Key Website Analytics Metrics You Should be Watching

Analytics and big data have become a driving force in today’s digital world. We now have more data about how visitors use websites than ever before.  Programs like Stellar Analytics provide countless metrics to help us measure how websites are performing, how people are getting there and where there might be room for improvements. The problem with this is data overload. Therefore, to help sift through that data, we’ve compiled these key website analytics metrics you should keep a close eye on.

Total Amount of Visitors
Sure, this one sounds like a no-brainer. Obviously, we all want to know how many visits our websites receive. The key is realizing that each website is unique, and the amount of traffic each site receives is also unique. Therefore, there isn’t some magical number we should all strive for. Instead, look for patterns in the amount of visitors. Small fluctuations from month to month are normal, large spikes and dips are not. Keeping track of how your total visitors change from one time period to the next will help you see if engagement is consistent, or if there are certain times of the year when you may have to increase marketing efforts.

Bounce Rate
Many people know that bounce rate is something to keep an eye on, but many don’t know why or what it actually means. Your site’s bounce rate in its simplest form is the percentage of visitors that left your site after viewing only one page. For instance, someone searches a term on Google and finds your website. They click on your website and quickly realize from the homepage that this isn’t what they were looking for. They then go back to Google or type in a different site’s URL. They have now “bounced.” The average bounce rate for all websites is 40%. If your site is at or below 40%, you’re in great shape. If the bounce rate starts increasing above 55%, you probably have some issues with your site.

Average Visit Duration
Average visit duration is a metric that gives you the best information when compared from one time period to another. There is no universal average for visit duration. Depending on the type of website, good visit duration could be anywhere from just over a minute to five minutes. However, one safe rule of thumb is if your visit duration is consistently falling below the one-minute mark, you might have some site issues. It is always good to check the visit duration for individual pages as well. It might be a single page that is pulling the whole site’s visit duration down, in which case you might want to look at changing the page’s content. The key is to watch visit duration from month to month and keep an eye out for spikes or drops.

Actions
Within analytics, actions are just that, actions people take on a website that can be measured. Often times actions are a mixture of page views downloads, outlinks and internal site searches. Actions help you determine if your site is engaging and whether it offers what visitors are looking for. Again, there is no overall average, but we like to see average actions above 1.5; 2 or 3 is even better. If your site only has a few pages and a couple out links or downloads, chances are actions will be consistently lower. If your site is a realty site where people can search for various properties, you should expect to see average actions that are much higher.

These were just four of the many, many metrics that Stellar Analytics provides, and are certainly not the only metrics worth looking at. However, for general day-to-day monitoring of your analytics, these four metrics will give you a basic understanding of how your site is performing.

If you want to see what insights Stellar Analytics can offer your business, contact a Stellar Blue representative today!