Website KPIs: How to Measure Your Website’s Performance

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How efficient is your website? Does it have a good ROI? Many entrepreneurs fail to answer these simple questions because they forget about web analytics. They launch a site and don’t know if it helps to achieve their business goals or not. But how can you tell whether the site justifies the investment? You need to measure and track website KPIs.

KPIs stand for key performance indicators. This term refers to a set of metrics that reflect the performance or success of a website and an organization in general.

Why do you need to monitor KPIs? They allow you to assess the ROI, understand whether a particular Internet marketing channel is profitable, and answer many other vital questions.

This article will look at 10 key metrics you should check, explaining how to do it. This information will help you find the vulnerabilities of your site, blog, or online store and take some actions to optimize it. 

For example, if your store is slow, carry out Magento 2 performance tuning or speed up any other platform that you use.

How do you measure your website performance?

I will use Google Analytics as an example to show you how to analyze website metrics. This tool is a free web analytics service offered by Google. To install it, you create a Google account, enter the site URL, and get a tracking ID. Then, you copy and paste this code into each page of the site under the </head> tag. And that’s how you start collecting visitors’ data.

website kpi

You can find out the following aspects with the help of Google Analytics: 

  • what pages visitors viewed;
  • how long they were on the page;
  • how deeply they scrolled it;
  • bounce rate, and more.

The Google Analytics interface provides you with various handy out-of-the-box reports that streamline your website’s performance analysis. So, without further ado, let’s dive deeper into the metrics you should track. 

10 essential website KPIs to analyze

1. Site speed

The site speed overview tells you how long web pages take to load. For example, it collects information about average page load time in various regions and browsers.

This indicator can grow if there are these possible issues: 

  • the Internet on the user’s end is slow;
  • the total load on the server becomes excessively high;
  • your website content isn’t optimized;
  • unclean coding;

A slow website loading speed can cause several problems, including:

  • new page indexing issues;
  • “glitches” on the site;
  • errors in web analytics.

All this can affect the site’s development in the long term and its ranking in search engines.

Aim for three or two seconds of load time. As soon as your site loading takes longer, you’ll notice an increase in the bounce rate. Figures prove that 40% of visitors close the tab if the site takes more than three seconds to load.

Did you know that Google Analytics provides recommendations for how to speed up your site? Here’s where you can find it:

Go to the Site Speed > Speed Suggestions report;

Click through to PageSpeed Insights.

Or go straight to the PageSpeed Insights tool from the search.

What can you learn from it? It informs you about your page speed for both mobile and desktop versions and advises you on improving the site.

I ran an experiment and tested Starbucks in PageSpeed Insights. In the screenshot below, you can see what Google recommends doing to improve this website, be it image sizing or reducing unused JavaScript.

PageSpeed Insights

2. Traffic sources

There is one more KPI to check your website performance, which is traffic sources. Your site visitors may land on your pages in different ways. For instance, they can:

click on an ad (this is done using pay-per-click advertising, or PPC);

put in a direct URL address in their browser (this is direct traffic);

click on a link in an email newsletter;

access your site using a link from social media or other websites that point to your pages;

type in a query in a search engine, and if your page is among the results (SERP), click on it.

The three latter points are considered organic traffic sources, i.e., those you didn’t pay for. You can track which channels bring in the most traffic and how many people visit your site through search or other sources using Google Analytics “Traffic Sources” reports. Below you can see how they look.

Google Analytics Traffic Sources

How does the report illustrate your website performance? Pay attention to the organic traffic section. It helps you understand whether your website is authoritative. The more organic visitors you get, the higher your website is in search. And that’s free targeted traffic that is easier to convert.

Users enter a query into a search engine with specific intent. So, if you answer their questions, you will most likely get a new client or subscriber.

3. Users and new users

Google Analytics has “Users” and “New Users” metrics, which you can find on the “Audience Overview” page.

What’s the difference between users and new users? The former ones are all those site visitors who registered at least one session. A session includes all actions on the site from the moment of visiting to the moment of closing the site. These actions are: 

  • transitions;
  • scrolling;
  • downloading;
  • watching videos;
  • and so on.

In turn, how does the system perceive new users? These are people whose browser contains a cookie that is unfamiliar to Google Analytics.

It’s not necessarily people who come to your site for the first time in their lives. These could be regular visitors. But they open your site from a different device now, or they have cleared their browser cookies.

Google Analytics uses a cookie called _ga or a unique User ID to track this indicator. The number of new users may decrease since this technology can determine when one visitor comes from different devices.

4. Average session duration

Average session duration is a Google Analytics indicator that shows how long customers stay on your page. Where can you find this report in Google Analytics? Go to the “Audience Overview” section.

Average session duration

How does Google Analytics calculate the average duration over a specified period? The entire course of all sessions (in seconds) is divided by the total number of sessions.

For example, you had three visitors per day:

 The first visitor spent 300 seconds on your site.

 The second one spent 540 seconds on your site.

 The third viewer spent 30 seconds on your site.

To calculate the average session duration, in this case, we get the following formula:

calculate the average session duration

The average session duration will be 290 seconds, or 4 minutes and 50 seconds (which looks like 00:04:50 in Google Analytics).

