Nowadays, if your business does not have an online presence would hugely affect its success, regardless of the industry. Having a website with properly set up website KPIs (key performance indicators) is a must for businesses, whether it’s small book shops or big construction companies. 

The variety of data you may track for your website KPIs may appear overwhelming at first. We recommend you take some time and decide which metrics/KPIs are the most important for your business performance and which you most likely need to track. It is a necessary step that will help you focus on achieving your business goals while having the needed data to accomplish and surpass them.

To ease the pain of choosing, keep reading the blog post to learn more about these metrics.

What Are Website KPIs?

KPIs are specific metrics that allow you to see how your business has done over time. Once you understand how to measure KPIs, you will be able to utilize this data to guide future decisions for your website and/or business.

Why Should You Track KPIs?

Why Should You Track KPIs

Progress Measurement Over Time: proper KPI tracking allows you to accurately measure a variety of important corporate metrics, including monthly sales volume, recurring revenue, customer reaction to changes, etc.
Performance Efficiency Improvement: by monitoring KPIs, you’ll be able to evaluate changing trends over time and derive insightful observations that will improve the overall performance.
Knowledgeable Decision Making: you get access to the proper data if using and analyze KPIs smartly. In a lump, that aids in problem-solving and the ability to make smart decisions.

Selecting the Right KPIs to Analyze

Thinking through your website’s goals can help you identify the site metrics that will best show you where you’re excelling and where you need to put more effort. The next step is to choose 5–10 KPIs that will serve as markers for achieving the goals.

6 KPIs to Track Your Website Performance

#1. Source of Traffic

Source of Website Traffic

This KPI lets you identify where people are coming from to your website.

Types of Website Traffic Sources:

 

I. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors that land at your website finding it through a search engine like Google or Bing. You will not pay Google to generate this traffic, but rather to optimize your website to rank for certain keywords. The organic search takes time to get results, but they are worthwhile because of their long-lastingness.

II. Direct traffic

If a visitor arrived at your website directly by putting your URL into the address bar, this is referred to as direct traffic.

III. Referrals

This type of traffic source means that visitors find you through another referring website. Since the user’s click takes them back to your website, this is known as a “backlink”. Your website gains credibility via backlinks. As long as the traffic is coming from a reputable or highly ranked website, this type of traffic is beneficial.

How do you generate more traffic from referrals?

  • Write guest blogs
  • Submit your website to online directories
  • Acquire publication on review websites
  • Comment on industry blogs and forums

IV. Email Marketing

Including links that point back to your website is important and logical when running an email marketing campaign. Use links as a strong CTA (call to action). Just make sure to add tracking codes to your email’s links so that the clicks may be appropriately attributed to the email marketing source. By the way, have you prepared your email campaigns for the upcoming holiday season? Learn from experts what impact the possibility of a recession has on email marketing holiday plans.

V. Social Media

Social traffic is highly ascendable and comes from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Sharing content and linking it to your website will help to pump up your website visits. 

VI. PPC (Paid Search)

The opposite of organic traffic is paid search. A little word “ad” appears before the listing in paid search results; this indicates that a business, like yours, has paid to have its page appear at the top of the list. You may accomplish this by using a Google Ads search campaign, which will cost you every time a user clicks on that link. The paid search uses pertinent adverts to direct visitors to your website.

#2. Unique Website Visitors

Unique Website Visitors

A unique website visitor is someone who visits your website and interacts with one or more pages over a period of a certain amount of time. A person is considered one unique visitor even if they interact with a couple of different pages after arriving on one.
Tracking unique visitors is an essential component of evaluating the effectiveness of your website. You may get insight into:

  • The popularity of your website
  • Issues affecting the website’s performance
  • Habits of the users
  • The most engaging website pages
  • How to improve your website ranking in search results

#3. Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration

Because it shows how well your pages perform for searchers, this is one of the most important metrics for website performance to track. You can determine whether you’re offering relevant content that keeps people engaged or whether your pages need to be improved to encourage longer sessions.

Remember that sessions last between two and three minutes. While aiming to match this session average, bear in mind your audience and market. Due to the nature of your industry or target audience, your average session time objectives can differ.

#4. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate on your website tracks how often visitors arrive at one page and leave right away without viewing any other pages on your website.

A high bounce rate across the board usually means that searchers aren’t finding your website to be relevant. If your bounce rate is high, you gotta tweak your pages to increase user engagement.

#5. Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate shows whether a user finished the targeted activity on a website. Usually expressed as a percentage, a successful campaign is indicated by a larger percentage.

The metric not only demonstrates how well you are motivating website visitors to take the right actions but also allows you to foresee the new sales and revenue flows.

#6. ROI (Return on Investment)

Return on Investment ROI

The most dependable strategy to expand your business is to continuously track ROI. It makes it possible to identify and address issues as they arise. Additionally, it enables you to identify potential areas for development in the future and seize such possibilities to accelerate your company’s growth. Knowing how well each component of your business is doing also brings a sense of comfort.

Although Google Analytics does not have a dedicated statistic for monitoring ROI, it does have the information required for this purpose.

Final thoughts

We hope this blog post gave you some inspiration and ideas about online KPIs and why it is important to track them. Just remember to identify what you want your website visitors to accomplish, what are the most important metrics for your business, and then select KPIs that reflect those. You can now monitor these KPIs to observe and put knowledgeable efforts into improving the performance of your business’s website.

About the author:

Tali is a results-driven digital marketer with a track record of growing her clients’ businesses and driving revenue.

As the business owner at WSI Digital Path, Vaughan, she takes great pride in delivering powerful but cost-effective solutions for her clients.

Innovative and revolutionary digital marketing trends set the pace for the digital marketing industry. Don’t make the mistake of falling behind! Contact WSI Digital Path today and trust your digital marketing to the industry’s leading professionals.