There are 8 essential metrics you should be tracking on your website and landing pages that you can use to optimize and improve your website’s performance:
1. Unique Visitors
Definition: The total number of individual visitors to your site during a specific period of time, not counting repeat visits by the same individual
How to Use It: Look for a good upward trend over time, or in conjunction with specific marketing campaigns to see whether your content and campaigns are driving visitors to your site
2. New vs Repeat Visitors
Definition: A comparison of your unique visitors vs. the number of visitors who came back more than once
How to Use It: The more repeat visitors you have, the more chances they found valuable contents that keeps them coming back to your site. If your repeat visitor rate is only in the single digits, your site might not offer enough valuable information. However, if your repeat visitor rate is higher than 30%, you’re probably not growing your audience enough to generate new business. A healthy rate of repeat visitors is about 15%.
3. Traffic Sources
Definition: A breakdown of the specific sources of traffic to your website, such as direct, organic, or referral
How to Use It: Checking your traffic sources tells you how well your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are performing. You’ll want to see your share of organic traffic rising until it reaches 40%-50% of total traffic. By tracking referral traffic, you can see the effectiveness of your link-building efforts. Aim for referrals to deliver 20%-30% of overall traffic.
4. Referring URLs
Definition: Specific, non-search engine URLs that send traffic directly to your site and represent the inbound links that are crucial for boosting your site’s search engine rankings
How to Use It: High amount of referring URLs means other site owners and bloggers think your content is worthy sharing with their audience. So, you want to see your referring URLs grow steadily. You can also study it to determine which types of sites or bloggers are linking to your site and what type of content they tend to like to produce more content that is likely generate inbound links.
5. Most/Least Popular Pages
Definition: comparison of the pages on your site that receive the most and least traffic
How to Use It: This helps you see what kind of content visitors and prospects find most interesting. Focus your database building efforts on your popular pages, like an email opt-in box, etc.
6. Indexed Pages
Definition: The number of pages on your site that have received at least one visit from organic search
How to Use It: With this info, you can see which landing pages receive the highest visits. Popular entry points into your website are great to optimize for lead generation by adding calls-to-action for content offers. If your site’s unique landing page count is small, ramp up your blogging efforts. Business blogging is one of the best ways. High amount of indexed pages means more opportunities to get found via organic search, and more likely to generate leads and customers via content creation.
7. Landing Page Conversion Rate
Definition: The percentage of visitors to your site who take a desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a lead generation form
How to Use It: Monitor different types of conversion rate to know how well you’ve been capitalizing on the traffic coming to your site:
- Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate: the percentage of visitors who become leads
- Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate: the percentage of leads who become customers
- Visitor-to-Customer Conversion Rate: the percentage of visitors who become customers
8. Bounce Rate
Definition: The percentage of new visitors who leave your site almost immediately after arriving, with no other interactions
How to Use It: A high bounce rate means your pages aren’t compelling or useful to visitors. Or there could be problems with your marketing strategy, like having inbound links from irrelevant sources or not optimizing landing pages for specific campaigns. A high bounce rate could also indicate problems with your site itself, such as confusing architecture, weak content, or no clear calls-to-action.
