Website analytics tell the story of how well your digital footprint is acquiring, engaging, and converting visitors. These metrics quantify the user experience and how well your site meets the expectations of users. However, you may wonder what they mean and how to use them to improve your website.

Let’s look at the common website analytics with context.

What Are Website Analytics?

Website analytics describe the data around how people interact with a website. In most cases, you’ll be gathering this information from Google Analytics. It requires inserting code into your website pages so that you can track and measure these.

While there are many metrics, we’ll look at the most important ones related to business success.

5 Key Website Analytics

Traffic

This is a count of how many visits your site receives over a time period, usually monthly. It’s significant because it tells you how much traction your site is getting. You can look at new visitors vs. returning visitors to see how these numbers are growing based on tactics you’ve deployed to increase website traffic. If you see spikes in traffic, that’s a good thing.

Because you can look at traffic at a granular level, you’ll be able to attribute increases due to tactics like social media posting, improving SEO (search engine optimization), deploying paid search campaigns, and garnering more backlinks.

Bounce Rate

When someone abandons your site without viewing a second page, it’s called a “bounce.” The percentage of these interactions against your overall traffic provides your bounce rate. This metric can provide insights but has to be put in context. It could indicate problems with the user experience (UX) like slow loading times, notorious for users jumping ship. It may also relate to clunky navigation.

However, bounce rate isn’t always negative. It depends on the page. If people land first and convert on a landing page, that’s not a bad thing. They’ve done what you want.

Traffic Sources

These website analytics tell you how people find your website. Those sources could include:

• Direct (someone typed in your URL)
• Organic search
• Links from referring sites
• Visits from email campaigns
• Clicks from social media posts
• Paid search

Ideally, you’d like to see organic as a source growing because it provides the best potential to hook new users. Referral data can also tell you what third-party sources are performing the best, so you can increase your use of those. For example, you could find that Facebook is the top referrer, so you should put more energy into that profile.

Pageviews

This metric counts how many times a specific page was viewed. It provides insight into what content your audience most consumes. That information can lead you to develop more content like this and use it in paid campaigns because you know it’s interesting to your audience.

Goal Conversions

Another essential metric to measure in Google Analytics is goal conversions. You have to define these goals within the platform. They are easy to set up and usually involve a form completion, a purchase, or other valuable action. This helps you attribute specific campaigns, paid or organic, to new business.

Website Analytics: Improve Them with an Optimized Site

To improve your website analytics, you’ll need an optimized site that looks great and includes content compelling to your customers. If your website isn’t hitting the mark, we can help. Our designers and developers will create a new site for you that converts. Contact us today to get started.