E-Commerce

2 Dec 2020
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

1 Website traffic
• unique visits tells you how well you attract new visitors, while repeat visits
tells you how well you retain visitors.
• Now, in an ideal world, unique visits and repeat visits will grow
simultaneously, giving you a healthy increase in total visits.
• what if total visits growth is driven entirely by repeat visits?
• In such a scenario, the metrics are telling you that you are successfully building a loyal
following (awesome!), but you aren’t doing enough to attract new visitors.
• You should be adopting new strategies to improve your discoverability, which will bring
new eyes to your website.
7 key metrics to track the success of your
website
2. Traffic sources
• Organic Search: traffic coming via the search engines
• Referral: traffic from another website
• Direct: traffic typing your domain into the browser
• Social: traffic from social media

• Which source of traffic is best? 

7 key metrics to track the success of your website

3 Bounce rate
• The bounce rate metric, displayed as a percentage, tells you how many visitors leave your
website immediately after arriving—Google defines these as “single-page sessions.” The lower
your bounce rate, the more visitors there are sticking around to enjoy your website, and
(hopefully) converting
• Bounce rates do differ based on the type of website—blogs will differ from landing pages which
will differ from eCommerce stores. You also have to apply some logic to the situation. 
• “when I changed my website from a multi-page site to a one-page site, my bounce rate declined.
No need to panic, though, as the change is easily explained: my information is all on one page
now, so visitors have no need (and are unable) to click around my site.”
• It doesn’t tell you why they are leaving—
• common reasons for a high bounce rate include: slow load times, broken websites, bad first
impression (poor website aesthetics), and badly targeted keywords.
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

4 Top pages
• If you head over to the Behavior section of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to
see your best performing pages in terms of traffic volume—Analytics displays
the number of pageviews, and how those pageviews look as a percentage of
total pageviews across the entire website.
• Knowing what pages receive the most traffic is hugely important because it
gives you real-world data showing what your audience responds to. If you
experiment with different types of content, this is where you can begin to
analyze what’s working, and produce more of the material your readers like.
• You could also look at the number of social shares per page as an indicator of
a strong article.
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

5 Conversion rate
• Conversion rate is another crude top-level metric, but it’s arguably the most
important metric of all as it can have a significant impact on your site’s profitability—
if you can increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, your profits double
• Total conversion numbers are important, but it’s the conversion rate that tells you
how well you encourage your traffic to perform a desired action.
• Your conversion rate is easy to calculate: Unique Visitors / Conversions
• an eCommerce store might have three conversion goals:
• A sale (most important!)
• A subscriber to an email list
• A social share (least important, but still valuable)
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

6 Conversion by traffic source – Discussion.

• Hypothetical example website with the following performance
metrics:
1. Organic search traffic: 4% conversion rate
2. Referral traffic: 10% conversion rate
3. Direct traffic: 12% conversion rate
4. Social traffic: 1% conversion rate
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

• For a start, direct traffic is the most valuable traffic source for this website.
Direct traffic is usually driven by loyal visitors, so with this in mind, this
website should take steps to encourage loyalty and repeat visits.
• Similarly, social traffic is the least effective, so while receiving free traffic
from social media is always nice, this website would be crazy to chase it too
hard.
• You can also see that referral traffic converts 250% better than search
engine traffic. This is an indicator that the strategy for generating referral
traffic is good (you’re being linked to from the right places) but your search
engine strategy is less effective (you’re targeting the wrong keywords).
7 key metrics to track the success of your website

7 Customer’s lifetime value
• This is useful to know, but ignores the fact that when a customer becomes part of your sales
funnel, they are more likely to buy again. The lifetime value metric addresses this by
factoring the customer’s future purchases into the equation.
• Take a membership website, for example. (Admittedly the nature of a membership website
means they are more likely to be aware of their customer’s lifetime value.) If membership
costs $100 per month, and the average customer remains a member for 6 months, then
each customer is worth, on average, $600 to that business.
• This is well worth knowing, as it will help this website to allocate their resources more
effectively—if they use paid advertising, they could afford to spend more to attract
customers based on the $600 lifetime value rather than the $100 transaction value. This
higher lifetime value means they can spend more on advertising and promotion, will attract
more customers, and will allow their business to grow more quickly—what’s not to like!
Demographics 

click Audience >

Demographics >
Overview.
 Note: If
your date
range is
one week
and
someone
visits your
site 4
times that
week, he
or she will
only be
counted as
one user
for the
week–not
four.

 click Audience > Overview.

