In the past, if you wanted to boost sales you’d run TV ads with catchy jingles or clever ad copy in newspapers.
These marketing methods still work today, but modern buyers are more likely to purchase online. In fact, buyers make around 12 online searches before making a purchase. This means your site needs to act like an attractive storefront that engages visitors quickly with relevant and personalized messages.
But how do you know if your website is optimized to grab buyers’ attention? This is where website key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.
A website KPI is a measure that ties your online marketing efforts with business goals. A glance at these metrics should tell you the business impact created as a result of your marketing efforts.
In addition to the impact and results, website KPIs also help:
While various web analytics platforms give you a goldmine of information, you should be able to differentiate and pick out the ones that actually impact your business.
Your website KPIs should be:
While it might be overwhelming to narrow down all your website KPIs in one go, read on as we discuss the top website KPIs that are relevant for any business.
Acquisition comprises a set of metrics that gives information about the traffic you’ve received on your website. It helps you answer questions such as
Traffic source is a part of the acquisition metrics. It measures the sources that drive traffic to your website, such as:
By keeping an eye on this website KPI, you’re able to double down on the channel that’s working well for you and contextualize your messaging for these visitors. Additionally, you can identify gaps and opportunities in channel traffic and focus on building your audience base from those channels.
A session represents a set of activities a visitor performs on your website during a certain time period. Say a visitor lands on your blog, clicks on a few related articles, and even downloads your eBook. This entire user interaction is considered as one session.
A session starts right after a user visits your website and ends after 30 mins of inactivity. If the same visitor comes back a few hours or days later, it’s considered a separate session. In other words, a single visitor can contribute to multiple sessions.
Tracking website sessions help you evaluate if your marketing strategy is engaging enough for prospects to return. Maybe you receive four sessions from a user on a daily average. That means you’re doing a good job in keeping visitors engaged. These users could eventually be nurtured into customers.
Conversely, if you receive as many sessions as visitors, it indicates that your prospects aren’t returning to your website.
You can improve website sessions by:
Pages per session is the average number of pages a user has visited in a session. For instance, if a prospect lands on your blog through organic search and then clicks on a related article that you’ve placed on your blog, then the pages per session for this visitor is two.
This metric allows you to track the overall website engagement. It indicates if your prospects find your content helpful and are interested to learn more from you.
You can improve your pages per session by:
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors leaving your website immediately after entering or without interacting further. If a prospect visits your landing page and leaves without downloading the eBook, this would contribute to the bounce rate. However, if the prospect downloads the eBook on your landing page or navigates to another page on the same website, it would reduce the bounce rate.
Bounce rate is an essential website KPI as it indicates that a visitor has decided to move on to the next page without interacting with your website. This is a precious lead lost. By stopping a visitor from bouncing, you are increasing the chances of conversion.
Keeping track of bounce rate is also important for two other reasons:
Having a high bounce rate could also indicate that site visitors don’t find your content helpful and bounced to another website, or they found the answers they were looking for (in the case of TOFU content) but aren’t ready to further engage with you. In such cases, it is essential to combine bounce rate with another metric: time on page. Time on page tells you how long a visitor spends on a specific page on your website.
To improve your bounce rate:
The average session duration indicates the amount of time a visitor spends on your website during one session. Website visitors with a high average session duration are likely the ideal prospects for your business. They resonate most with your content and would like to learn more.
To improve your average session duration:
Page speed/load time is the time it takes for your page to load in the user’s session. Page speed and load time is crucial for three main reasons:
Using a site performance in webmaster tools, you would be able to view your site’s average load time and your site speed is compared to other websites. If your site is faster than most, all you need to focus on is creating quality content. But if it’s slower, you need to make speed a priority.
To improve page speed and load time, reduce and optimize image sizes on your webpages, avoid auto-streaming videos, and implement browser caching.
Dwell time is a measure of how long it takes for a user to return to the SERP results after clicking on your page. In essence, it determines the time spent on your page before getting back to the SERP results.
When a user enters your page, they quickly scan to see if they find your content valuable. When they spot what they’re looking for, they spend time reading more. If they don’t, they instantly go back to SERP to find another page.
Search engines use this as one of the factors to determine your authority in the subject and rank your page: “A minute or two is good as it can easily indicate the visitor consumed your content. Less than a couple of seconds can be viewed as a poor result. And while that’s not the only factor we review when helping to determine quality, it’s a signal we watch.”
You can improve dwell time by:
Leads are individuals or businesses who are interested in your business. By nurturing them and tapping into their curiosity at the right time, you can convert them into potential or even repeat customers. Depending on their qualification to be an ideal customer, there are two types of leads, MQLs and SQLs.
Leads are literally your future potential customers. Without fueling your sales funnel with quality leads, your business won’t be able to grow sales and will subsequently lack a customer base, which means it’s essential to strategize and grow your lead funnel.
There are various lead generating strategies a business could use. Here are a few quick ways to get started:
When you put a lot of time and effort into bringing leads into your website, you need to measure if it is paying off.
There are two layers of conversion rate:
Website KPIs help you understand how your visitors engage with your website. If you understand the why behind each website KPI, it will enable you to draw inferences and create strategies to optimize your website better. Tracking and acting on these KPIs regularly will help you build an attractive storefront for your business with free flowing leads that positively impact your revenue.
Gone are the days when measuring KPIs could be done with your eyes and ears alone. Modern businesses use analytics tools to capture the most up-to-date data.
Nivedita is a developer-turned-marketer and a SaaS enthusiast. She leads integrated marketing for Freshmarketer at Freshworks. When not writing, you can find her binge-watching an anime or doodling on her iPad.
Gone are the days when measuring KPIs could be done with your eyes and ears alone. Modern businesses use analytics tools to capture the most up-to-date data.
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