Website Metrics You Need To Know For Your Small Business Website
These are the most essential website metrics are easy to track and understand, and they can provide you with valuable insights about your website’s performance. For example, if you have a high bounce rate on a certain page, you might want to consider rewriting the content or adding more visuals to it.
Tracking your website metrics should be an every week exercise so you can make informed decisions about how to improve your website.
Unique visitors
One of the most important website metrics, a unique visitor measures the number of times someone visits your website in a certain period of time, regardless how many times they visit. It’s essentially an indication of your website’s reach and how effective it is to attract new visitors.
Sessions
A session is a single interaction from a unique visitor on your website. A single session can include a number of interactions with your website such as page views, button clicks, form sign-ups and so on.
Sessions are recorded in the following ways:
- A website visitor views three pages. This is a single session.
- The visitor returns to your website after 30 minutes. This is a new session.
- The visitor goes back to your website again after a day or so. This is also a new session.
Basically, the website visitor is counted as a unique visitor, but had 3 sessions on your website.
Session duration
The average session duration shows you how much time website visitors spend on your website. It is calculated by dividing the total time spent on the website by the total number of sessions. The average session duration is generally between 2-4 minutes.
Page views
Page views are counted every time a website visitor loads a new page. If the website visitor reloads the page, or visits the same page again and again, it will count as a separate page view. The page view metric can help you understand which pages are the most popular on your website and create more content similar to it.
Bounce rate
The term bounce rate describes and measures what percentage of visitors leave your website after only viewing a single page. They don’t take any action such as navigating to another page within your website or clicking on any elements.
Essentially, they land on your website, do nothing else, and then “bounce” away back to Google Search as an example.
How to track website metrics
There are numerous different tools you can use to track and interpret your website metrics, the most popular being Google Analytics. Our monthly WordPress maintenance packages include a live website analytics dashboard that keeps track of the website metrics written in this article and more.