What Website Analytics Should I Track?
There are many metrics you can track in order to assess the overall health of your website, but the primary metrics are session duration, pages per session, bounce rate and conversions.
Google Analytics’ Channels Metric provides insight into which medium users are accessing your site – be it organic search, direct visits, social media posts or pay per click (PPC). Meanwhile, its Source/Medium Metric displays specific traffic sources.
Session Duration
Session duration is an effective web metric used to gauge how long users spend browsing a website, providing an indicator of user engagement and pinpointing potential areas for improvement on your site. A long session duration helps your visitors quickly locate what they are searching for quickly, leading to more conversions and a higher ROI.
An ideal session duration typically ranges between three minutes or more, although this varies according to website. A longer session duration indicates great user experiences while shorter ones might indicate room for improvements on your site.
To calculate your average session duration, first you’ll need to know how many sessions take place each month and divide that total number by the number of days in that month – this will yield your average session duration.
However, there are certain variables that could potentially skew your session duration data. For example, if visitors click on an interaction event (like file download) during their session, that last page of that visit could alter its calculation and alter session duration data accordingly. Furthermore, session duration metric does not take into account time spent on individual pages within multi-page visits – for instance a user could spend five minutes browsing page two before exiting your website and alter the average session duration data accordingly.
Pages Per Session
This website metric, commonly referred to as page views, measures how many pages of your website were viewed in one session. This can provide insight into whether your content is engaging users for long enough periods.
An increased Pages per Session usually indicates that users are successfully navigating your website to find what they’re searching for, providing an indicator of engagement with your content and navigation strategy. But it may also serve as an indication that some adjustments must be made.
Pages per Session should be measured alongside other website metrics such as Sessions and Average Session Duration to provide you with an in-depth picture of how your users engage with your content. To increase this metric, ensure your navigation provides clear pathways between pages – this can be accomplished through sharp template design or organic recirculation modules that add value.
Note that this metric should not be confused with hit metric, which refers to file requests on your server (for instance, three images could generate four hits). It’s essential to differentiate these two measures as both could give misleading insights into user behavior.
Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate could indicate that visitors to your website aren’t finding what they’re searching for or that your content doesn’t live up to visitors’ expectations.
But having a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate any negative aspects for your website’s goals; websites that provide quick answers to specific queries, like weather or calculator sites, might experience higher than usual bounce rates because visitors find what they need quickly before leaving again.
Google Analytics makes it easy to track your website’s bounce rate by selecting “Overview” under Audience section. From here, you can select to see your bounce rate for either all or individual pages – though keep in mind that other analytics software programs may measure bounce rates differently than Google.
To enhance the content and user experience on your site, Google Analytics’ bounce rate by landing page can help identify which pages are most popular among your visitors and use that data to tailor your website specifically for groups of users – for instance if your audience consists largely of business professionals or shutterbugs you could make adjustments that increase engagement while decreasing bounce rate.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the key metrics to measure to understand how well your business website is doing. This metric tracks how many visitors complete specific actions on your site such as making purchases or subscribing to newsletters.
Calculating conversion rate involves simply dividing the total conversions by total visitors during your measurement period. Be cautious not to confuse this metric with other KPIs such as bounce rates and time on site – such as when there is an unusually high bounce rate or extended visit duration during this period; such behaviour could indicate problems with website conversion rate calculations.
Like all marketing metrics, conversion rate is relative. If it increases over time, this indicates that your website is performing better than before – hence why it is vitally important to monitor overall site performance rather than looking solely at individual metrics.
Databox offers an effective solution for monitoring conversion rate on websites; its integration with Google Analytics gives a complete picture of website traffic while pinpointing areas where improvements could increase conversions. Adding tools like Hotjar can further insight into user activity on your website and help identify any barriers to conversion.
Exit Rate
Though exit and bounce rates appear similar, it’s essential to remember that each measures different aspects of your website. A high bounce rate suggests visitors entering and then quickly leaving, while exit metrics show which pages on your site cause them to leave and therefore provide insight into ways you can make your site more useful for visitors.
Utilizing an analytics tool, such as MonsterInsights (a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress), to monitor these metrics can provide invaluable information about visitor activity on your website. Understanding which pages have high exit rates can help identify areas for potential improvement on your site.
Example: if a page with an extremely high exit rate drives visitors towards your conversion and sales funnels, its high exit rate might not warrant as much concern than if it was simply dead-end with no links leading forward on your website.
If you were selling products online and found that your checkout process was prompting a large percentage of users to abandon your site before the completion, this may negatively affect both ROI and SEO rankings. Here is some additional advice to reduce bounce rate and increase SEO on your website.
Top Pages
The Top Pages report provides you with an overview of your site’s most-visited pages, providing insight into which types of content your audience finds valuable and important – helping you produce similar posts or make necessary modifications that might cause visitors to leave sooner.
Track the unique visitor count over time as another key metric to monitor, as this shows you whether your marketing campaigns are successfully driving new traffic to your website. Furthermore, this metric can help identify trends and any areas that may be growing or declining over time.
If you operate an ecommerce website, conversion rates – the percentage of visitors who meet your business goals on your site such as making a purchase, downloading a white paper or filling out contact forms – should be monitored to measure user action on your website and increase revenue. This metric provides the ideal way of tracking how successful users have been at engaging with your content and taking desired actions on it.
Other metrics you should monitor include revenue attribution, which follows users from when they first land on your website through to their purchase journey and purchase decision. This helps you understand what is converting and maximize return on investment for each page of your site. You should also keep an eye out for exit pages to discover why visitors are leaving and identify any necessary site updates that may be required.