Whether it is a small personal blog, business website, or an Online Store, at the end of the day, every site owner’s primary goal is to maximize its performance. Therefore, analyzing your website metrics is vital in determining the necessary directions to take to improve your marketing, advertisement, and content strategies. Underestimating the importance of interpreting your website metrics can lead to unsuitable practices and, consequently, a waste of efforts and funds.

We bet you do not hear anything new so far. Most people are well-aware of how important analyzing their web metrics is. With the high-availability of Website Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, we will not be surprised if you have already integrated such a tool on your website. Based on research, around 70 million websites are using them already, where 40% of the share goes to Google Analytics. This is definitely the very first step in the right direction. We will advise you to strongly consider setting up your Google Analytics account or another similar tool you find convenient to use.

Supposing you have integrated the Web Analytics tool into your website, then what do to next? Then comes the confusing part with the long list of overwhelming statics that users are not entirely sure how to interpret and which metrics are of real importance for their websites. Fortunately, there are very accurate and precise stats that can really show you how your website is performing.

In the following lines, we will review the most important website metrics that will give you valuable insights into your current website performance. You will learn how to correctly interpret them and use them as a solid base for your digital marketing strategy, which will positively lead to reducing bounce-back rates, increasing visitor conversion, and overall satisfaction.

Visitors

Naturally, the most important aspect of analyzing is your traffic. Without a fair amount of traffic, examining the rest of the matrics lowers its effect. When tracking visitors, there are a few aspects that you need to pay attention to.
First and foremost, the number of unique visitors. This metric represents the number of people who visited your website during a specific period of time – an hour, a day, a week, a month. Unique visitors indicate the number of individuals that have browsed your website in an initially defined timeframe regardless of the number of times they have visited it. Apart from having an idea of how big your audience is, you can also determine how effective your current marketing campaign is. Let’s say you have recently started running a new ads campaign, but you do not notice any indication for an increase in the number of unique visitors on your website. This can clearly lead you to conclude that the campaign does not have the desired effect, and you should focus your energy and money in another direction.

Second, the number of returning visitors. As the name suggests, these are the visitors who accessed your website more than once in a specific time frame. The percent of returning visitors is also crucial as it indicates that you have given the user a reason to return to your website, whether they are engaged by your content, or they would like to purchase your products.

Google Analytics comes with a handy feature called “Goals”. It allows you to define specific circumstances in order to track and estimate each visitor’s worth by dividing the revenue you make by the number of unique visitors on your website. This insight can help you prioritize your marketing campaigns and consequently lower your expenses by boosting your conversions.

Session Duration

The session duration metric indicates how much time visitors spend on your website on a per-visit basis. In other words, you can determine how engaging your website content is for visitors – the longer they stay, the more compelling your content is. According to research, most users tend to spend less than 15 seconds on a web page unless you manage to attract their attention. A poorly written content may lead to the immediate abandonment of your visitors. In contrast, well-written and engaging content will indeed extend the time they spend on your website and potentially increase the possibility of a successful conversion.
In Google Analytics, you are able to find out the average session duration. Please note that the algorithm used is based on user interactions, and if a user is inactive for more than 30 minutes, this will be considered a closed session. In other words, if you have long articles, tutorials, videos, etc., this might not be the most accurate metric for you.

Apart from the average session duration, Google Analytics also shows you the average time spent on a per-page basis. This metric is invaluable in two directions. You can learn which pages of your website are not performing well and need some improvement. It can also show you which pages are more engaging and help you determine your future content strategy.

It is essential to know that the average time spent on pages is used by search engines, such as Google, to determine your content’s quality. The search engine bots cannot define how relevant and well-written is your content. Therefore, they use the time session duration as an indicator of the efficiency of your web content.

Top Pages

It is important to be aware of which website pages are the most popular and perform best in terms of user engagement. Identifying what topics are of interest to your website visitors will ultimately help you base your future content strategies on actual facts.

In Google Analytics, you can find the top-performing pages in terms of traffic volumes.

Analyzing the top pages’ content type will help you identify the topics your audience is most interested in. You can create similar content or review these topics in-depth.

Interactions Per Visit

It is essential to understand your visitors’ behavior and how they interact with your website. Analyzing the users’ behavior, such as the time they spent on your website, the links they clicked, and the pages they visited, will help you determine the path taken to the successful conversion. This will help you determine which user interactions are most likely to lead the visitor to purchase. On the other hand, you can examine which interactions lead to visitors’ abandonment and help you decide what adjustment you need to make to avoid or at least minimize the bounce-back rate in the future.

Top Traffic Sources

The traffic sources will help you understand where your website visitors are coming from. This metric is also critical, especially if you are running paid advertisement campaigns.
There are three primary traffic sources – direct traffic, organic searches, and referrals. Direct traffic is formed by the visitors who access your website by directly entering the URL address in their browser. Organic searches indicate the traffic formed by visitors who found you through search engines. Referrals are based on visitors who were redirected to your website from another third-party website you were mentioned at.

Examining which the traffic sources bring most of your visitors will help you determine how effective your current marketing campaign is. If you detect that a given traffic source’s bounce rates are higher, this indicates that it brings irrelevant auditory that is not most certainly not interested in your brand. In such a scenario, you will need to reconsider your efforts and focus on another strategy that will bring relevant users with the potential for conversion.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate indicates the percentage of users that were successfully converted for a particular website page. Conversion rates indicate the success of the action you want your visitors to perform on a specific page. Naturally, higher conversion shows the page in question is effectively performing.

Comparing the pages with higher conversion to the pages with lower conversion rates will help you identify what aspects require improvement, whether it is a design, call-to-action, or content.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who left your website right after accessing it, without any further interaction. This makes it one of the most crucial tracking metrics. Naturally, your goal should be to keep the bounce rate at the lowest possible level.

A high bounce rate indicates there is a specific issue with a particular page. You need to find out the pages with the highest bounce rate and focus on improving them. While the issue can be related to the design or content, an ineffective marketing campaign can also significantly impact it. Intuitively, if you attract an irrelevant auditory, it is normal to have a high bounce rate.

Exit Pages

Exit pages indicate on the pages on which your visitors are leaving your website. Analyzing your website users’ path and the exit page will help you understand at what point they are abandoning your website. You can revisit the pages with the highest exit rate and determine what factors could be potentially leading to an issue.

Whether it is a complicated checkout process, unattractive design, poorly written content, you surely need to pay attention to the exit pages and dedicate your efforts to improving them.

Conclusion

The most important part of improving your tactics based on analyzing these metrics is to find out which have the most significant impact of your individual business and be consistent. The metrics we have reviewed are generally the most important ones providing genuinely accurate information, the key is to learn how to accurately analyze it and put the necessary efforts in improving the elements of your website and marketing campaigns.

In case you are not getting the desired results, there are several reasons that could be impacting your website performance. One of them is your website speed. It has a significant influence on your user experience and therefore could consequently lead to increased higher bounce-back rates and unsuccessful conversions. While quite a few factors determine your website loading speed, the hosting server takes a notable part in that. As a hosting provider, that aims to deliver the best possible speed and overall performance, HostArmada has taken the extra mile in the optimization of our server environment. More about our services you can find in the comprehensive review generated by Online Web Service after testing our hosting plans.