Important Metrics to Track Website Success

How do we know if our website is performing?

There are very real, specific metrics that show us how well our content is performing.

In this post, I'm going to describe the most valuable metrics for evaluating the performance of a website.

Traffic

Traffic is the most important metric because it enables everything that comes after it: engagement and conversion.

The real metric that we should be paying attention to is the increase in traffic over time.

There is no definite amount of traffic that we should have. Each blog and website will have different objectives, and a different threshold of traffic before people start to convert. Still, if we are correctly executing a content strategy, we should see an increase over time.

We can learn the best practices and start to adopt them as we progress while at the same time cutting out things that we did that didn't make the traffic increase.

Time Spent on the Website

The real measure of the quality of the content is how long people actually stay on the site. The longer people stay, the more content they are consuming.

In Google Analytics, this is called Session Duration. We can see how the people are engaging with a specific post by finding the URL.

Pages per Visit

Content that supports other content helps fuel a virtuous circle where people continue through to other articles while learning and receiving value.

We should make it as easy as possible for people to click through and find more of the content.


The strategy is to deliver so much value in one article that when we link to a different article, people assume that it contains a vast amount of value as well.

Returning Visitors 

We will always have first-time visitors. In order to increase our traffic, we certainly want new people coming to our site all the time.

Google Analytics has an option in its dashboard to evaluate the percentage of new sessions. 

We can segment by the source of traffic and extrapolate a couple of predictions that would hold true.

The best way to look at the performance of our content is to look at direct traffic. This is the traffic that comes from people typing our URL directly.

The percentage of traffic from direct versus other sources will depend on your marketing campaigns and business model. Instead of trying to increase the percentage of our traffic from direct, you should focus on the absolute volume of sessions from direct traffic.

If our volume is increasing, it means that people are coming back and our content is working.


References: 

Neil Patel (2020) The 7 Most Important Metrics to Track Your Content’s Success, Available at: https://neilpatel.com/blog/7-important-metrics-track-contents-success/ (Accessed: 26th April 2020).