Basic Website Metrics

• by jakeaull

Website analytics are wonderful. Google Analytics is wonderful. Sometimes all of this wonderful can be too much of a good thing. It becomes valuable to go back and refresh on what basic metrics can be most valuable. So, for your website, what are they? Here’s a good answer from the book The Art of SEO by Enge, Spencer, Stricchiola and Fishkin:

• How many unique visitors did you receive yesterday (or last month, or last quarter)?
• Is traffic trending up or down?
• What are the most popular search terms with which people find you?
• What are the most popular pages on your site?
• What are the best-converting pages on the site?

So there you go. Simple but strong. Interestingly, they didn’t include bounce rate – a metric often touted by marketers. Thing to remember about bounce rate is, if you’re losing more non-matching prospects, are you doing a better job of converting the higher-quality prospects? If the answer is yes, then personally I would take a growing bounce rate any day of the week. And that brings up the other big point of mine personally:
Quantitative metrics are good, but qualitative may be much better.

-Jake Aull, Head Honcho, ZenFires Digital Marketing