5 Website Metrics You Should Be Focusing On

Your website serves as the mothership of your marketing initiatives. 

It's where your landing pages, calls-to-action, forms, case studies, educational blog content, and all other things lead generating live and function.

Not to go all space-age on you, but there's a ton of other "motherships" floating around out there looking to beam up your potential customers to meet their business needs. So why should people come to your ship? What are you doing to ensure your website is outperforming all the rest?

Looking into the insights from your analytics will help you to uncover what elements of your website are driving results, and what areas appear to need a little TLC.

Aware that all those numbers can be a bit intimidating, I've outlined 5 website metrics that you should really be focusing on. 

5 Website Metrics You Need to Start Measuring Today:

Unique visitors

The difference between unique visitors and regular visitors is unique visitors are only counted once, no matter how many times they visit the website. This number calls upon the visitors unique IP address to differentiate new visitors from returning ones.

In other words, someone who visits your website 20 times equates to 1 unique visitor and 20 visits. 

That's not to say that repeat visitors aren't important. (We love them too!) In fact, repeat visitors serve as a good indicator that your website has proven useful to those who have arrived there. 

Nonetheless, the number of unique visitors that your website generates serves as an accurate representation of the actual size of the audience that you are currently drawing in. Determining this will help you to gauge how marketing efforts like new campaigns, co-marketing initiatives, or redesigns influence the number of people coming to your website.

Ultimately, this will help you determine where you should be placing your time and energy.

Bounce rate

Your website's bounce rate refers to the number of people who visit your website and choose to instantly close the window or click the back button. This metric serves as a indicator of how many people come to your website and quickly decide that it's not what they're looking for.

This decision is likely a result of a number of contributing elements. 

Perhaps your product or service simply didn't match their needs, or maybe your website was impossible to navigate, your mobile was messy, or you didn't have a clear value proposition. 

With that being said, it's important that you prioritize and resolve any and all elements that could be taking away from the first impression your website gives off.

Be sure that you're focused on defining a clear navigation path, implementing a responsive design, and making the value known upfront. 

Traffic sources

Measuring and reporting on the traffic sources in which your website visitors come in from is really valuable in terms of content distribution and budget allocation.

However, before you can start picking them apart, it's important that you understand what each source accounts for. While the definitions will vary a bit depending on what software or analytics tool you're using, the following explanations are fairly universal:

• Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors that arrived on your site through the use of a search engine. Whether their search input was "inbound marketing agency" or "IMPACT Branding & Design" we want to know so that we can identify which search queries are turning up the best results in terms of traffic and leads. 

• Social media traffic accounts for anyone who came to your website through a social media link. This could mean that they clicked on a link to one of your blog posts that someone tweeted, or they followed the link to your website from your Facebook page.

• Direct traffic is a representation of the visitors you receive to your website with no referring source. This means that the visitor took to the search bar and actually typed in "www.[ your website here ].com"

• Paid traffic is only relevant if you are running a PPC campaign. This number will represent the number of visitors brought in through paid efforts.

• Emailing marketing traffic refers to the visitors brought in through links that can be sourced back to emails that you've sent. For example, if you have an instant notification email set up for blog subscribers, their clicks will contribute to your email marketing traffic.   

Landing Page Conversion Rates

Are your landing pages optimized to convert a high volume of high quality leads?

If you're shaking you're head, it's time that you find out why (and do something about it.) 

Taking a closer look at your landing page conversion rates will provide you with the insight you need to better understand what elements contribute to the persuasive capabilities of each page. 

Start by taking a look at your 3 top-performing landing pages. What do they have in common? What type of copy are they employing? How long are the forms? What do the calls-to-action look like? How did you structure the headlines?

The strengths from your top-performing pages should be applied to your weaker ones in an effort to bolster them up. 

Keywords

In order to ensure that you are properly optimizing your website, it's important that you're keeping tabs on the keywords that your website is currently ranking for in search engines.

If you're a HubSpot user, the Keywords tool should play an important role in your keyword strategy.

Essentially this tool makes it easy for users to organize a list of keywords based on visits, rank, and difficulty.

Having the ability to visualize ranking opportunities, long-tail alternatives, and competitor insights will help you to more effectively go after the keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for. 

After all, we've all heard the joke: "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results." 

So don't let poor keyword tracking land your business a spot in the graveyard.