How to Know If Your Website Is Successful: 5 Metrics to Track

We are living in the age of blazing digital developments, and that means that we all have to evolve as technology evolves if we want to stay up to date with the modern world. This is true for websites too. In case you fail to upgrade yours once in a while, your business will most likely suffer losses.

After all, one of the top reasons why a website may not be hitting the results that you’re after is the lack of upgrades and investments. But how can you know when it’s time to improve your website and what metrics should you keep an eye on? Take a look at the key metrics we’ve listed that you should track if you want to make your website shine.

Website traffic

Managing to attract the right amount of traffic to your website is the first step in measuring its success and value. Figuring out how to get traffic to your website should be your top priority, but it is also very important to be able to measure that number and read it.

Keep in mind that it’s normal to see a dip in traffic to your website on weekends or major holidays. It is also common to see decreases when Google makes algorithmic changes. These affect all websites out there, so don’t worry.

Remember, you need to learn as much as you can about your visitors, and this metric is crucial when it comes to that. If you see any decreases or increases over a longer period of time, you should be ready to analyze the reasons behind those trends. 

Last but not least, this metric is also very important if your plan is to buy and sell websites. Website brokers usually look at it when they are deciding whether or not to put a website on their list because the more traffic a website gets, the higher chances they have for profit.

Consumption metrics

Consumption metrics refer to the content that your visitors see and ‘consume’ when they come to your website.

These metrics include but are not exclusive to:

• Downloads that track the number of times people download your content from your website.
• Pageviews metrics that keep track of how many people have seen the pages and content on your website. These are considered to be the easiest metrics to find and record.
• Video view metrics that show what number of people have watched your videos. These can be measured using YouTube Insights or similar tools.
• Document views that track the number of views for any documents embedded on your website.

Obviously, consumption metrics are important since they help a website owner understand how their content is viewed.

Sharing metrics

Sharing metrics monitor how many people are sharing content across the internet that actually comes from your website. This metric is a good indicator of content usefulness and quality. It also implies if your content is popular and interesting, so it’s also a good indicator of your website’s performance.

Sharing metrics include social signals that people leave by clicking social share buttons on your website. They come from websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.

Another share metric is your email open rate and forwards. And of course, there are backlinks (an important part of SEO), which are created whenever another website links back to your website. This can be measured through Google Analytics.

Therefore, you should encourage your visitors to share your content by using share buttons on your blog posts, articles, or videos. If you don’t have social sharing buttons installed on your website, make sure you do that as soon as possible.

Channels

Various analytics tools offer you a method to remain clear when it comes to the sources of your website traffic. 

For example, Google Analytics organizes your website traffic (the number of visitors) into various channels:

• Organic search – users that have found your website naturally through a search.
• Direct – users that have directly visited your website (either by typing the address or through a bookmark).
• Referral – people that came to your website through an external link from another website.
• Email – those who have clicked on a link leading to your website from an email message.
• Paid search – users that have clicked on a link to your website from a paid advertising campaign.
• Other advertising methods – visitors coming from other forms of online advertising (aside from search and display).
• Social – visitors that came to your website through a post on social media.
• Display – those coming from display advertising (such as Google Adwords remarketing campaigns).

With these metrics, you will be able to identify the source of the traffic you receive. In other words, you will figure out where your visitors are coming from. Additionally, it will come in handy to know if these visits are organic and whether they come from your social media pages and referral links. 

All in all, this metric will help you to better understand what areas need improvement.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visits that go to only one page before exiting your website right away. Google’s algorithms that determine search engine rankings consider this to be a good sign of bad user experience. In simpler terms, the higher it is, the lower your website will go.

This means that if you click on a website and then leave to another website, that will be considered a bounce, and it will negatively impact the bounce rate.

Your website’s bounce rate can also be affected by closing the browser or window, typing another URL into the address bar, clicking the back button on the browser, or leaving the website entirely to go to a different website.

That is why it is important to keep an eye on this metric to better understand when your visitors are sticking around to learn more or when they’re bouncing off.

Figure out which pages of your website have the highest and the lowest bounce rate. Put them side-by-side to determine what’s so good on the one that keeps visitors engaged and how it compares to the other that doesn’t.

If you think that this is a lot of work, remember that you don’t want search engines to see your website as a weak source of content due to high bounce rates.

Final thoughts

It is more than obvious that the success of your website matters a lot. You, as a website owner, have either worked hard on creating your website or have invested a lot of money to make great things online.

But keep in mind that success with websites is not one-size-fits-all and it depends on numerous factors and metrics. For starters, keep an eye on the metrics you have just read about and they should be enough to get you on the right track.