Website Traffic Metrics

In today’s lesson, we are going to look at what website traffic metrics are and which ones to look out for.

There are currently nearly 2 billion websites on the Internet, which means that your competitor will almost certainly have a website like yours.

What is Web Analytics Metrics or Tracking Metrics

Web analytics can be defined as a system that collects, processes, and reports data from a website, which can be used to obtain information about customers and their interactions with the company’s website.

The use of analytical reports allows us to access valuable data and traffic metrics that are helpful to the company. To achieve their goals and objectives, most brands use this data to develop strategies to help them grow their website.

Importance of web traffic metrics or traffic analysis

The most successful companies will track as many metrics as possible; if you don’t track them, you can’t tell which ones work and which ones don’t; it’s also impossible to see where you put your time or money and how to improve.

Many managers and business owners instinctively use their intuition or “guts” to make important business decisions. Although there is nothing wrong with following your instincts (which may be great in business), you can’t argue with numbers.

Here are some of the reasons why it is important to track website traffic.

1.  Better Understanding of Your Traffic Through Accurate Data

2. Know your best content and focus on it.

3.  It improves your site SEO

4. Track popular recommendations and develop strategies to get more recommendations.

7 Website Traffic Metrics You Should Track

1.  Page Views

Pageviews refer to the total number of views or visits a web page gets. Repeat visits to the same page are counted. A page view hit is usually counted every time a page loads or is reloaded/refreshed.

The number of page views can indicate the popularity of a post or page. It could mean that people liked the content, or when used in combination with other metrics like new vs returning visitors, you might check whether a lot of people are landing on a particular page because they are looking for something.

2. New Vs Returning Visitors

The new and returning visitors report identifies (obviously) new and returning visitors to your site. It is helpful to know how many people find your site interesting enough to return back to it.

3. Traffic Source

Traffic sources reveal where your visitors are coming from.

It can be divided into sub-sections: search traffic, direct traffic, and referral traffic, and social traffic. Each source is important, so it is worth having a good overview of where your users come from to plan your content strategy.

• Search traffic refers to users who found your site through search engines like Google or Bing.
• Direct traffic are users who directly visit your site by entering the URL into their browser’s address bar.
• Referral traffic are users who visit your site via a link on another website.
• Social traffic refers to users who come to your site via a link on a social network

It is interesting to note that a lot of traffic has been coming from social media sites in recent years. People follow links shared by their friends rather than browsing the internet on their own. Social sharing buttons and encouraging social sharing are two ways to increase traffic from social media sites.

4.  Bounce Rate

This metric measures how many visitors left your website immediately after they arrived, also known as single-page sessions. If this metric is high, it means that your visitors aren’t staying on your site to browse the content.

The bounce rate metric doesn’t necessarily indicate why people may leave your website after a given time. So it is left for you to figure out why and try to improve on it to reduce the bounce rate. You should try and aim for 50% or lower.

Path: Google Analytics > Audience > Behavior > Session Quality

5.  Session duration

While the Bounce rate indicates areas where you are failing to engage visitors on your site, the Average Time On Site metric is a measure of how well you are engaging them throughout the site. It can identify problems such as poor navigation, poor content, or a lack thereof.

Keep in mind that mobile users behave differently to desktop visitors than on their smartphones. It is more common for them to spend longer browsing websites from their phones than from their desktops or laptops.

You can access this metric via Path: Google Analytics > Behavior> Site Content> All Pages

 In conclusion

These are the basics that you need to know as far a web traffic tracking and analysis is concerned. In our next lesson, we will look at all the various tools you can use to analyze website traffic (both yours and competitor traffic) aside from Google Analytics. So watch out for it.