Website KPIs: How are Key Performance Indicators Measured for Strategy?

With all the data available today, you can find dozens of website KPIs that can be tracked to measure how successful your website is and what your site performance is. Read to explore more. 

Having a website is not a linear project unless you want to create a site for the sake of having a site— please don’t; running a successful business doesn’t work like that.

But the trouble now is many metrics are out there, making it almost impossible to use in an actionable and sustainable way. 

That’s why marketers and business owners need to narrow in on the most invaluable and relevant metrics for their unique sites. 

So, it’s about using valuable metrics for the best outcome. 

Now the question is, “Which metrics are those?”

Our digital expert, Ciaran Connolly, puts it, the answer is: It depends. While almost all websites share the goal of generating revenue and conversions, this process is different for each.” 

Yes, it rings so true. Everyone’s goals are different— no size fits all metrics. 

In other words, the right answer has no place here because the best metrics to track vary significantly for each business and each website. So, you should understand your conversion process and goals first. 

Then, go around and explore many tools. Finally, choose metrics to monitor on your site analytics dashboard that gives you a clear picture illustrating the success of each conversion phase and revenue. 

Fortunately, we’ve compiled digital marketing KPIs to help you decide which metrics to pay attention to.

This long list depends on tons of marketers’ reviews about which website performance metrics they consider most appropriate and important— plus insider tips to getting what you want through the whole monitoring process.

Without further ado, let’s dive in. 

What are Website KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?

These KPIs are quantitative measurements that help determine marketing initiatives’ effectiveness, track goal progress, and examine experiments. In addition, website KPIs display and highlight relevant customer behaviour and SEO website health data. 

Thus, these analytic metrics help you see how creating initiatives contributes to attaining business objectives. In addition, these insights help when making adjustments and optimising strategy or spending for marketing activities.  

For instance, if you notice that one KPI has increased while another has declined, it may be time to make significant changes, shift gears, or excavate a new marketing strategy.

That will help you decrease your efforts, time, and expenses for nothing. 

Lastly, KPIs are important because you can identify benchmarks and set data-driven strategies and goals when measuring website and marketing performance over time. 

In short, KPIs depict your overall marketing target and assist you in spotting any potential issues to address them before turning them into more serious ones. 

Now, what do most companies measure to run a successful website? Continue reading!

Why Should You Invest in Website KPIs?

KPIs are essential as they help translate meaningless data into valuable benchmarks and goals.  

Without KPIs, it’s much more common to delete most of the data generated by your analytics system. 

Otherwise, you can create a regular snapshot that lets you track your marketing effectiveness.

In simple words, a website KPI ties your online marketing efforts with your business objectives. So, just a glance at these metrics should tell you more about your business impact created as a result of your activities through the website.

In addition to results and impact, website KPIs also help you:

• Measure the success and progress of marketing strategies
• Understand shortcomings and make changes to your plan accordingly
• Identify trends, analyse patterns, then tweak over time

For example, KPIs give you signals to implement a new strategy if you notice your website visitors spend just a handful of seconds on your site without taking any action or opening more than one page. 

Website KPIs plot your marketing situation, which will help you convert leads and compare your position to your competitors. 

How to Choose the Right Website KPIs?

While various web analytics platform enlights you with a goldmine of information, you should be able to differentiate and pick out the best ones that actually influence your business.  

So, your website KPIs should be:

• Actionable: The KPIs you track must provide you with actionable insights and enable you and your team members to make informed decisions. For example, if you’re looking to improve engagement, then choose solid metrics that indicate audience interactions with your site. These interactions can be anything from clicking on CTAs to leaving a comment and chat conversions. Then you can have a look at the numbers. Not happy? So, you can revisit your messaging to make something resonate with your visitors or turn the CTAs more clickable. 

• Quantifiable: A KPI shows the exact straightforward outcome of your work backed by hard numbers. It could be the number of clicks, downloads, or website visitors. Choosing quantifiable KPIs will leave you without guessing.  

