It would help if you had website analytics metrics. When running a website for marketing or eCommerce, it’s vital to have methods in place to track the success of that website.
The issue is that Google Analytics and other monitoring tools make many indicators available. Choosing which metrics to watch or your site's performance may be difficult. It might be challenging to determine the metrics that shape the traffic to your site, such as bounce rate and page views. Additionally, several of those measures are essentially useless over the long term.
Tools like Google Analytics are free to use and provide robust website analytics but lack quite a bit in terms of metric diversity and helping you understand why a metric is used.
In this guide, we’ll explore some nonstandard website metrics and KPIs that your typical analytics platform may not be tracking for you.
7 Metrics for Website Analytics
1. Bounce Rates
Your website's bounce rate is calculated as the proportion of total visitors for the same period divided by the number of individuals that view your site but depart without engaging. For instance, if you received 100 visitors in a single day but 40 of them left immediately, your bounce rate would be 40%. This indicates that 25% of visitors left without taking a closer look. This might be due to various factors, so that bounce rates can be debatable.
The computation takes into account a variety of unique elements. For instance, the layout and destination of your landing pages may result in a high bounce rate yet a respectable conversion rate. In addition, some sites, like e-commerce checkout pages, will always have high bounce rates despite your efforts to restrict them.
It's wise to know the industry average bounce rates as they might differ. You may set up reports in Google Analytics or other analytics tools to assist you in keeping track of your bounce rates.
2. Time to First Byte
A request is sent from the web browser to your web server each time a visitor puts your domain name into their web browser and presses the enter key. The web server will respond to the request after receiving it and acknowledging it. The time between making the initial request and the browser obtaining a response is known as Time to First Byte (or TTFB).
TTFB has several effects on your website. When taken at face value, it's a reliable sign of how good your web hosting provider is. The details we see when purchasing a hosting web package are standardized. For instance, a web host could mention the number of resources included in a hosting package but not the precise specifications of their hardware. It's comparable to purchasing a vehicle without knowing its brand or model other than the fact that it has four wheels and moves.
You must boost your website's performance in several areas to lower TTFB. The server quality is quite crucial, though. You must switch to a better hosting plan or find a different WordPress hosting company to improve server performance.
3. Referral KPIs
After you grasp your visitor statistics, the next thing you'll want to know is, "Where did these folks come from?" That inquiry has a response in the referrals report. Referrals keep track of visitors that click on connections to your website from search results, blogs, and other websites. The referrals report will also display how many visits come from social media.
The secret to determining how your efforts to market your business succeed is to identify where your traffic is coming from. Are there links to you from other blogs that mention you? Do your social efforts bear fruit?
The referrals report can also help you locate other businesses or blogs you might consider collaborating with more closely. If a specific website is sending traffic your way, you might want to explore getting in touch with them and forging a more official connection.
4. Average Session Duration
The average session duration measures the length of an average user session on your website. Insufficient user engagement with your website's content, design, or product offerings may be reflected in a short average session time, leading consumers to abandon your site and perhaps go on to another one. Utilize standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics to measure the average session length. These systems track how long users spend on your site before leaving or becoming inactive.
Then, combine your information for average session duration and time spent on the page to go even further. For instance, even though your sessions last a long time, you can observe that a specific page has low time on the page and high exit rates. With the help of this data, you can focus on the areas where you need to make changes and optimize the sites that demand it the most to lengthen your customers' average session times and keep them engaged throughout their browsing experiences.
5. Top Pages Visited
It's crucial to understand which website pages your visitors consider to be the most critical. You may improve your site by focusing on the pages that will have the most significant impact if you make changes by looking at your top 10 pages report.
Your top 10 pages report may vary regularly if you manage a content website. In this situation, the information will inform you of the most helpful and exciting material for your visitors and the most effective headlines you've created. As you expand your site, use this information to assist you in deciding what sort of material to provide.
6. Total Website Uptime in Website Analytics Metrics
The length of time that users may access your website is referred to as uptime. Although we may consider website uptime from an application perspective, the web hosting server should be a significant area of interest. We won't be able to access our websites if the hosting server goes down.
The possible impact on revenues is the most immediate effect of a web hosting server being down. This influence can be detrimental to heavily commercial websites, such as eCommerce retailers. The possibility of harm to your brand's reputation is far worse.
Time tracking is a continuous process. To ensure it responds to queries, your web hosting server has to be tested often. Using pinging tools to ping your servers periodically will allow you to assess how quickly they respond.
7. Pages Viewed Per Session
The number of pages viewed on your website overall during a single user session is tracked by the measure known as pages per session. This enables you to determine whether your website pages encourage users to keep clicking and whether you deliver a fun, simple user experience throughout the client journey.
By dividing the total number of page views by the number of user sessions, you may get the number of pages per session. Then, utilize the information you've learned about page views in conjunction with your statistics on pages per session to determine where you can improve your website with internal connections, clickable pictures, and CTAs to encourage more visitors to visit relevant pages.
How DashboardFox Can Help in Website Analytics Metrics
For some people, website analytics metrics are just for the nerds, and no one uses them correctly. However, these metrics are essential to assess whether you are doing well in your daily operations or need to improve. After all, we are all for customer satisfaction.
But for most of the consumers of the data, you don’t want to give them access directly to the web analytics tools. The interface may be too complicated for them, the security may allow them to see more than they should, or you simply have multiple products and want to give consumers a holistic and simplified view of everything.
That’s where DashboardFox comes in.
DashboardFox lets you connect to any website analytics data that you have in either a database, a spreadsheet, or by pulling in data from the API of the tool you’re using. Once connected, you can quickly summarize data, create interactive dashboards, and combine data with other data sources. So instead of just the out-of-the-box views your analytics tool may provide, DashboardFox can let you get more specific to your business.
Add DashboardFox’s codeless build reporting, self-hosted setup, and affordable payment policies (no need to maintain subscriptions), and you’ve got your game-changer for this year and beyond.
We know you are very stoked to make this happen, so reach out to us by setting up a meeting with us or, better yet, booking a free live demo session. See you!