In this day and age, you can’t run a business and not have a website. Being present online has become essential for success — so, it’s only natural that you want to make sure your site is performing at its best. Still, it can be tricky to figure out what metrics you should look at to see how you’re doing. There are all these analytics to watch out for, and if you focus on the wrong ones, you’ll get nowhere. We know it all may sound a bit scary now, but as you learn more about it, it’ll all make much more sense. We want to help you get there sooner. Therefore, today we’re talking about website statistics you need to be familiar with.
Number of visitors
No matter how good your website looks, it won’t bring much to your business if no one visits it. So, the first thing you should be looking at is how many website visitors you get on average.
If you find this number low or decreasing, it might be a good idea to find an SEO writer to boost your website traffic. With good content, you’ll draw more people to your pages, and you’ll earn backlinks. Other sites will link to yours, and their visitors will become yours as well.
On the other hand, your site may be well-established, and you may have a steady number of visits each month. In that case, be sure to look into how many of your visitors are returning ones. You want people to always come back for more — that’s how you know you’re getting somewhere.
Bounce rate
Consider if this scenario sounds familiar. You’re searching for something on Google, click on a site, and after a few seconds, you realize it doesn’t have the information you’re after. So, you click the back button, and you continue your research elsewhere. We all do it, and chances are that it happens on your website as well.
For these visitors, we say they bounced. Hence, a bounce rate is a ratio of the total number of visitors to the ones that bounced. The higher this ratio is, the more it will harm your website. It’ll affect your SEO score, so you’ll get fewer and fewer people on your pages.
Luckily, it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most troublesome with Google Analytics. Once you know what these are, according to the experts from linkdepartment.com, there are two things you can do to fix them.
- Improve the content – visitors get engaged and stay on your site for longer
- Reconsider who you’re targeting – adjust to attract the audience that’s more interested in your products or services
Average page views and session duration
If you want to find out how attractive people find your site to be, these are the two website statistics you need to be familiar with.
The average page views will tell you how many pages people visit on your website before they leave. Of course, you want this number to be as high as possible. If it’s only one or two, people aren’t moving on from your landing pages, and you’re probably missing something. Work on your site and make visitors go from one of your pages to another one. The more they see, the more likely they will do the action you want them to.
The second thing you want to look out for is the session duration. Although it’s a good indication of how engaging your website is, it works the best for websites that users need to click on a lot to use. If your focus is on long-form blog posts or long videos, people might not click as much, so you’ll get a lower score. Take it with a grain of salt, and you’ll be fine.
Average time on page
The two metrics we just mentioned will give you just a part of the story. Many visitors could land on your site, click a few pages, and leave as if nothing happened. Your statistics would look good, but you wouldn’t see many benefits from it.
If you want to get the whole picture, you’ve got to take the average time on page into consideration. It’ll tell you how much time people spend on each page on your site. For example, if you’re selling products, you want your visitors to spend the most time looking at them.
It’s also a great way to track which of your articles people read the most, and therefore, which of them you should build links to. It’s easy to improve your SEO and create links that make a difference if you know what your readers like to see.
Top traffic source
Here, we’re talking about other places on the internet that people visit before they end up on your site. For instance, if you have a YouTube channel to promote your products, your customers might read the description and click the link in it. It will lead them to your site, and if most of them come from there, it’s your top traffic source.
But why is this so important?
Well, if you combine the session duration data and your traffic sources, you’ll end up with some valuable insights. You’ll see where your top customers find you, and you’ll know what channel you should focus on the most.
Device source
You can’t overlook the devices people use to access your site. With more than half of traffic on Google coming from mobile, you might be surprised by what your customers use to read your content. If most of them are on small screens, it might be a good idea to invest in responsive website design a bit more.
It’s all about offering your visitors the best user experience possible. Your site is there for them, and you should always keep that in mind. On top of that, device source data can come in handy when creating ad campaigns. Make the ads for devices they use, and you’ll convert more of them.
Exit pages
The last thing we want to talk about is the exit pages. If you’re selling over your website, the chances are that your customers have to go through multiple pages before they can complete the purchase. But, of course, they could fall out at any point on that journey, and it would be good if you could learn where that point is.
Exit pages tell you exactly that. You’ll find out on what pages people abandon your website most often, so you’ll get a chance to fix them. It’s one of the website statistics you need to be familiar with if you want to take your company to another level.
