social media driven traffic
Every website has a different mix of diverse sources of incoming traffic so staying on top of those trends allows you to refine your marketing strategies and see which channels are driving the most traffic. For instance, if you put a lot of effort into SEO; then the volume of organic search should increase. Wide social media promotion should translate into referral traffic from various social media website. Each traffic source has different levels of conversion which is why it’s so important to track a variety of sources as there is no single best one.
Conversion rate
Conversions are probably the most important metric when it comes to tracking. The rate at which they are happening shows you the percentage of people that perform a desired action or goal on your website. Depending on that goal, conversion rates can refer to anything. For example, these can be landing page or email conversions from your CPA (cost per action) campaigns if you use something like AdWords or alternatives to AdWords. It can also be tied to filling out a form, making a sale and so on. 
Naturally, the higher the conversion rate, the better as that means your website is doing well. On the other hand, low percentages can present all sorts of trouble, from attracting irrelevant traffic to having a weak or ineffective ad campaign. In essence, the conversion rate measures your website’s overall success and keeps you in the loop if you are getting valuable traffic (or not) for your marketing efforts.
Bounce rate
The easiest way to explain what is a “bounce” is to go by Google’s definition – a single page session. Technically, a bounce is every visitor that visited your site and immediately left off. Bounce rate can always be partially attributed to visitors that are simply at the wrong website, meaning there will likely be some percentage of it at any time. However, for the most part, it means people who visited your website didn’t find what they were looking for and just left. Thus, low bounce rate means the majority of your audience is sticking around to enjoy your website. High bounce rate can be caused by several factors, everything from poor traffic to bad keywords to slow load times. Comparing high bounce pages with low ones can provide information into what’s working for some of your visitors and what isn’t.
Average session duration
A page that doesn’t have helpful information can see your visitors leave in just a few seconds, whereas a well-written, informative page or a blog post can keep people as long as needed. The aim is to get your point across while making your audience stay long enough as Google bases how good a website is on time spent. Because it cannot make a distinction between a good and poorly written content, the search engine turns to session duration as an indicator of website’s performance. The more average time is spent, the better.  
For a website to see any kind of success, it’s critical to monitor its performance and make improvements on the go. By focusing on these metrics, you will get a better understanding of your site and optimize it for more conversions. Yet, it’s important to remember that every website is different and has different metrics for success so be sure that these fully apply to your online property and don’t be afraid to go even further.
