A fully functional and highly optimized website plays a major role in a business's success. By investing in a website, your company can reach a larger potential audience and create a focal point for all of your online activity.
Website performance metrics allow you to evaluate the success of your online marketing efforts. With some simple analytics, you can figure out how much traffic you're getting, which channels are proving to be the most valuable, how much revenue your website is generating and even how efficient your efforts are proving to be. But there are a lot of different metrics that have varying degrees of usefulness. Over the years, certain metrics have proven to be very helpful in assessing the ROI of a website, while others have turned out to be misleading.
Here are some of the main website performance metrics that your business should be aware of.
Unique Visitors
Website traffic is a critical metric, but it can often be misleading, as it counts all of the visits that one user makes separately. For instance, if one visitor looked at your website seven times, this would count for seven visits. Unfortunately, this inflates the value of one consumer's interest, since one potential conversion opportunity is counted numerous times.
Instead, you should focus on the number of unique visitors that come to your website. By doing so, you will be able to see the true reach of your brand online, as this measure will give you a more accurate reading of your conversion opportunities.
Referring URLs
Referring URLs can show you how many other websites are linking to your own, which will allow you to see what kind of reach you're getting for your brand. In general, the more referring URLs you have, the better your website will fare, as this diversity of sources will stabilize your traffic and demonstrate your brand's increasing visibility. And, by observing your referring URLs, you will be able to see where the greatest volume of traffic is coming from and which marketing strategies are paying off.
Bounce Rate
While an analysis of unique visitors can illustrate your brand's reach, your bounce rate shows how well your website is actually performing. According to Hubspot, a high bounce rate suggests that visitors have trouble finding the information or products that they're looking for or that they find the website to be too difficult to use. Landing pages and blogs tend to have slightly higher bounce rates due to their focused content. If your website has a high bounce rate, you should start to examine your current offerings and make changes where necessary. This might call for a redesign or simply a new approach to marketing your website online. Try making small adjustments until you find what works.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a big metric, and therefore it can be somewhat vague — but it nonetheless remains critical to judging website performance. Conversions represent a percentage of transactions you earn out of the total unique visitors your website receives. If a small business's conversion rate rises by even one percent, their company can be drastically affected.
Website performance metrics come in many forms, but by paying attention to the right ones, you can quickly evaluate your website's success and determine where you need to make changes.