• Relevant: KPIs should be aligned with your business goals. Tons of metrics go into the details of audience engagement. But only a few can be directly tied to your business’s bottom line. These metrics are most impactful— not just for tracking the traffic on your website but because you can observe how much of that traffic converts to leads. 

How are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Measured for Website Strategy?

If you want to know how KPIs work to assess website performance, start by checking these metrics. These measures indicate that you’re successfully attracting traffic to your site. 

Here are the key KPIs you should check to figure out how these indicators are a game-changer for your ROI. 

Understand Acquisition Metrics

These KPIs reveal whether or not you are taking the best route to attract new visitors to your website and how successful your overall marketing strategy is.

And not, it’s not just generic traffic volume.

Acquisition metrics can help you dig deeper into who visits your site and where they come from. That means you can better contextualise traffic numbers.

You will understand how people find your website. 

How?

Monitor acquisition metrics in Google Analytics like sessions by the social network, traffic by source, top paid keywords bey sessions, bounce rate, sessions by organic traffic and more. 

That’s how you can quickly identify how people reach your website, what your most effective and profitable traffic sources are, and how successful certain marketing champions are in driving visitors to your site.  

To better understand how your site performs regarding acquisition and conversions, you can start with a demo GA account that contains all essential benchmarks for understanding what you will do next.

Pro tip: To set up your Google Analytics, you can easily make a few clicks— no coding required. Just download and upload the HTML file on your website and click verify. 

This approach will help you uncover how successful you are at magnate visitors from different channels. 

With Google Dashboard, you can quickly identify how users visit your site and more details such as:

• How many website visitors are coming from each channel?
• Which keywords bring in the most traffic?
• What is their behaviour like?

And much more.

Note: keep in mind, though, the number of dimensions, demographics, and channels you can sort by in Google Analytics is one of the easiest things you might overcomplicate after that to help you make decisions. 

Explore Unique Website Visitors

While identifying the best website KPIs, you should check out unique visitors.

But what does this mean?

A unique website visitor is when a visitor reaches your website and images with one or more pages in a specific duration. 

To clarify, if a person lands on a page and then opens three or more other pages (such as services, pricing, features, and/or blog page), this user is counted as a single unique visitor.  

How?

Use the number of total unique visitors who landed on your website divided by the number of all unique visitors counted during a specific period. 

However, you have two other options to identify your unique users: 

• Use Google Analytics to get this data. Just create an account, go to Acquisition, Audience report. Then, you can add other user segments if needed. GA will get you access to a clean dashboard to check such KPIs.
• Use other tools, such as Whatagraph, wonderful to get unique visitors displayed with a single click. This tool gives you access to all website KPIs generating a modern report to track all significant numbers.  

But why does this matter?

You should track unique visitors to gain insights into how well your content and the overall performance of your website elements. 

That leads you to figure out the following:

• How popular your website is
• Where the problems are hindering the website’s performance 
• What issues you can fix right now
• What the size of the audience is
• What habits your visitors have, and how they interact with the website
• How your website ranks in search engines
• What affects your website performance the most

Bouns: to increase your unique visitors’ numbers, implement these ideas:

• Analyse your website’s loading speed and find ways to reduce it
• Produce more content targeting the most relevant keywords
• Running paid ads for traffic
• Use influencer marketing
• Highly improve your on-page technical SEO strategy

Identify Traffic Source

Traffic sources can be part of the acquisition metrics, but we want to explain it more separately. First, that monitors the source that drives traffic to your site, such as:

• Direct: Users who typed in your URL and directly reached your page.
• Organic search: Users came from search engines as a result of a good SEO strategy.
• Social: Visitors from social media platforms such as Insgtragm, Linkedin, etc. 
• Email: Users from your email marketing campaigns or other email efforts such as newsletters.
• Referral: Visitors get attracted to your website whom you’ve partnered with, for instance, gusset blogging, listicles, and review sites. 

By keeping an eye on your website KPI, you can double down on the channel that’s working well and prioritise your investment in terms of ads and content.

