Data

15 Site Metrics That Will Track What You Actually Care About

How well do you know your site metrics? In this day and age, you can’t always know exactly what your users are thinking, especially when they visit your website for the first time. Your metrics act as a glimpse into their experience, needs, and journey.

You need to keep a sharp eye on your site metrics. However, when we’re talking about metrics, it’s important to note that they aren’t all created equally. In the web-o-sphere, we’re often lured in by what’s known as “vanity metrics.”

A vanity metric is any metric that looks great but doesn’t convert to real income or value. For instance, your website traffic could be booming but this means nothing if you don’t have any users converting into customers. In this guide, we’ll highlight 15 key site metrics that track what you actually care about as a business owner.

Traffic

First, let’s look at metrics that focus on traffic. As we said before, many of these can fall under the “vanity metric” category if you’re not careful.

1. Pageviews – It’s important to realize that the only traffic that matters is traffic you want. If you aren’t focusing on attracting the right users, you can through your pageview count right out the window. Track your pageviews, aka the number of views your website has, but also pay close attention to your audience.

2. First-time users – How many users are visiting your website for the first time? How many are returning? Returning users is a good sign your marketing is effective.

3. Traffic source – It’s easy to track how much traffic you have, but where are these users coming from? This is important if you’re spending a lot of money and time on advertising and marketing. You need to know that these are working in your favor.

4. Growth rate – How much is your traffic growing each month? Is it staying the same, regardless of new content on your website, or do you see the effects of SEO, marketing, and other promotional efforts paying off?

5. Demographics – Finally, pay attention to the key demographics of your traffic sources. Google Analytics is a great way to determine just whose use your website, where they’re from, and what type of device they’re using to view your website.

Engagement

Your engagement often is more important than your traffic. Having users on your website is only valuable if those users are actually engaging with your content regularly.

6. Bounce rate – Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your website after only seeing one page. A high bounce rate might be an indicator that your content isn’t engaging or that you have an issue with your website experience.

7. Time on site – How long are users staying on your website? This is another indicator of how engaging your content is for users.

8. Social media engagement – Though not measured through your website, paying attention to how many clicks, likes, and comments you get on social media will mean more than follower counts and other “vanity metrics.”

9. Inbound links – If you’re familiar with SEO, you know that getting high-quality links to your website is a good thing that improves your page ranking. You can measure these links with a tool like Moz’s Link Explorer to determine the state of your current backlinks.

10. Email subscribers – Using your website as a way to convert email signups is a common marketing strategy. How many email subscribers are converting from your website alone?

Website Performance

It’s essential to pay attention to stats related to your website performance. Search engines prefer websites that load quickly, work properly, and are built for humans (not robots).

11. Logging – The first way to track your website performance is through logging. This can be done with a third-party application, and it will log the current status of your platform or website to alert you of any potential problems. Learn more about Log file tailing solution here.

12. Load time – How long does it take for your website to load? You can check this with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

13. Error rate – How many problem requests happen on your website? You can analyze this through your host, and it’s an important way to know if something’s going wrong with your website.

Conversion Stats

Last but not least, you need to keep a close eye on these site metrics that track what you actually care about: converting users into customers.

14. Conversion rate – How many users are converting into paying customers, email subscribers, or blog readers?

15. Lead gen success – Finally, if you want to improve your ability to generate leads, you need to analyze which posts, pages, and CTAs are most effective when it comes to creating leads.

Are you ready to transform your website with these leading stats? Let’s all agree to stop wasting time being distracted by vanity metrics. There’s so much value waiting to be discovered, and your website deserves the best analysis possible.

This list of site metrics include things you should actually care about. They’re actionable, research-based, and will lead to smarter decisions. Your metrics are the closest thing you have towards reading your users minds. It’s time to use them to your advantage.

Share
Published by
Wendy Dessler

Recent Posts

How to Personalize Your Outreach Emails

Your outreach email pitch is crucial. Without your email reaching the recipient, no deal is…

1 year ago

Using Concepts From Other Industries to Create Innovative Marketing Materials

Using Concepts From Other Industries to Create Innovative Marketing Materials

1 year ago

How to Keep People Engaged with Your Page

There are constantly new trends in mobile that are evolving and expanding the way users…

1 year ago

How Mobile Marketing Is Evolving and Expanding

There are constantly new trends in mobile that are evolving and expanding the way users…

1 year ago

The Importance of Customer Reviews in Marketing

When it comes to your marketing strategy, the first and most important place to turn…

2 years ago

How Marketing Tech Can Ease the Difficulties of an Email Campaign

This article discusses some of the most effective marketing technologies available to help make your…

2 years ago