Edward Clayton 
Building a company website with a great design and effective features takes a lot of work. You can spend months perfecting the landing page, navigation tools, blog content, and online store. But how can you know if it’s getting enough visitors? That’s where website metrics can help.
Your website metrics are crucial analytical tools that can help you understand the site from a user’s perspective. You can look at how well different pages and elements perform and see how you can improve. Ideally, each page will have a lot of traffic, with visitors finding their way to all the products and information they need. They will convert into buyers, sign up for emails, and come back again and again. The problem is that this doesn’t happen overnight. A lot of people will bounce or abandon pages if the site isn’t well-designed. So, what should you look for in these digital analytics?
10 Metrics That Help Online Businesses Grow
Website metrics are complex and wide-ranging, which is why businesses turn to companies like Quantum Metric for help. Here are 10 crucial factors that every online business needs to pay attention to.
Page views
Let’s start with one of the basics. How many times are people viewing the pages on your site? This is a great metric for your website’s organic reach and the accessibility of the site as a whole. Each time the page loads, it counts as a view. So, one person could reload a page to check information, and that would be two views. If a new page isn’t getting the views you wanted, you can make a plan to improve it. Maybe it needs a more engaging headline or better links from other pages.
Time Spent On Your Site
You can take this metric of page views further by looking at how much time people spend on the site. One way to do this is by looking at the average time on a page. If visitors tend to spend a while on an informational page, they are probably getting a lot out of it, and if they spend a long time on a landing page, maybe they are struggling to find their way to the right page. You can also look at the average length of sessions on your website. Are visitors sticking around to browse and learn more, or are they in and out without doing anything of benefit?
Lead-performing pages
When you start looking at the page views and session durations across the website, you get a better understanding of which pages perform well and which need further work.
Pages that are underperforming may need new links, better navigational tools, or tweaks to the content. You can also see how to utilize the best-performing pages to drive further sales or customer interactions.
Traffic Sources
The next thing to consider is where all those visitors are coming from. Traffic tends to fall into specific categories. Some will reach your site through an organic search, such as a result of a keyword on Google. Others may be more direct via a URL or email link. You can also look at the impact of social referrals. These referrals are more important than ever, with visitors finding content and products through social media posts and influencer content. You can find out if you’re bigger on Instagram or X or if there are any random LinkedIn referrals.
Device Type
This one is pretty simple but, again, one that’s really important in today’s market. Web traffic doesn’t just come from desktop browsers. There are plenty of mobile users browsing content and making impulse purchases from their devices during work breaks or in class. If they’re missing, maybe you need to fix your mobile optimization.
Bounce rates
This is where we start to look at some of the more negative aspects of digital analytics. Visitors that bounce are those that leave quickly without interacting. A high bounce rate shows something seriously wrong with your landing page. Maybe it’s taking too long to load or is far too cluttered. Maybe they saw too many pop-ups and clicked off.
Exit pages
Exit page metrics can be positive or negative, depending on the user experience. These record the page visitors used last. If it’s the checkout for your online store, then that’s great. If it’s the landing page, that’s bad. If it’s a random product page, something about it needs work to keep people interested.
Conversion rates
The goal of any online store is to convert potential customers into paying customers. So, it helps to see just how well the site performs and how many conversions you’re getting.
This can track the number of purchases, as well as the number that signed up for emails or downloaded additional content.
Revenue attribution
This is something to consider in addition to the conversion rates. These metrics go further to track the user experience and see the full journey to a completed purpose. You can follow their footsteps to see how they got to the site, which products they looked at, how much they spent, and how they paid.
Returning visitors and new visitors
Finally, it is a good idea to look at the digital analytics to see the status of all those visitors. It’s great to have lots of new customers converting, buying, and signing up for content. It shows that all those ads and social media posts worked. However, it’s even more satisfying when those visitors come back. Metrics on returning visitors can show you how many people come back. Are they back to read more blog content, look at new product lines, or consider additional purchases?
Working With Website Metric Professionals
Clearly, there is a lot to look at here and too much for one business owner to handle alone. That’s where a professional company can help. Expert analysts will go through the digital analytics and pinpoint all the aspects that work and all the problems to fix. Find a team with the knowledge and skills to present all this information effectively. You can then use that information to improve your site and its performance moving forward.
About Author
