How to measure website performance? - 5 metrics

However, just having a company website is not enough. The website needs to generate customers, represent the brand, get online exposure, and reach the audience.

First of all, it must be efficient and effective.

Otherwise, hardly anyone will visit your site and contact you.

But how to measure it? Rather, every entrepreneur counts on an efficient and effective website, but who actually tracks the impact of a website? It is unlikely that anyone knows about this and checks how the site affects visitors.

So check out some points on how to measure website performance.

The following metrics are taken from Google Analytics, a basic and complete tool that will show a lot of data about website behavior.

How to measure website performance with Google Analytics?

1. Total visits

First of all, it is very important to get an idea of ​​how many users visit the site in total. Is it about 20 per day or more than 1000? This indicator will allow you to understand whether the site is gaining at least some traffic.

It is also worth checking these figures compared to the earlier period. For example, your site has been positioning for 6 months now, then set the graph for the last year and see if there are any effects.

Theoretically, the number of visits to the site should be more. A higher position means that more people will be able to notice your site. Unfortunately, far positions are not actually clicked. Ba, the most important is the TOP 3 (i.e. the first three results for a given search query in a search engine) or even the TOP 1.

2. Frequently viewed pages

The next step to evaluate the effectiveness of the site is information about the most viewed pages of the site.

By looking at the data here, you can find out how many people are interested in the About Me page or the Price List page. This is a very valuable feature in terms of creating a useful site.

This data is great for blogging as you can analyze what content is read the most. It is also a hint about what topics your audience is interested in.

You can also analyze these posts and maybe find opportunities to improve them, which will increase their value even more.

3. Traffic source

Another great piece of information comes from the visitor sources report. There are 4 types here:

• Organic - search engine traffic. The user arrives by typing a phrase into Google and clicking on your site.
• Direct - the user types the website address in the browser bar. They know about it and go directly to him.
• Referral - the recipient comes to you via a link from another site, for example, from a guest post, comment, etc.
• Social - i.e. traffic generated on your social media channels.

After analyzing this data, you will get a preliminary idea of ​​whether the activities you are conducting make sense. For example, here you can check the activity outsourced to another person. For example:

• SEO agency - we are looking to see if "organic" is growing.
• Social media marketing - we check the source of the "social network", whether the created posts and user actions involve (whether they go to the site, etc.).

This is very important as you can find out what works and what doesn't. There are many lessons to be learned here too.

4. Time Spent On Site

We can measure the performance of a website by analyzing a metric that shows the average time spent on a page. Thanks to this information, we know if users spend more time on a particular page or leave quickly.

If, for example, a blog post that should be read in 8 minutes is read on average in 30 seconds, then we have a clear indication that something is wrong. Perhaps the content is unattractive, or perhaps the intro is boring and the user leaves the site.

This is already speculation, but it's worth checking the time in this way to make sure the site is effective.

Here it is worth considering the attractiveness aspect in terms of visual appeal. Perhaps the design of the site is already bad and not as attractive as it was five years ago?

5. Rejection rate

A metric that measures the effectiveness of a page, based on which conclusions can be drawn, as in the paragraph above.

The bounce rate tells us whether a person leaves the site without any interaction, but nevertheless goes to the next page, for example.

For example, we have a bounce when someone enters the main page of the site, but leaves without clicking on any link on the page. However, if this person went to the contact page, then there will be no refusal, because there is some kind of interaction with the page.

What does this tell us?

First of all, a high coefficient value makes us understand that the page may be unintuitive, there are too few CTAs on it, the user does not know what to do next on the page.

However, on the other hand, you have to be careful because, for example, if someone goes to the contact page but doesn't click anything, they can get what they need - a phone number. Hence, there is no need to interact with the page at all.

6. Own goals set in GA or GTM

The above indicators are more than enough to check the effectiveness of your current activities.

You can configure other settings as well, but more extensive knowledge of Google Analytics is required here.

We are talking about goals, event tracking and conversion settings. This is how we check if the user has clicked on a certain button on the page, or if the page is playing video or audio.

However, for such things, we use Google Tag Manager more, which allows us to create various events that measure, for example, button clicks.

This also has its advantages, because based on such clicks, you can measure the effectiveness of CTA buttons or conduct A / B tests, for example, to check which button color option has the best effect on recipients.

How do you measure the effectiveness of a website?

As you can see, you can measure the performance of a website by analyzing the data that comes from the Google Analytics dashboard.

This is the basic data that the Google service collects when linking to a website.

It's worth getting used to this panel, as there is much more information than I described above. You can find something else to check if your site is moving in the right direction or not.