Web analytics are an integral part of a successful website. Detailed website metrics tell you about your website visitors’ behaviour and are the key to accelerating continual positive online growth.
With the installation of a piece of code onto your website, called a pixel, platforms such as Google Analytics can collect anonymous data about your visitors and the actions they perform on your website. The data collected is considerable, and can often be very overwhelming for people who are not familiar with analytics and website metrics.
These are the top 5 website metrics to track in order to measure the performance of your website:
Traffic Sources
Being able to see where your traffic is coming from is a very important tool. This allows you to measure the success of marketing efforts across different platforms such as email marketing or social media and determine where to put your time and money.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users that enter your site and then leave after just viewing a single page. A high bounce rate can be a strong indication of possible issues. These issues could include problems with your website such as slow load speed or problems with your advertising efforts such as targeting the wrong groups or irrelevant keywords. Understanding why your website has a high bounce rate may take some time and research, however, it is important to fix as soon as possible — It doesn’t make sense to be spending time and money on directing people to a website for them to leave right away!
Conversions
Tracking conversions does require some extra legwork as you will need to set them up individually in your analytics platform. In Google Analytics, conversions are set up as “Goals”. Conversions will vary by website. For some, it may as simple as a newsletter signup, for others it could be an online sale in an e-commerce store. Understanding how many users are converting on your website allows you to determine if your efforts are successful. If conversions are low, new strategies will need to be implemented and could include paid advertising, stronger calls-to-action, or other techniques.
Behaviour Flow
Most analytics platforms will allow you to track your website users’ behaviour flow. This enables you to see your website visitors’ actions as they move through your website. Google Analytics provides a flowchart which shows which pages people are visiting, where they exit your website and their journey from one page to the next. This will give you a better understanding of which content users find the most useful, if your calls-to-action are leading users to the right pages and if people are leaving your website where you want them to.
Average Session Duration
Similar to the bounce rate, average session duration allows you to determine if your content is relevant to the people that are finding their way to your website. If people are spending a lot of time on your website, it most likely means that they find the information interesting. However, an average session duration could also mean that visitors are having a hard time finding or understanding the information on your website. This is why it is important to be able to understand various website metrics that could be correlated.
While analytics platforms are relatively easy to install and access their dashboards, understanding the information and using the data to manage and improve your website takes experience.
Cloud9 Marketing offers Google Analytic set-up, reporting and ongoing data analysis with monthly actionable recommendations to improve your website’s page rank, visitation, increase conversions and more.
For more information on our web analytics services, read more here.
