Website Metrics that Matter for Business Growth: Why They Matter and How to Measure Them

Website metrics offer core insights into your business, but it’s easy to chase the wrong KPS without understanding the right one to focus on. Not only will this cost you money, but it will also set you back in business, giving you a false idea of growth without any revenue changes.

So, which website metrics truly reflect business growth? Is it website traffic, quality of visitors, blog comments, or time per session? In this article, you get answers to this question, learn the importance of tracking metrics, the four categories of website metrics to prioritize, and the best way to track them.

Why Is It Important to Track Website Metrics?

Typically, tracking website metrics gives you an insight into your customers' behavior on your site. It helps you understand what they are interacting with, where they are coming from, the pages with the best conversion, and those without. This data serves as a guide to making decisions about what needs optimizing for a more significant revenue impact. However, tracking website analytics isn't only relevant because of the financial gains and decision-making insight it provides. It also helps you understand the effectiveness of your content strategy, especially business with a focus on value delivery through blogging.

Similarly, tracking web metrics can give you insights into the effectiveness of your sales funnel. You can identify if your visitors are following the pre-planned path toward completing a purchase. If they aren't following the path, you can quickly identify where they are dropping off and what to optimize for better performance. You can also determine the best traffic sources, conversion rates, engagement, keyword ranking, and more with website analytics.

What Are the Four Categories of Web Metrics?

Website metrics vary from different industries and levels in the customer journey. However, you can group them into 4 main categories based on business goals and customer interaction.

Traffic Metrics

This category provides insight into the number of visitors, quality, and where they come from, like ads, landing pages, referrals, or social media. It also helps you understand the usability of your website in keeping visitors engaged enough to stay longer on a page or return for more information. Some website traffic metrics to track include traffic sources, new vs. returning customers, average time on site, bounce rate, exit pages, top visited pages, and conversion rates.

Marketing Metrics

Marketing metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of the marketing collateral linked to or on your website. They often tie back to your business or marketing goals and help you identify areas that need optimization for better conversion. Some examples include cost per lead, engagement rate, marketing attribution, and click-through rate (CTR).

Engagement Metrics

This provides information on how visitors interact with the assets on your website, like pages, content, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and others. Website analytics in this category measures the effectiveness of the assets, messaging, and any other technical aspects that can improve conversion. Some metrics in this category are social sharing, pages per session, time on page, and page views.

Conversion Metrics

This category helps you measure the effectiveness of your conversion process. You can identify the performance of each channel, the section with issues, and the best-performing conversion methods. Some website conversion includes cost per acquisition, conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, and return on investment.

What Are the Most Important Website Metrics?

Regardless of the industry, specific metrics contribute to your digital strategy's overall success. These website metrics help you to understand what's happening and why. They include:

Bounce Rate

Website bounce rate shows the number of users that visited a page and exited without taking any action. Action in this context can include clicking on a link, sharing, making a purchase, etc. A high website bounce rate means users are not finding value on your website. In contrast, a low bounce rate shows they are getting value and engaging content. Tracking this metric helps to measure the effectiveness of your website assets. Reaching millions of visits is good, but you cannot boost revenue without conversion.

Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of visitors that engage with your website and complete a desired goal. It's one of the best metrics to measure the performance of your website and marketing assets like campaigns. A high conversion rate shows that you are delivering value to your visitors, and they can access your offers quickly. If you are experiencing a poor conversion, you may have to assess your sales process, website design, or copy for more insights. 

Click-through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate measures the percentage of visitors who click on a link in an email, website page, or campaign. It's an important marketing metric that helps you understand if your offer is valuable to customers or if you attract the ideal visitors. A high CTR means lower spending on conversion costs and the effectiveness of your ads in capturing viewers' attention.

Average Time on Page

Average time on page is the average time a visitor spends on a page and other pages visited in a session. It helps you to monitor user experience and website performance. If users drop off quickly, it might be due to broken links, slow-loading pages, poor navigation, and more. This information from this metric helps you make efforts to understand where the issue is coming from and fix it, which will boost the conversion rate.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources are web analytic metrics that show you the channels where visitors are coming to your website. Typically, these channels are referral, search, and direct sources. However, you can also track traffic from campaigns like banner ads. Traffic sources help you understand the channel with the highest awareness. This is important when running both organic and paid marketing drives simultaneously. You will know which is effective and which needs optimization.

What Is the Best Way to Measure Website Performance Metrics?

The best way to measure website performance metrics is to connect it to a web analytic tool. These tools offer features that allow you to monitor specific metrics in real time and understand their impact on business growth. For example, Google Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager can help you monitor page views and conversion rates on your website. Similarly, you can use other tools like HotJar to help you understand how vistors behave on your website, like average session time, exit pages, and more. Some other tools that can help you measure website performance metrics are SEMrush, Pingdom, and Similarweb. Additionally, you can connect all of these tools into Kyligence ZEN to get AI-powered website analytics that support business growth; with these web analytics tools, you can access dashboards, chat with data to understand different trends and foster collaborations among team members. It democratizes website metrics analytics, allowing marketers and stakeholders to extract insights from website metrics in natural languages.

Website Metrics Analytics Made Easy with Kyligence

Monitoring relevant website metrics and acting on important trends is essential to drive customer growth. It's easy to fall into the trap of chasing vanity metrics like website visitors without understanding how they affect the overall business revenue. However, when you monitor important metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, and click-through rate, you get a better view of what matters: customer experience and revenue.

Kyligence Zen enables you to access all metrics from one centralized location. This way, marketing, product management, sales, and senior management can follow up on metrics relevant to them. They can also extract AI-powered insights directly from their KPIs using Kyligence Copilot. This feature lets you chat with your data and get detailed responses with actionable insights, without needing to write complex SQL queries. With these insights, you can make impactful business decisions that guarantee efficient user experience, consistent website performance improvements, and repeatable revenue growth.

Boost your business with data-driven decisions. Start tracking and analyzing your website metrics today with a free trial of Kyligence Zen.