What Website Statistics Should I Track?
Tracking your web analytics is crucial to understanding:
- How your website is performing
- Who is using it
- What they are viewing
- And helping you decide whether any marketing campaigns you are running are successful.
These metrics help you figure out which steps to take next and are vital to improving your online presence.
With so many different metrics out there, it can be hard to know exactly what to track and why. To help you along we’ve put together a list of the key metrics you need to start tracking today.
Note: To track website analytics you will need to have an analytics programme set up on your website. There are several different programmes out there, however, Google Analytics is the most popular. Take a look at our step-by-step guide on how to add Google Analytics to your website here.
1. Number of visitors
This is an obvious one but looking at how many visitors your website is attracting is important to understand whether it is successfully attracting traffic. If the number is low, you need to explore why that is. Is the content of your website fully optimised to rank in search engines? Are you using the right keywords? Are the ads you’re creating targeting the right audience? Knowing your traffic is low and finding the cause will allow you to resolve the issue and increase your click-through rate.
If you already have a well-established website that gets a lot of traffic, you should also measure the return visitor metric. As the name suggests, return visitors are those who have visited your website at least one time and returned. Having a lot of return visitors shows that your website is engaging and that it’s attracting those who are interested in your products or services.
2. Enquires
Tracking enquiries is again, obvious, but important. Keeping track of how many people are engaging with your site and product or services will help you determine whether your current website is working. It can also help you decide if you need to make changes to your website and whether these changes improve the number of enquiries you get. For example, if you change the call to action on your site and see a jump in the number of enquiries, this will show you that the change is working as well as help inform the content you use in your marketing activities.
Vice versa, they will also indicate that something is wrong if your enquiries start to go down. This information can help you find and change something that isn’t working on your site.
Often when we ask small businesses how many enquiries they received from their website in the previous 6 months, they do not know. These figures are important in tracking if your website works effectively for you.
Tracking enquiries is never 100% as people will call you after visiting your website and unless the person answering the phone asks and tracks this, it will never be 100% accurate. We suggest always asking how someone found you.
3. Conversion Rate/Revenue
When looking at conversion rates, a good place to start is looking at the number of enquiries you get, how many become customers and how much revenue that brings in. For example, you get 100 enquiries and 20 of them convert, giving you X amount of revenue.
Tracking these figures can help you identify a range of information from your most popular products and services to who your typical customer is to how much someone spends with you on average. You can then apply this knowledge to both your site improvement efforts and your marketing campaigns.
4. Engaged Session/How long they spend on your website
Note if you are using Google Analytics: An Engaged Session is replacing Bounce Rate in Google Analytics 4. Instead of tracking bounce rates, you should now be tracking engaged sessions. You can read more about GA4’s new Engaged Session metric here.
It is a familiar story and something we’ve all done before; we’ve landed on a website, browsed for a few seconds and clicked away. Whilst we may click off because we disliked the website’s design or layout, usually, it is because we realised the site doesn’t have the information, products or services we’re looking for.
A low number of engaged sessions mean exactly what it suggests – visitors aren’t engaging with your website, likely because they aren’t finding what they expected.
To deal with this issue, you can go to your Google Analytics page and find out exactly which pages on your website have the lowest engagement rate. From there you can determine what is causing the low engagement rate and take the necessary steps to resolve it.
If you’re using an analytics programme that still uses Bounce Rate instead of Engaged Sessions, you’ll want to take the above information and flip it – so you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.
5. Traffic Sources
The traffic sources metric shows you exactly where your visitors are coming from and therefore how they are finding your website. There are four primary types of sources:
- Direct visitors – those that visit your site by typing your URL directly into the address bar.
- Search visitors – those that use a search engine to find your website and click your website in the search results.
- Referral visitors – those that come from another website.
- Paid – this is any paid advertising such as social media, search engines and other advertising platforms.
It is important to evaluate each traffic source to understand whether your marketing strategies are working. For example, an increase in search traffic after publishing new content or implementing a new tactic means that these actions have been effective at driving traffic to your website. If you start posting on social media and your traffic from social media increases, you are doing something right. You just need to monitor whether those people are converting to customers.
You can even drill deeper into the data for traffic sources and find out whether your traffic is organic or coming from paid sources, such as ads. This information can be further used to help inform a variety of things, from your SEO strategy to whether you use pay-per-click advertising.
6. Device Source
Device source is another metric you can use to help you make your website more engaging for your audience. It can be used to not only find which devices users are browsing your website on, (PC, tablet, or smartphone) but also what operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows) and browsers (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) they’re using.
Mobile traffic has jumped significantly in recent years, so it is important to make sure your website looks good on mobile devices, not just on desktops. At Pagio Website Builder all of our website templates are mobile-friendly as standard, and you can preview how your website will look on different devices before deciding on your design.
Tracking device source is also good for ensuring your website is working as it should across devices. For example, if you get 80% of your traffic from mobiles yet most of the enquiries come from desktop, you need to find and fix whatever is preventing people from enquiring via mobile as you could be losing potential customers.
7. Location
If you’re a location-based business, for example, a hairdresser or restaurant, it is worth tracking the location of your website visitors. If you are getting a lot of visitors in your local area this is a good sign that your website is attracting the correct audience. If you are not attracting the right customers, you can work on improving your local SEO. We have a blog on how to do this that you can read here.
8. Entry and Exit pages
Tracking entry and exit pages will show you which pages visitors to your site arrive on and which pages they leave the website on.
Entry pages show you where a visitor landed on your website. This helps you understand which pages on your website are the best at attracting visitors and can help inform your content and marketing strategy. For example, if you are providing a lot of high-quality content in your blog and getting a lot of people landing on it, you know you’re answering questions that your audience is asking.
Exit pages mark the page where the user was when they decided to leave the website. If your engagement and conversion rate is low, exit page data might provide valuable insight into why this is. Some website visitors will exit on a main service page or contact page as they have the information needed or have enquired.
Final thoughts
Tracking metrics can be massively beneficial for improving both your website and marketing campaigns. However, it is not enough to simply track them. You need to choose which metrics you track with a clear purpose in mind and then track them consistently if you want to collect data that you can turn into actionable knowledge.
If you don’t want to track all of the above, we recommend at least tracking the visits, enquiries and conversions as those will give you a good insight into if your website is working.
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