When first launching a website for your new business, you may have felt overwhelmed when looking at the website metrics page. That’s okay—there’s a lot of information to digest in there. Lucky for you, though, you’ve found this guide going over the most important online metrics to track for your website. We’ll help you understand what these metrics do and why they’re so vital.
Bounce Rate
You could have a million unique visitors, but if you have a low bounce rate, it doesn’t matter how many people have been to your site. For those who don’t know, the bounce rate is the ratio of how many visitors left your website not too long after getting on it. Whether they didn’t find the info they were looking for or just hated how your site looked, the bounce rate is the best determining factor for how well your site is doing.
Session Stats
Once you have a stable bounce rate, it’s time to see what people are doing on your site. The averages associated with pageviews, time on page, and session durations will help you figure out which pages are performing well and which ones aren’t, as well as how engaging your website is as a whole. These stats will help you determine problem areas of your site.
Interactions Per Visit
While all the session-based stats are great, the one that stands above the rest is the interactions per visit. Even if your website has a solid bounce rate and people are highly engaged with a lot of your pages, none of it matters if you’re not converting any customers. The whole reason you put this site together was to put your business online and make sales. Interactions per visit are by far the most important online metric to track for your website because it’s the determining factor for financial success.
Traffic Sources
Just because it’s so important doesn’t mean that there still aren’t other vital metrics to keep track of, though. Now that you have a good idea of what your visitors are doing, you should figure out where they’re coming from. Whether it’s from a search engine, social media site, or someone else’s website, knowing this kind of info allows you to figure out which sources you might need to work on.
Domain Authority
If you notice that you’re not getting much traffic from search engines, that’s when you’ll want to take a look at your current domain authority. This stat determines how high pages from your site rank on various search engines. Once you know how well or poorly you’re doing, you can make changes to help increase your domain authority. After doing that, you should see an increase in that section of your traffic sources.
Device Used
Finally, you can also see what kind of device a person used when they visited your site. While this may seem arbitrary, it can be quite insightful. For example, if you notice the bounce rate is abnormally high on mobile, it might be due to an optimization error that makes your site nearly unusable on a smartphone. You wouldn’t know that without this stat.
