How successful is your website?
It may be challenging to answer this question.
How do you even tell?
There are tons of different metrics you can track, but not all of them are relevant for your analysis. Also, trying to track everything would only lead to confusion – not an actionable strategy for improvement.
So, how do you choose the right metrics? We’ve gathered the most important website KPIs that will tell you exactly how well your website is performing.
Let’s dig in.
What Are KPIs?
Let’s get this clear first. What are KPIs anyway? Are they all the metrics you’re tracking?
No. Key Performance Indicators are the metrics you need to measure to determine whether you’re progressing towards your business goals.
KPIs help you develop an actionable plan on how to reach these objectives, and allow you to track and measure the goal contributions of individuals or teams.
KPIs to Measure Website Performance
What KPIs you decide to track strongly depends on what your business is and what goals you want to achieve with your website. Every business has a different conversion process, and once you have that determined, you should be able to extract the most meaningful KPIs that will show you exactly how your website’s performance contributes to your overall business goals.
Although there isn’t a universal set of KPIs that every business should track, we’ve narrowed down the list to the most important KPIs to measure website performance.
1. Acquisition Metrics
Acquisition metrics show you how good your website (combined with your other marketing activities) is at attracting visitors to your site.
They give you general information about the traffic volume, but also help you identify who your visitors are and where they’re from. That’s critical because it allows you to improve your marketing efforts and make changes on your website accordingly.
Some metrics from this group are:
- Traffic by source
- The number of unique visitors
- Organic traffic volume
- Domain Authority
- Search Rankings
2. Engagement and Behavior Metrics
Are you an interesting host? It’s one thing to attract people to visit your home – in this case, your website, but keeping them there is a whole new story. A lot of traffic doesn’t mean much if your visitors don’t find something valuable on your website to stick around, or if they don’t complete the conversion process or at least take some action. A good website encourages visitors to interact with your content, and if yours doesn’t, it’s time to make changes.
Here are the metrics you may use as KPIs:
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
- Dwell time
- Interactions per visit
- Pages per session
- Scroll depth
3. Conversion Metrics
Finally, if your goal is to sell through your website or build your mailing list, you won’t find out much without tracking conversions. This group of metrics shows you directly how successful your website is. Again, the fact that you get lots of traffic doesn’t mean your conversion rate will also be high.
Here are a few ideas on what you can measure here:
- Conversion rate
- Visit-to-signup rate
- Visit-to-lead rate
- Goal completions
4. User Experience Metrics
Another aspect that determines how well your website will perform is user experience. Do your pages load fast enough? Is your website mobile-friendly? Some business owners neglect these important metrics and are left wondering why people leave their website before taking any action.
To ensure the best user experience possible, measure page load time. If it takes more than three seconds for your website to load, it’s a plausible explanation why you may be losing potential conversions.
Start with Your Goal
What’s your primary business goal?
The KPIs you’re going to track should align with it. The ultimate goal is usually more revenue, so think about how different aspects of your website can contribute to that.
Should you optimize the mobile user interface? Should you create more engaging and attractive content? Tracking the right KPIs will help you determine the next step.
- Grow your customer base faster by becoming more visible online
- Grow conversions and increase ROI with higher quality leads
- Utilize our expertise to improve GMB ranking for better visibility
- Gain increased insights into the performance of your marketing strategy
