Key Performance Indicators to Watch on Your Website

Running a website without monitoring certain metrics is a recipe for disaster. You won’t be able to optimize your website for the highest possible level of engagement, nor will you be able to fully capitalize on the traffic. So, which key performance indicators (KPIs) should you watch?

Number of Unique Visits

Using a tool like Google Analytics, keep an eye on the number of unique visits your website receives. Whether your website is designed to sell a product, sell a service, generate newsletter signups, or simply to increase brand awareness, you’ll need traffic to accomplish these goals.

Number of Returning Visits

In addition to unique visits, you should also pay attention to the number of returning visits to your website. If only a small fraction of your website’s visitors return, it’s usually indicative of a more serious underlying problem, such as lack of content and/or relevancy.

Do a thorough review of your content — does it answer the “how will this content help me?” question consistently for visitors? If not, it may be time for an overhaul. Consider outsourcing some of your content creation to a digital marketing firm like ContentFirst.Marketing for some fresh, relevant content.

Bounce Rate

What’s your website’s bounce rate? Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who leave without accessing a second page on the site. If 1 out of 3 visitors leaves after visiting just a single page on your website, it has a 33.3% bounce rate.

Generally speaking, you should work to lower your bounce rate by encouraging visitors to access multiple pages. This can be done by adding links to other articles and pages within your site. Also, keep external links to a minimum, as visitors who click external links may be counted as a bounce if they didn’t already click through a second page on your site.

Exit Pages

A commonly overlooked web metric among webmasters is exit pages. An exit page is essentially a webpage on which a visitor leaves your website. Each page on a website is given an “exit rate.” Not to be confused with bounce rate, exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave/exit that particular page. So if a particular page has a high exit rate, there could be something wrong with it or its respective content, in which case you should analyze it.

Traffic Source

Of course, you should also be keeping an eye on your site’s traffic. In other words, where are your site’s visitors coming from? This may include direct traffic, such as browser type-ins, search traffic, such as Google and Bing, and referral traffic, such as links placed on social media or other pages. By learning which traffic sources are yielding the most traffic, you can optimize your site appropriately. For instance, if most of your visitors are coming from Google, you can perform SEO on your site for higher rankings and ultimately more traffic.

Have anything else that you would like to add about key performance indicators? Let us know in the comments section below!