With the number of websites on the internet creeping up towards two billion, creating and running a website is obviously very popular. Some people just want a website to share their thoughts or share information, while others use it to make money. However, whatever the goal of your website is, you want it to grow.
One of the best ways to help your website grow is to know your numbers. Without knowing your numbers and website stats, you may not know why you aren’t growing and simply won’t have that much information at all. As a result, this article is going to look at a few of the most important metrics you should know for your website.
Your Web Traffic
First and foremost, you want to know about your web traffic. Your web traffic is a very clear metric, and one that can show you if your site is growing, stagnating or even losing visitors. Many pieces of software and programs are able to show you your traffic, perform web traffic monitoring, as well as traffic in the past and maybe even some potential trends.
Being able to track your traffic is also very important to see what times of year or what times of month you are getting the most visitors. While web traffic isn’t a very in-depth metric, it still gives a nice and simpler overall snapshot of how your site is performing.
Your Bounce Rate
Now, while you would like people to spend all day long on your website, that is hardly ever the case. Instead, it is more likely a person will only spend a few minutes, if you’re lucky. The metric that can help you understand how long people are spending on your site is called bounce rate. Your bounce rate tells you what percentage of visitors leaves your website almost immediately after visiting.
Of course, you want your bounce rate to be as low a percentage as possible. The bounce rate will differ depending on the type of website you have and the type of content you produce. All in all, if your bounce rate is declining, people are spending longer amounts of time on your site so you must be doing something well.
Your Sources of Traffic
In addition to knowing your exact numbers when it comes to traffic, it is also quite important to know where these visitors are coming from. There are a few different categories when traffic sources are being tracked such as organic traffic, social, direct or referral. Depending on which source people came from, it can give you different information about them as a visitor and the overall marketing of your website.
Which traffic source is the best? It really depends. Most sites enjoy traffic from a variety of different sources, as it shows you aren’t only getting people visiting from your social media accounts or referrals, but also people finding your organically or visiting you directly.
Your Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are one of the best ways to see how profitable and viable a website is. The definition of a conversion and thus conversion rate itself can differ from website to website. In general, your conversion rate is the percentage of people who “completed a goal” on your site. Depending on your definition, this could be someone making a purchase, signing up to your email list or visiting a desired page.
Your goal is to make your conversion rate as high as possible. If your conversion rate is low, you might be asking people to do too much too quickly, or simply might not be reaching the types of people you should.
These metrics are quite important for success of your website and could potentially make or break your business. Without knowing these numbers, it is also tough to know just how successful your business has been so far.
