How to measure website performance? - 5 metrics

However, just having a company website is not enough. A website must generate customers, represent a brand, gain online visibility and reach an audience.

Above all, it must be effective and efficient.

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.

Therefore, check out some points on how to measure the effectiveness of a website.

The following indicators 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 metric will let you know if the site is getting any traffic.

It's also worth checking these numbers against the earlier period. For example, if your site has been positioning for 6 months, 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. Most Viewed Pages

The next step in evaluating site performance is information about the most viewed pages on the site.

By examining the data here, you can find out whether more people are interested in the "About me" page or page "Price list". 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 clue as to what topics your audience is interested in.

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

3. Traffic Source

Another great piece of information comes from the Visitor Source 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 site address in the browser bar. They know about it and contact him directly.
• Referral - the recipient comes to you through a link from another site, for example, from a guest post, comment, etc.
• Social - i.e. traffic generated on your social media channels.

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

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

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

4. Time 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 whether 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 is worth checking the time in this way to make sure the site is effective.

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

5. Abandonment 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 still proceeds, for example, to the next page.

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

What does this tell us?

First of all, the high coefficient value lets us know 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 must be careful, because, for example, if someone goes to the contact page but doesn't click anything, he can get what he needs - a phone number. Therefore, there is no need to interact with the page at all.

6. Custom goals set in GA or GTM

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

You can set other parameters, but more extensive knowledge of Google Analytics is required here.

We're 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 the 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 to 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 panel.

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

It is 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.