If you're running a business, it's important to track your website analytics. By understanding what metrics matter to your business, you can make strategic decisions about how to use your website to reach your goals. In this blog post, we'll discuss what website analytics you should focus on to create a more impactful strategy based on data.

In today's data-driven world, it's easy to get caught up in vanity metrics. These are metrics that make you feel good but don't actually provide any valuable insight into your business. Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, you should focus on data that will help you make decisions about your business to make sure that your business is on track for success.

Example Website Metrics That Matter:

Metric

Explanation

Alternative focus point

Page views

Pageviews can give you an idea of how much traffic your website is getting, but they don't necessarily indicate how engaged your visitors are.

You're better off focusing on metrics like time on site and pages per session, which will give you a better idea of how engaged your visitors are and whether or not they're finding what they're looking for on your site.

Unique visitors

Unique visitors can be a useful metric to see how many new people are coming to your site, but it's also worth looking at repeat visitors.

If people are coming back to your site multiple times, it's a good indication that they're finding value in what you're offering. On the other hand, if you're getting a lot of unique visitors but they're never coming back, it could be an indication that you need to work on retention.

Time on website

This is a measure of how long people stay on your website before leaving.

Whilst time on your site is mentioned as an alternative focus metric for page views, focusing on time on its own can be confusing, especially including factors such as if someone leaves your website tab open for a long period or if bots are visiting your site, this can skew the time to appear very short and make a normal, longer view time appear as an outlier.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate can be useful for identifying problem areas on your site and specific pages that are turning your visitor off and making them exit.

The bounce rate does not tell you why visitors are leaving specifically except for where they are leaving. Examine the page layout, the calls to action buttons, the amount of copy and the imagery on the page to see what could be improved.

Facebook Likes on your post

You might focus on how many likes your Facebook post gets but this number doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not your business is actually succeeding.

Check the number of visitors that clicked through your post link on Facebook. What did they do next? How many people is your content converting? How many conversations have you had this week? How many new faces have you talked to?

Knowing your metrics is important but what you do with them next is more important.

You can create the most elaborate marketing plan or funnel system or email sequence out there but if you don’t know how the things you do affect your business, you are pushing a rock around a field.

At the end of the day, data is only useful if it's helping you to make decisions that will grow your business. There's no use in obsessing over metrics that don't actually provide any valuable insights. By understanding which metrics matter to your business, you can use your website to reach your goals and grow your business.

If data isn’t your jam, we can break down your numbers for you and show you where you are currently headed, where you are excelling and areas you need to fix. Book a strategy call here. Stuck for time? Alternatively book a website audit, a done-for-you service option to receive a comprehensive website report sent to your inbox.