Additionally, you can locate gaps and opportunities in channel traffic or shift your focus on building your audience base from the most channel that adds value to your business.   

How?

Again, Google Analytics is an excellent source to get this information. 

Discover Traffic Sessions 

A session is a collection of activities executed by visitors to your website over a specific duration. 

The more sessions you collect, the better insights you can glean. 

Sessions can be as long as you want to be.

An example of a long session: a visitor arrives on your site, checks out relevant content, clicks through the About Us page, downloads an eBook and purchases your product in the same session. 

But what is considered a session?

A session begins when a user visits your site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. However, one visitor can participate in different sessions. That’s when the same visitor comes back to your website.   

How?

Nothing is better than Google Analytics. 

You will start to notice that you can catch all this data seamlessly across various websites, all from one central dashboard. 

Monitoring traffic sessions will help you determine whether your plan is creating enough qualified leads to convert in the future. 

When do you know your traffic sessions are perfect?

There is no right answer. However, if you get five sessions from a visitor, you’re doing a brilliant job of retention because these types of users might convert into actual customers in the future. 

Understand Bonus Rate

The next item on our checklist of website KPIs is bounce rate, which measures how many people visit a page on your site and leave it immediately without clicking through any other pages. 

This one is the most important KPI because it indicates the user experience you’re delivering for your audience.  

If all your pages show a high bounce rate, it typically suggests that your content isn’t relevant to the searchers. 

How?

In Google Analytics, you can find the bounce rate metric in reports under “Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.” 

Takeaway: you want to track the bounce rate to see if your users engage with your website offerings. In case you have a high rate, your pages need to be optimised to keep your prospects on your site longer. 

Uncover Organic Traffic and Search Rankings

The reason that digital marketing is the best approach to prompt your business because absolutely everything can be monitored and tracked. And one of the metrics you should focus on, from an SEO perspective, is rankings and domain authority— important factors that determine your website position.

Both are the best measurements to track if your focus is on SEO. They show how your content, technical SEO improvements and promotion build up your authority and clout in search engine filters.  

How?

Online tools such as MOZ, Semrush, and Ashrefs will give you a complete picture of your domain authority score and search rankings. 

However, having high domain authority doesn’t matter if your traffic is ridiculous or you’re sweating to get visitors. That’s why you should also concentrate on organic traffic— the most important metric for SEO because simply all other actions and metrics are designed to grow this organic number. 

Track Conversion Rate 

It indicates whether or not a visitor completed the action you desired on a website. The conversion rate is measured in percentages; a higher percentage means a successful campaign. 

How?

It’s calculated by dividing the number of actions achieved in a specific period by the total number of visitors to your website and multiplying it by 100%.

So, you need to know the total conversions and then make your equation. 

What is a good conversion rate?

It mostly ranges between 2% and 5%, and please note it varies based on your industry norm, conversion goal, and audience demographics.

Why it matters?

 You need to track your conversion rates because the following reasons:

• It shows how well you’re driving the right actions on your website.
• You can accurately predict the new flow of revenue and sales.
• It gives you insights into your campaign messaging. 

Also, this data reflects user experience, which means the quality of your page, calls to action, content, ease of navigation, and site speed. 

It may also provide you with insights into the quality of inbound traffic from different sources. 

How Can Profiletree Help You?

Whether you’re looking for high traffic or generating more conversions, it’s vital that your company has the right SEO performance metrics to actionably and accurately measure what matters for your marketing activities. 

You can build smart KPIs that drive toward your unique goals with the recommendations and advice above. 

That’s what we will help you understand— to determine the most relevant website KPIs you should focus on, know which sources drive the most visitors, and how your visitors engage with your site once they arrive.

Then, you’ll receive a content marketing plan and a go-to-marketing strategy based on your numbers to help build an effective online presence for your brand and start leveraging your website performance to match your business goals.  

Are you ready to start driving more revenue than any before? Contact us now to speak with a strategist and marketing expert today!