The 3 “Must Know” Analytics Metrics for Web Success
Analytics is the measurement of your website. It is the future of online marketing and a basic knowledge necessity for anyone in the marketing function and business owners and executives. To help you on your way to better understanding your website we’ve put together a short description of the 3 most important metrics for your success online.
Visits
Visits is the most commonly referred to and easily understood metric for website. It is the measure of the number of times your website domain name is loaded. It does not count each time a page is loaded after the initial visit, that is counted as the pageview metric. Although seemingly simple there are some important nuances to understanding the visits metric, the first of which is the difference between visits and unique visits. A unique visit is a measurement of the computers that viewed your website, if a computer closes your website and comes back, the return view is counted as a visit, but not a unique visit. A visit will expire out after 30 minutes and a unique visit will often expire around 90 days. These timeframes are customizable via your analytics code.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is an often misunderstood and underused metric. If visits is used to measure the volume, bounce rate is used to measure the relevance of the content to the visitors. A common way to think about bounce rates is that they are the measure of customers who came to your site, they saw your site, and they left immediately. It is the measure of relevance to what your visitors are looking for. The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant and helpful your website’s information was to the visitor. Bounce rates have a wide range, but in most cases a rate of 30% or less is the ideal goal. To improve bounce rates you’ll want to understand what it is your visitor was looking for and find a way to provide it to them or to target an audience that is more receptive to your content.
Conversion Rate
What’s the ultimate goal of your website? Is it to sell a product? Inform an audience? Capture a lead? These are all conversions and can be measured via your analytics platform. Conversion is the ultimate metric and the top key performance indicator for the best performing websites. Google analytics in particular allows you to measure conversions in a variety of ways including eCommerce and Goals, then assign dollar values, and understand the ROI of your web traffic.