Website analytics are key performance indicators especially when it comes to identifying or measuring the success of your website
It provides you with important data that can help you analyze your website’s activities, and make projections that will grow your business.
There are a handful of web analytic tools that can help you get analytic data on your website but in this post, i’ll be focusing on Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is both FREE, accurate (to a large extra extent ) and comprehensive enough with the correct data that can help you make accurate decisions as regards your website.
Now, going back too web analytics, over the years, website analytics have become important data sources that have helped website owners make important business decisions about their websites.
Notwithstanding, a lot of new bloggers and website are yet to understand the importance of web analytics. And many that understand are yet to use it.
In this post I’ll be identifying the top important website metrics that you should be tracking on your website below.
Website Traffic
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Website traffic is one of the most important web metric for website owners.
It gives you an overview of the number of visitors that visit your website at regular intervals. And this report can help you adjust your content marketing effort in line with your marketing goals.
For instance, a website analytics report that shows a clear increase in your website traffic after you publish a particular post can indicate the popularity of the post.
With such report, you can decide to publish more of such related posts in the future in order to get the same result.
Alternatively, this can also give you a clear idea on what is working for your audience. And with this knowledge, you can create more of the same effect.
Again, a sharp decline in website traffic can also indicate the state of your website, giving you an idea on what needs to be fixed where necessary.
Bounce rate
Bounce rates indicates the percentage of times a person interacted with just a single page on your website without clicking through to other pages.
It is a very important website analytics that webmasters pay attention to.
With your bounce rate metrics, you can decide whether your website has actually taken advantage of the niche in terms of creating rich and similarly related content or not.
Your bounce rate analytics can help you understand other factors in relation to your content like your brand authority, the content length, depth etc.
It can also help you understand keyword targeting, website user interface etc. And with such knowledge you can take decisions that will get your website towards your goals.
A lot of the times, search engines like Google rely on your bounce rates to rate your website and web pages in terms of authority etc.
Traffic Sources
Another important website analytics data is the traffic source.
The traffic source metric is important because it gives you an idea about the important platforms from which you have referral traffic back to your website.
Google Analytics categorizes your traffic sources into four broad areas. This includes the following;
Organic Search: Traffic coming directly from the search engines like Google etc.
Referral Traffic: Traffic from another website which with back links to your website.
Direct Traffic: Traffic coming directly from your domain name, when a visitor visits your website directly by typing in your website URL in their browser.
Social: Traffic from the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter etc, where your posts are shared.
This data should indicate areas that your content marketing is working effectively.
For instance, if you’re having more of your traffic coming from social media instead of the search engine, this could indicate that there is need for you to work on your Search Engine Optimization, keywords and other elements that will make your content more visible on the search engines.
With such information like this, you will be able to focus on devising a better strategy to create more contents on the platform with the best traffic opportunities.
This metric can also give you a good idea about platforms where you should focus more of your content marketing effort and the others which you should reduce such effort.
Page Views
Like the name implies, page views are simply the number of times a particular page, post, content is viewed on your website.
Page views are important website metrics that illustrates the effectiveness of a website or it’s content.
The total number of views you have on a particular page can give you a good idea about the performance of the particular content.
Also it can tell you whether your content strategy is working or not. With such information you can adjust your content strategy, to meet the current realities.
Audience Location
Your audience location is another website analytics data that can help influence the success of your website.
This particular metric is also very important. It helps you create better content for the audience based on their location.
For instance, knowing the location of your audience helps you in making tailor made content that will make sense to them.
Beyond content, it also helps you in creating the right kind of ads or related services that will be beneficial to your audience, based on their locations.
Generally, a good knowledge of the location of the majority of your audience helps you in creating a brand that will connect with the audience at deeper levels.
This is achieved right from the way your website is designed to the words you use in your content and the kind of content you create.
Click through rates
It is not enough that your content shows up in the top search engine pages. It is very important that people actually click through the content to read or view it. This is where click through rates comes in.
Click through rates demonstrates the number of people that actually clicked through your content links, either from the search engines or elsewhere.
This is an important website metric in the sense that it helps you understand your post titles and headings.
When more people click through your content, it shows the heading and the title is appealing to them.
So where you have your content showing up on the search engine without actual clicks, that should indicate that such content heading may not be appealing to that audience.
With such data, you will be able to work on your heading and the copies you use in order to create a better result for your content.
Website Speed
Your website speed is an important website metric that can make or break the success of your website.
Over the years, website speed has become a very important SEO ranking factor and search engines like Google have given continuous preference to fast loading websites.
Besides the Search Engines, a slow loading website will definitely affect your potential visitors, causing them to click away when the website takes a longer time to load.
With the correct analytic data, you can work on improving your loading speed and this in turn will ultimately increase search engine ranking.
In summary, your website is very important as a driving tool for your online business. And whether you’re the one managing the website or not, you should work on tracking your website metrics at intervals, to know areas you can improve on.
Important website metrics like Click through rates, Audience Location, Page views, and Bounce rates should give you an idea on how to re-strategize and improve on your content marketing and other metric like Page Speed etc should help you improve on your website usability.
So which of these metrics has really affected the success of your website?
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