Time to Talk Tracking: Is Your Website Measuring What Really Matters?

A business’ website does more than provide information to visitors. It also offers a lot of valuable information about these visitors to the business. This can include users’ interests, preferences, and certain demographics, but often that valuable data is missed or even ignored. It’s time to talk about website tracking. We’ll explain which website metrics are important, why they are insightful, and some of the best tools for gathering and measuring that information.

Why Website Metrics are Important to Track

Websites can collect a lot of data about how many visitors come to a website, from where, what pages they visit, how long they stay, and more. These can be extremely informative for a business. They can provide insights into customer/client interests, how they are navigating to your website, whether an audience is growing or cycling, and even strengths or weaknesses about the website design itself. Measuring these important metrics can provide great insight about your website’s design, the products/services you offer, and where you should focus digital marketing efforts.

Important Website Metrics to Measure

There are countless data points a website can measure, but they are not all created equal. Some are more important to measure and track than others. For example, ‘views’ is a simple metric to see how many people are viewing a business’ website and specific pages. However, it’s not much more informative than this. We’ll explain some of the key measurements that all businesses should be tracking.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is uniformly one of the most important metrics to track on a website to measure engagement. It considers what percentage of visitors to a business’ website convert, i.e. perform some kind of action. There are different kinds of conversions and yours will depend on the website and business. Conversion rate may consider completing purchases or booking appointments/service, but they can also be filling in a digital form, signing up to a newsletter or trial, or downloading content. All of these can be extremely informative about what is attracting visitors’ attentions and interests.

Event Tracking and Other Behaviour Measurements

Another important metric for measuring website visitor engagement is event tracking. Events can include conversions, but they also include other actions taken on a website. Event tracking can monitor users clicking on certain buttons or images, playing videos, opening a gallery, etc. All of this can provide important data for what parts of a website are attracting more attention, getting more conversions, and more. That can help a business know where to focus its service/product offerings and inform web designers about future revisions to the site’s layout.

Other event related metrics like average time per page (how long users are staying on pages) and average session length (how long users are staying on the website) can also be extremely informative both to a business and designers. For example, visitors may be staying on a page for a long time because of strong interest, but if it is a page designed to quickly redirect users to more specific products or pages, it may be due to confusion or too many options.

Traffic Sources

Today, most people don’t navigate to a new website by typing the URL into their browser’s address bar. Instead, most people are directed to a website from ads, social media, emails, blogs or even other websites. Measuring a website’s traffic’s sources helps determine where new and returning visitors are coming from, helping to determine which marketing is most effective and where a business can maintain and further grow its clientele. Inversely, it can also identify which channels might be lacking and if you need new marketing strategies.

Bounce Rate vs Engagement Rate

Another informative metric to measure and track is the bounce rate. This tracks how many visitors load a page on the website and then leave without clicking or interacting with anything on the site. This can indicate certain design elements are not grabbing attention or perhaps a certain page is causing more bounces than others.

Engagement Rate is the opposite of a bounce rate and a good measurement to compare with the bounce rate. The engagement rate tracks how many visit the website and interact with anything, including buttons, images, videos, etc. With the engagement and bounce rates together, a business can get a full sense of the impression its website provides.

Tools for Measuring your Website

All these metrics are important to track, but that may leave the question of how you measure them. Of course, there are countless tools and plug-ins available to help you track metrics. We’ll highlight a few standards.

Shopify Analytics

Shopify includes in its platform a dashboard which helps track various metrics about an ecommerce website. Along with some of the essential metrics we’ve mentioned, it also includes various business performance metrics that can help track both your website and ecommerce business.

MonsterInsights

WordPress does not offer a free built-in analytic dashboard like Shopify, but it does have a large suite of plug-ins. MonsterInsights is one of the more robust plug-ins and offers a wide range of tracking for a website along with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Of course, the web giant Google provides its own web analytics platform that can track and measure a website’s various metrics. Google Analytics, part of Google’s large Marketing Platform, provides all these key metrics and also connects to other Google services, for an even fuller picture of all your digital marketing. Its services are also built into WordPress’ Premium plan, and Shopify sites can be connected to the platform.

Matomo

Another popular web analytics platform is Matomo. Along with a thorough set of analytics, Matomo is particularly popular for its data ownership policy and self-hosting option, allowing a business to keep the metric tracking in-house. Its WordPress plugin can make it an easy addition to any WordPress site.

Making Sense of the Metrics

Tracking and measuring key metrics of your website can be extremely informative. A key thing to remember when tracking these metrics is that they are numbers alone. Measurements mean nothing without careful analysis. For example, a click-rate could be high or low for various reasons. The metrics become even more informative when they are combined, e.g. observing that traffic coming from a certain source has higher engagement rates. Your web design and digital marketing team at Rosewood will have the expertise to identify the important metrics, understand what they mean, and turn them into actionable strategies for your business. If you’re ready to start tracking measurements and consider the invaluable data of your business’ website, contact Rosewood’s web team.