10 Website Metrics To Be Tracking for Every Website

Whether you run an eCommerce store or a service based website there are 10 website metrics to be tracking as an absolute must, keep reading.

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Your website is one of your most important marketing tools and the website metrics to be tracking is key to understanding your customer data and how to improve marketing performance.

Your website is an important marketing tool that helps you attract customers. If you’re an eCommerce store, your entire revenue depends on your website. One of the most significant benefits of digital marketing is that you can measure and track just about anything, including anything happening on your website. Many tools can help you track your website data, so it can be a little overwhelming. However, once you know what metrics you need to follow, you’ll be able to choose the best tracking tools for you.

Here are the website metrics you need to be tracking. 

1. Visitors

You should always track the number of unique visitors your website gets. Unique visitors are individual people that have visited your site at least once. For example, if someone visits your website once and another person visits your website twice, you only have two unique visitors. 

The number of visitors your website gets is crucial because it tells you about the size of your audience. If you increase your marketing and advertising spend, your visitors should increase. If the number of visitors doesn’t rise, you know your marketing campaign wasn’t effective. 

2. Return Visitors

The return visitors metric tells you how many of your site visitors have returned. As you may know, repeat customers are essential to help your business grow because they’re more affordable than searching and advertising to new customers, and they’re also easier to convert. If few of your website visitors are returning visitors, you may have to look into your customer engagement strategy to help bring people back to your website. 

3. Bounce Rate

When it comes to website metrics to be tracking, bounce rate is essential. The bounce rate tells you when someone visits your website and then leaves after visiting one page. A high bounce rate means your visitors aren’t immediately finding what they are looking for and leaving. This metric can tell you a lot about the performance of your website. A lower bounce rate typically means that your visitors find what they’re looking for. 

4. Exit Pages

Next, you’ll need to understand where exactly you lose your visitors. An exit page is where a person exits your website after visiting multiple pages. Many of your pages may have a high exit rate because they’re supposed to be the last page a visitor sees, such as an order confirmation page. However, having a high exit rate on pillar pages, including product pages, signals that many of your visitors are not converting. 

5. Conversion Rate

As a website metric to be tracking the conversion rate tells you how successful a page is at converting a customer. This is especially important for pages that have forms or products. Ultimately, conversion rates tell you the percentage of people who completed a goal on your website. 

Conversion rates are significant because they measure whether or not your website is performing the way it’s supposed to. If you have a low conversion rate, your website cannot convince customers to contact you somehow. 

Monitoring conversion rates can also alert you to potential site problems such as errors in your shopping carts or forms. 

6. Top Pages

The top pages will help you understand which pages perform the best and attract the most visitors. This allows you to zero in on only a few pages of your website to focus on what can be improved. You can also use the top pages to help you improve your lower-performing pages. For example, you might find that a top page has a better user experience and change a low-performing page to reflect the better experience. 

7. Top Blogs

If you invest in content marketing, you should understand whether or not your money is going to good use. Tracking your top blogs will tell you which information your visitors find most useful and which will need to be tweaked to fit the needs of your potential customers. 

8. Rankings

If you want people to find your site organically, you’ll need to invest in a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. If your website serves as a sales tool, you need to find some way to bring customers to your site. Of course, you can also invest in advertising to help you get customers to your site quickly, but SEO is a longer-term strategy that can help you reduce your overall marketing spend. Before optimizing your website, it’s best to know where you stand. You can use a tool like Google Search Console to help you understand your rankings and identify which pages you need to focus on. 

You’ll need to monitor your rankings to see if your efforts improve continuously. 

9. Acquisition Medium

You should always know where your customers are coming from, including direct, organic, and referral traffic. This is especially important if you’re investing in SEO since an organic traffic report can help you determine whether or not your efforts are bringing more organic traffic to your website. 

How you acquire customers can help you determine the best ways to market to them. While all websites should invest in SEO, some might not need a robust strategy, depending on their business. If your customers come directly to your website, you’ll still need to monitor customer acquisition data. 

10. Events

Tracking website events can help you understand user behavior and measure user experience. Event tracking allows you to track everything from a button click to how far down a visitor has scrolled on a page. These metrics can help you understand what actions users are taking on your website to improve the experience. For example, you may find that putting a button below the fold results in fewer conversions. Once you have that data, you can experiment with button placement to improve conversion rates and increase sales. 

You can also track submission forms from website plugins that aren’t automatically tracked in Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

Many of these website metrics can be found through Google Analytics, but you may need website integrations, depending on your CMS. Before you start tracking anything, make a list of the most important metrics to track and figure out the best tools to use to help you visualize your data and make better marketing decisions.