A pageview is
defined as a
view of a page
on your site that
is being tracked
by the Analytics
tracking code. If
a user clicks
reload after
reaching the
page, this is
counted as an
additional
pageview. If a
user navigates to
a different page
and then returns
to the original
page, a second
pageview is
recorded as
well.”
“A session is
a group of
user
interactions
with your
website that
take place
within a
given time
frame.”
• Landing Pages – Landing pages are the pages through which a visitor entered
your website. An easier way to define it is that a landing page is the first page
someone visits when they come to your website.
• To see your Landing Pages report, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
• Note: Most likely, your high traffic landing pages are NOT your home page.
Instead, it could be that popular blueberry muffin recipe post. For my Cub Scout
blog, it's the post I wrote about where Cub Scout patches go on the uniform.
• Exit Pages – An exit page is the last page someone was on before they left your
site. To see the Exit Pages report, go to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages.
• Bounce Rate – Google defines a “bounce” as a single-page session on your site.
Basically, someone comes to your site and only looks at one page.
Bounce(rs)..
• Optimize Page Load Time -  47% of users expect a web page to
load in two seconds or less, making on-page optimization.

• Only 2% of the world’s leading 100 ecommerce websites have mobile

sites that load fully in less than five seconds on mobile devices – and one-
fifth take almost eight seconds to load completely, an almost criminally
long time for sites that live and die by conversion rate optimization.
• Before you even think of looking at the content of your pages, make sure
your visitors can actually view them in a reasonable amount of time.
Shopping cart abandonment percentages (Image via Search Engine Journal)
• Use of Sidebar Widgets and Promotions
• Some web pages are an ideal vehicle for offering relevant content, offers, and
other material to your audience. Blog pages are a prime example, and you’d
probably struggle to find a decent blog without something in the sidebar.
• However, cramming the digital margins of your content with ads, offers, award
emblems, and other crap is a surefire way to overwhelm your visitor and tempt
them to bounce.
Consider user intent when targeting
keywords. Is the prospect looking to
learn something, or buy something?
What stage of the funnel are they in?
What problem are they trying to solve?
These are all questions that can help
you provide the most useful, relevant
content to your audience, and the more
relevant your content is to users’
queries, the more likely they are to stick
around once they’ve arrived on your
site.
• A cramped internal linking structure causes all kinds of
readability issues
• Non-navigable means high bounce rate
• The world is going mobile. Don't just optimize for it. Make it a
priority.
• Don’t overwhelm your visitors with dozens of CTAs. Think
about user intent and how your pages can help visitors
accomplish their goal, then include a clear, relevant call to
action that helps them get the job done.
• One of the major reasons people fail to convert from product pages is
because they aren’t ready to complete a purchase or transaction.
Sometimes this is as simple as buyer hesitation or an aversion to
price, but sometimes, it’s because the information they want about a
product isn’t provided. This could include details on where something
was manufactured, the specifics of your return policy, or user reviews.
Resources
• Organic VS Paid Marketing Search Strategies The Pros and Cons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V3HMRJ8U40
How to Get More Organic Traffic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_6zAGJ-JO4
https://
www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/04/07/reduce-bounce-rate
Google Analytics Demo Account.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342?hl=en
References
• CPC vs CPM: Benefits and Pitfalls : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qvnC4Ffrq8
• 4 Easy Ways to Get Advertisers on Your Site: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/159412
• What Do All Those Google Analytics Terms Mean? : https://painlessbloganalytics.com/google-analytics-terms-meaning/
• How Does Google Make Its Money: The 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google Ads :
https://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords
•7 Simple Google Ads Hacks That’ll Drive More Qualified Leads : https
://neilpatel.com/blog/7-simple-google-adwords-pay-per-click-hacks-to-drive-more-qualified-leads/
• Keywords: What Are Keywords & Why Do They Matter for PPC? : https://www.wordstream.com/keyword
• SEO & PPC Tools For Professionals : https://www.spyfu.com/
• 7 key metrics to track the success of your website : https://torquemag.io/2015/03/7-key-website-metrics-track/#comments
• What’s a Good Quality Score for Each Type of Keyword? : https://
www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/09/19/whats-a-good-quality-score
•7 Elements of an Aesthetically Pleasing Website : https
://www.appliedi.net/blog/7-elements-of-an-aesthetically-pleasing-website/
• The HOTH Google Keyword Planner Tool : https://www.thehoth.com/google-keyword-planner/
• The Ad Rank Formula Revealed : https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords/the-ad-rank-formula-revealed/