The session timer starts running when a user clicks on one of the pages from a search. When a visitor goes to another page, the timer stops. For the timer to count the duration on the second page, the user must perform some action (for example, play a video or click on a link). Otherwise, it won’t be part of the session duration.

However, session duration is just as ambiguous a metric as bounce rate. It would seem that if the session duration is low, then the client doesn’t linger on the page. It’s true to some extent. However, it may mean that your page quickly and easily provides the needed information to take the desired action.

5. Bounce rate

Site bounce rate is the percentage of one-page-view visits. In other words, how many visitors close the tab and don’t take any action after seeing your page. Here is where you find bounce rates in the Google Analytics interface: “Audience Overview” > Bounce Rate.

Bounce rate

What does a high bounce rate indicate? That your site isn’t user-friendly? It’s not always the case. Bounce rate is not a one-size-fits-all indicator because it may vary depending on your business and niche.

For example, a user can click on a link in the search engine results. They spend 10 minutes reading an article, leave, and complete the action outside the site. The user took the desired action, as you see. But it would be a bounce rate for Google.

There are situations when people are unwilling to stay on your site or view other information. It may indicate that the user interface is non-functional or the page contains irrelevant content that doesn’t fully match the user’s request. Slow page loading and difficult navigation can also lead to high bounce rates.

6. Pages per session

How many pages does a user view per session? You need this KPI to measure the interest in your resource and how compelling your content is in users’ eyes. If it’s low, you should figure out how to keep users engaged, increase their attention, and encourage them to take the next step.

Some believe that the more pages per session, the better. But that’s deceptive. It may indicate that the user is struggling to find the needed information. Analyze other site metrics such as average session duration and bounce rate to get a better idea.

When do you need to worry? When you see the following picture simultaneously: 

  • a high page count per session;
  • low session duration;
  • high bounce rates.

It’s a warning that users fail to find the information they are looking for. In turn, a great number of pages per session, combined with high duration and low bounce rate, can signal decent content quality.

What is a good number of pages per session? Two pages per session is an unofficial standard.

pages per session

7. Goal completions

Goal completion, or goal conversion, is a metric reflecting how well your site converts visitors and gets them to take the desired action.

What can you identify with it? You may evaluate marketing channels and site pages to determine what helped to convert visitors.

The system will count goal completion when visitors meet all the specified conditions on your site, such as: 

  • mouse hovers;
  • clicks and right clicks;
  • video views;
  • clicks on social network widgets;
  • downloads.

As a result, you’ll see which elements are the most engaging and use them on other pages of your resource.

8. Landing pages

What are landing pages? It’s the first content your visitors see when they open your website. Find this report by clicking on the “Site Content” > “Landing Pages” sections.

Landing pages report

Landing pages can be the following:

  • a home page;
  • a sign-up pop-up;
  • a well-optimized blog post;
  • any other page on your website.

How can you make the most of it?

These resources bring the most traffic to your site, so you need to improve them to retain visitors and encourage taking the desired action.

Evaluate your top landing pages. How can you convert visitors through a conversion funnel on this page? For example, one of your landing pages is a blog post. Look into how to transform it for better engagement and conversion by speeding up load time or optimizing for mobiles. It may increase your overall ROI and drive more sales.

9. Exit pages

Obviously, every website visitor will eventually leave. But are there any certain pages that people abandon more than others? The “Exit Pages” report gives you the answer to this question. This KPI helps you identify where your audience loses interest, stops browsing your website, and closes it.

Where can you find this section in Google Analytics? Open the “Exit Pages” report in the “Site Content” section.

Exit pages

What can you do to retain people on your site?

You want to retain your visitors on the site and convert them, right? So, top exit pages are an excellent starting point for optimization. First, scrutinize your exit pages to see what can be wrong. Does your content engage? Do you use calls to action?

Try incorporating CTAs with benefit-driven language and adding directional cues where users should click next. These improvements can assist in keeping users interested in your site.

10. Click-through rate

Click-through rate is a broad term that measures how often people click on a link in an ad or email. In the case of web analytics, the click-through rate shows how often people click on your link in search results. This is how it looks like in Google Search Console.

Click-through rate

Your SEO optimization can be successful. But do people want to click on the link?

By using this metric, you understand how well your site is performing on the search engine result pages. How relevant are your results? How attractive are they to users?

Click-through rates for websites vary depending on the industry and the request nature, but the average for all sites is 2%. If your score is lower, work with keywords, meta descriptions, and rich snippets. 

Final thoughts

How do you measure a website’s ROI for your business? How do you understand the effectiveness of the work on a particular Internet marketing channel? Track the KPIs listed in this article.

Even starting with 3-4 fundamental indicators, you’d better know whether you spend your money wisely and where to direct your efforts in case of some weaknesses.

About the author 

Kate Parish

Kate Parish, chief marketing officer at Onilab, with 8+ years in Digital Marketing and eCommerce web development promotion. Kate constantly upgrades her knowledge and skillset to stay fit in the progressing online world. She always does exhaustive research in such spheres as SEO, Magento PWA development, and SMM, before sharing her expertise with a broad audience.

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