Website statistics are often overlooked and overlooked topics. However, they can provide insights that help us understand our users, improve results, and achieve our website’s goals.
Taking into account the most basic statistics about your website can provide insights that will help you outperform your competition, who isn’t paying attention to them. No matter how beautiful, attractive, and functional your website appears, there’s no way to know how it’s performing and what your users’ experience is like unless you review your statistics regularly. Once you understand the most important statistics, you’ll be able to achieve the results you want. These are the metrics we recommend paying special attention to:
Number of Visitors
The most important metric is the amount of traffic to your website. Regardless of your website or the goal you want to achieve, you always want to increase your visitors. The more people you visit, the more likely they are to take the desired action.
To obtain this metric, simply create an account on Google Analytics, it’s really simple and anyone can do it. When you look at your website traffic, it tells you whether your site has been growing, declining, or staying the same.
You can also relate this information to other efforts in your marketing strategy. For example, when you publish a new blog or run an ad campaign, you can see how traffic is performing during this time and see if the blog or campaign is actually driving more traffic.
On the other hand, if your website traffic decreases, it means something is wrong and you need to try new things. Otherwise, it will gradually reach the point where it will stop receiving visitors.
Although viewing the overall number of visits doesn’t give you much information, it is a good starting point for analyzing the status of your website. You can also divide traffic into two categories to better understand your website’s performance:
- Unique Visitors: This metric indicates how much you are attracting new potential customers. It’s important to have a steady growth in unique visitors as it is one of the clearest indicators that your marketing efforts are working.
- Returning Visitors: This number shows that you have users who visit your website repeatedly, which means your website strategy is effective at retaining users. It’s good to have returning users, but in most industries, it’s best to focus on strategies to attract new visitors.
It’s important to mention that a large number of people visiting your website means you’re doing a good job directing people to your site. However, this metric alone doesn’t guarantee results. Therefore, it’s important to also consider the other metrics we mention in this blog.
Sources of Traffic
We already know how many people visit our website. Knowing the traffic sources means we understand where those people come from before arriving at our website. This data can also be easily obtained through Google Analytics.
This metric will help you differentiate the different sources that generate traffic to your website and understand how you can improve your marketing efforts to get more ideal visitors.
There is a lot of debate about which traffic source is the best. Really, all of them can be good; the important thing is to make sure you have several different sources of traffic so that if one of them decreases, you still have traffic from the other sources. Work on improving each one, but focus on the one that works best for you at the moment, based on your industry.
Organic Searches
Many people think that SEO has become less important in their marketing strategies, but that’s not the case. What is true is that the rules of the game have changed, and this means that ranking a website requires a little more work.
Nowadays, there are no shortcuts to achieving good rankings, but this doesn’t mean that SEO has become less important. On the contrary, having a well-ranked website is one of the most reliable ways to have a consistent source of traffic over time.
Knowing the number of organic searches gives you a clear picture of your website’s search engine ranking. Around 72,000 searches are carried out on Google alone every second, indicating that search engines remain an important source of traffic.
Social Traffic
Social traffic shows you how many users arrived at your website through a social network. If this metric shows little traffic, it means your social media strategy or efforts are not being effective. Therefore, you should interact more with users, share content, and build a stronger presence on these platforms.
Only then will people click on the content you’ve shared and visit your website. It’s also important to identify which social network the user profile you want to reach with your website is on, as it would be pointless to post on social networks where users aren’t interested in your products or services.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic refers to all the people who directly typed your website’s domain into their browser. This action will never be performed by people who are unfamiliar with your website, but rather by people who remember having visited your site before and remember the domain name.
This metric indicates the number of loyal customers your company has.
Referral Traffic
This metric shows you the amount of traffic received through other websites. Having a link to your website on other sites with a strong Google presence will help improve your rankings and generate more referral traffic.
Referral traffic indicates that you are generating quality content that other websites find valuable.
Email Traffic
Many companies still use email campaigns to reach potential customers. If you also use email campaigns to generate leads and acquire new customers, it’s important to have a way to measure the traffic your email campaigns generate.
Paid Searches
Many websites run paid campaigns to generate website traffic. If so, this metric helps you identify if the campaign is working and how many visitors it has generated.
Most platforms where you run the campaign will provide you with results statistics; however, it’s always a good idea to use Google Analytics statistics as a more objective tool.
Bounce Rate
This is the percentage of people who visited your website and viewed only one page. Your goal should always be to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.
People viewing more than one web page means they spent more time on your site, which increases the chances that they found interesting material.
There are many factors that can lead to a high bounce rate. It’s important to pay attention to identify them and make the appropriate corrections. Some of the most common reasons are:
- The content on your website is irrelevant
- The website is not optimized
- The usability of your website is poor
- The design is not very good
- The loading time is very slow
Most people assume that a high bounce rate is a design or development issue, but that’s not always the case. For example, if your website contains only one page where users can find the information they’re looking for, it’s not surprising that the bounce rate is high. The important thing is that your website is designed to offer a variety of content and pages.
Another big reason for a high bounce rate is that users are arriving at your website believing they’ll find interesting content, only to find that’s not the case. This is especially relevant in PPC campaigns, as it can be an indicator that your ad is conveying a different message than you intended or reaching the wrong people. This is something you should correct immediately, as it would only waste your budget.
The same could happen with SEO campaigns that are optimizing for popular keywords that are unrelated to your overall website content.
Conversion Rate
This is one of the most important metrics that can tell you the percentage of visitors who take the action you expect from a user. In the case of online stores, it can tell you the percentage of people who actually made a purchase on your website.
For example, if your conversion rate was 4% and then increases to 8%, it indicates that you managed to double the number of visits that turned into sales.
The example of online stores is the clearest way to understand the meaning of a conversion rate; however, sales aren’t the only thing that counts as conversions. Other valid conversion rate metrics can include: number of downloads, number of video views, number of messages sent, etc. This metric is very important because it indicates how effective your strategy is in encouraging your users to take an action on your site.
The first step in obtaining this metric is to determine your goals and what actions on your site you want to measure. Basically, the higher the conversion rate, the better the results.
Conclusion
These are the metrics you consider important to pay attention to, regardless of the type of website you have. They can provide you with important information that you can use to continue improving the user experience, enhance your website’s performance, and target your content and strategy based on user feedback.
It’s important to mention that there are many more metrics that may be relevant to consider depending on the type of website and the industry you operate in. We recommend taking the time to explore further growth opportunities for your website through statistics.