The Metrics That Matter for Your Site

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With nearly 2 billion websites up on the internet, there are a lot of people creating a lot of websites. Some people create online service-based businesses, some write blogs and some even have a virtual resume. No matter the type of website you have, you likely want it to be successful. For most, this means getting a lot of visitors and potential customers to the site. But whatever your reason for starting a website, it is important to know how your site is performing. This can involve using cloud logging (more on that here: https://papertrailapp.com/cloud-logging), testing, or a wide range of other services to check on the status of your site.

However, the best way to know how your website is performing is by checking out the metrics. There are literally dozens of different analytics and metrics that you can keep track of, and tracking them all can be quite difficult. So which are the most important to focus on? While they all have their value, this article is going to look at a few of the different metrics that matter the most for your service-based website.

Bounce Rate

When you have a website, no matter the purpose, you likely want people to spend some time there. The longer people spend on your site, the more interested and engaged they are in the services or content you offer. One of the best ways to test how engaged users of your website are is to know and monitor your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the percentage of single-page site-visits you get.

If you have a high bounce rate, it means people are not visiting more than a single page on your site. This could be because of slow loading pages, uninteresting copy for your services, difficult navigation or poor design. While this metric won’t tell you why people are leaving, it will let you know you need to make some changes to try retain users and visitors.

In addition to using bounce rate on it’s own, you should also look at the average time per session and pages per session to let you truly get a full picture of how interested people are.

Conversion Rate

If you have an online service-based business, the main goal of your website is to sell your service to everyone who visits your site. This desired outcome is called a conversion and the amount of conversions you get directly ties into how successful your small business is. Knowing your conversion rate can tell you how effective your marketing, copy or website has been and if it needs some work.

Converting users can take a lot of good marketing as well as offering something worthwhile. Reasons why a conversion rate might be low include weak marketing, too many steps to buy your service or just a general disinterest in what you have to offer. The average conversion rate is relatively low in most industries, so even a small percentage point boost to conversion rate can be huge for selling more of your service. Of course, it differs slightly between industries but a double-digit conversion rate is unheard of in most niches.

Traffic Sources

Tracking and monitoring your traffic sources is the best way to see where your visitors and potential customers are coming from. This can help you adjust your marketing strategy to focus more on better-performing sources or come up with ways to boost the under-performing ones.

Different traffic sources include organic search, referrals, social and direct. Organic refers to people organically discovering your site and referrals are when they found a link to your site from another site or in a piece of content. Social is when they discover you via social media and direct is where they directly enter your URL to visit.

In conclusion, hopefully, this article has been able to show you some of the most important metrics to track for your online service-based company or website. Knowing these will ensure you are always aware of the success and viability of your website and can always make sure it’s performing as expected.

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