Whatever the size of your business, measuring web traffic is essential in order to understand who’s visiting your site, and how they’re engaging with it.
Properly analysing your website metrics and goals will help you assess your website’s performance.
Tracking and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) will also help you to optimise your site, convert more visitors into customers and empower you to make strategic decisions for your business.
But as there is so much analytical data available for your website, it’s important to narrow down which metrics are most relevant to your aims and objectives.
There are several tools available that can display and interpret your website analytics, helping you to avoid guesswork, set goals and measure and compare success and growth.
Below we’ve outlined the key metrics that can help you track and measure website traffic.
How many users is your website attracting each month? Where are they coming from? You can quickly establish a baseline for average traffic levels and begin to understand how people are finding and interacting with you online.
See if you can correlate any peaks and troughs in traffic with when you posted on social media, sent marketing emails, press coverage or other significant events.
Analysing your traffic will help you start to understand what’s driving people to your website.
Time on page
This is the average time in seconds that users spend on a specific page before navigating to another part of your site.
If the average time on page is higher for one particular page, that could indicate that its content is more engaging than other areas of the site.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who entered your site on a specific page, then exited from that same page without visiting anywhere else on your site.
Simply put, bounce rate is measured when a landing page is the first and only interaction a user has with your website.
If landing pages have a high bounce rate, they may not be effectively encouraging visitors to engage with other areas of your site – or they might not be giving users the information they’re looking for.
Average session duration
The total duration of all sessions (in seconds) divided by the number of sessions gives you your average session duration.
It’s a crucial metric that helps determine content relevance and user engagement.
Along with bounce rate and page views per session, it allows you to discover how long users are staying on your site.
Longer average session duration shows that users are more interested in your content and/or products and services.
Landing pages are commonly where users first come in contact with your website, and they’re designed specifically to guide visitors towards a single call to action.
You’ll be able to look at which of your landing pages are most popular and effective.
If there are few conversions or the page has a high bounce rate, that indicates that something is wrong.
Perhaps the page is taking too long to load, some of the links might be broken or the page layout or content is confusing.
You can then analyse which areas need improvement and try to create a better user experience and increase conversions.
Device reports can show you which type of device is used by a majority of users to access your website.
People use different devices such as desktops, mobiles or tablets to perform online searches, so you should make sure that your website is responsive and compatible with all devices.
It’s relatively straightforward to set up goals to show how often and how successfully your site is converting people, and encouraging them to take desired actions.
Once set up, goals can then be filtered to can help you establish which specific marketing channels, campaigns and web pages helped your users convert.
Looking at your goal completions data can help you understand which pages and content are relevant and engaging for your users.
Ensure you set measurable goals, no matter what it is that you want to accomplish.
It’s best to identify three to five key performance indicators, then create a plan to improve over time the metrics attached to them.
But keep in mind that metrics will improve at different speeds and it may take a few weeks before you start to see any improvement work reflected in your website traffic and rankings.
Ready for a data-driven website? Get in touch with the Air Websites team and let’s find out how we can help your small business grow with a quality, professional site that allows you to easily measure traffic and performance.
