Introduction

If you’ve invested the time and money setting up a website for your business, you’ll want to keep a close eye on its performance to make sure it’s worth the time and effort. Knowing what key site metrics to track can give you an edge in improving your KPIs and using your website to achieve your marketing and business objectives.

There are a lot of metrics that you could look into: from your daily visitor count to the paths they take across your site. All of them are useful in one way or another, but there are 5 key figures to track that can give your business everything it needs to know to maximize revenue.

In this article, we’ll list some of those most important metrics and offer some tips on how to make use of them for your marketing analytics.

1. Site Visitors

The most critical site metric to track is site visitors (often referred to as traffic). This is the number of people who land on your site. Generally speaking, the bigger the number, the better. More eyeballs on your website means you’ve got more opportunities to earn new sign-ups, potential customers, or just straight up ad revenue.

Site visitors, like most of the metrics on this list, can be highly contextual, and while the general rule of “more is better” usually applies, it can mean different things depending on other metrics (such as where your visitors and clicks are coming from), which we’ll tackle further below.

How to Analyze Site Visitors

While the raw numbers of site visitors can be pretty straightforward, actually making use of the metric and making sure your analysis is telling you something useful is a bit more complicated than just “more is better”.

• It’s generally good to receive more traffic, but you’d want to check if you’re receiving quality leads (i.e. likely buyers instead of random users) and have the capacity to satisfy demand.

• Likewise, understanding where that traffic is (or isn’t) coming from will tell you where you should focus your efforts to acquire new visitors.

• As you’ll see with many metrics on this list, your site visitor count is best read alongside other metrics. In this case, we recommend looking at conversion rates and traffic sources.

TinyURL’s shortened links can be a great addition to your website traffic monitoring, and can be set up to tell you which of your marketing channels are bringing in traffic. You can use them to track how well your ads, social media posts, or emails are performing. 

Likewise, you can use site visitors alongside other key site metrics to track, such as conversion metrics (i.e. sales, sign-ups, or other valuable actions you want to see) to check the quality of the traffic you’re bringing. This will help you balance priorities and map out the best ways to acquire new traffic and allocate your efforts.

2. Conversion Rates

Just as valuable as site visitors is your conversion rate, or the proportion of your site visitors who take valuable actions on your website. All those eyes on your website don’t amount to much unless they’re driving the rest of your business, whether it’s sales, signing up for events or services, or even just adding a little bit of extra ad revenue.

There are a number of ways to track your conversion rate. You can set up success pages that only converted users can see, distribute promo codes, or use a service like Google Tag Manager to track conversion events.

How to Analyze Conversion Rates

As with any metric, context is king. Consider your business, strategy and products, and use these as a lens for interpreting your conversion rates.

• Conversions can tell you which products and services are most important to your users.

• Uptrends in your conversion rates can show you which marketing efforts lead to more conversions — for example, you might find users from Facebook convert more often than your blog readers.

3. Traffic Sources

Traffic sources is another key metric to track because it shows you where on the internet your users came from before landing on your site. This can be helpful in tailoring your marketing towards sources with the best conversion rates, or show you which marketing strategies are driving site traffic and awareness.

Direct traffic (which we’ve written about before) is a bit of an outlier because it counts both users who visit your site without having clicked through from another website (such as from a browser bookmark, or a QR code), as well as visitors who land on your site through email and other sources Google Analytics can’t track.

How to Analyze Traffic Sources

Traffic sources is a critical site metric to track to give you valuable info about your potential customers as well as the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

• See where your most valuable audiences are hanging out

• See which of your marketing strategies are paying off

• Measure your presence across the internet (i.e. are users discovering you across the web)

4. Average Time Spent on Page

Another important site metric to track is average time spent on page, or dwell time.

How much time does the average user spend on your website? Do they take the time to browse, just pop in for quick updates, or do they linger and explore?

Dwell time is a key metric to track so that you can see whether the parts of your website and your content are working as intended.

How to Analyze Average Time Spent on Page

Time spent on page (or dwell time) is, like every metric, highly contextual. Different parts of your website will have different types of ideal dwell time.

• You want to see longer dwell times on your blogs, sales pages, and content designed to engage users.

• You want shorter dwell times on pages where you want users to have an easy time taking actions (ex. your payment pages).

• Use the data you see here to determine if your pages are performing how they’re supposed to.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the proportion of users who land on your website and leave before visiting any other pages. In a way, it’s like the evil sibling of conversion rate and dwell time, showing you what percentage of your visitors “bounce” off the site without doing anything meaningful. 

But the metric is more complex than that, as high bounce rates can even be desirable depending on the nature of the pages or sites in question.

How to Analyze Bounce Rate

How you analyze your bounce rate depends on what you want your pages to do – so it’s about as contextual as dwell time. Consider how you want people to use your website and what you want specific pages to do (you can view your overall bounce rate or, more usefully, check individual pages).

• When it comes to things like the storefront and resource sections of your site, high bounce rate is undesirable. You want viewers to engage with elements of your website here.

• If users spend a lot of time on simple order tracking pages, this could be a sign that what should be a simple page is, in fact, hard to use. Context is key.

Conclusion: Tracking Your Site Metrics

We hope you’ve found this tiny guide to key site metrics to track a useful addition to your digital marketing knowledge. Keep a close eye on the most important site metrics, and you’ll be able to accurately assess the performance of your website and your digital marketing efforts.

TinyURL’s shortened links can help you track key site metrics, such as traffic sources, peak times, devices used to view your links, and more.

Our streamlined analytics dashboard lets you track real-time metrics for each of your shortened links, making them data gathering powerhouses perfect for small businesses looking to get started with marketing analytics, or as a complement to the tools of a bigger organization.