Don't say your website rocks until you track those 7 website KPIs
Mariam Ispiryan • Feb 15, 2022 • 6 min read
You've been into the months of mockup-final website cycle and finally created a website that you and your team love!
No doubt, you've also tested the website back and forth to make sure the UX and functionality are all in place, and your customers will have no issues when using your digital storefront.
However, you never know the actual value of your website until real users test it and give their verdict, and that's when website KPIs come in handy.
Which metrics for website performance should you track?
There is an abundance of website KPIs, and that number grows in parallel to new activities you include on your website. In simpler words, the more activities you provide to your Website users, the more user paths you will track, and therefore, set website KPIs for.
So, there is no exact answer to which KPIs should be a priority for you to track. However, there are must-track website KPIs you can't afford to ignore.
Below, find which are they.
Acquisition KPIs | How much attention did you manage to grasp?
Acquisition metrics help you to understand how much traffic your website generates. It measures your efforts to drive your customers to your website from different channels, such as advertising, social media, street banners, etc.
Organic Traffic
Image Source: Stridec
Organic traffic shows how many people visited your site by organic search. For example, if you reached our site by searching website KPIs on Google and finding our article there, you have just enriched our organic traffic statistics by 1.
Number of Visits and Sources
Image Source: Blue Hills Digital
Website visits count how many times users visited your website. This metric allows you to understand your website’s users’ activity. You should also note the difference between visits and unique visits.
Aside from tracking the raw volumes of people who visit your site, you should also track the traffic sources: which channels bring more visitors?
Performance KPIs | How do the visitors behave on the website?
After you know how many people have visited your website and how many times they did it, it's time to understand their behavior on your website.
Bounce rate
Image Source: Search Engine Journal
Bounce rate shows how many users entered the page and leave it without navigating to any other page within your site. We can't state for sure the percentage of the acceptable KPI; however, a very high bounce rate should be alarming for you.
That will mean most page visitors don't want to stay on the website after entering it. And if your internal links are in place, a high bounce rate may be because of the poor UX.
Dwell time
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This metric shows how much time passes after a user clicks on your site and then returns to search results. More simply, it shows the overall time spent on your website by a single user. Dwell time is one of the website KPIs widely considered by search engines when determining your page rankings.
Conversion KPIs | Are you good at transferring your visitors to customers?
The final goal of attracting visitors to your website is to make them go through the sales funnel and complete the initially desired action. Sales funnel planning tools always come in handy when you are considering making changes to it. Conversion KPIs are usable when you make the users complete some goals on your website. Conversion KPIs are usable when you make the users complete some goals on your website.
Visit-to-lead ratio
Image Source: Klipfolio
visit-to-lead or traffic-to-lead ratio will help you determine the percentage of visitors converted to leads. A lead is a user who is not your customer yet but has shown some interest (signed up, left contact details, etc.). Your task is to increase this website KPI continuously.
MQL-to-SQL ratio
Image Source: Geckoboard
MQL stands for Marketing Qualified Leads (which showed interest in your brand but their buying intent is not clear yet), and SQL is shortened for Sales Qualified Leads (which showed interest toward your brand and went further in the sales funnel). Therefore, measuring how many purely interested users became buying customers is critical.
UX Metrics | How comfortable are your website for visitors?
All the above metrics for website performance are the results of your website's quality. If it's convenient and easy to use, and if the content is appropriately arranged to help visitors find what they want, chances are high you will succeed.
Page Speed
Image Source: I am Jamie
As simple as that, the page speed or page loading time detects how much it takes for a website to display its content to the user. Users are not accustomed to waiting long; therefore, you should keep this metric as low as possible.
Time-on-task
Image Source: Wow Makers
Time-on-task is usually considered as one of the key KPIs measuring the user experience on the website. It shows the time in minutes or seconds that a user needs to complete a certain task on the site. In other words, it measures the time it takes action to happen once the user clicks on a button.
Mobile Optimization
Image Source: SEO Hacker
More people access websites via mobile than from desktop. Therefore, there is no doubt you should optimize your website for mobile devices. You can either have a mobile version of your website designed from scratch or a responsive website that automatically changes its size and content layout when accessed via mobile device.
Final thoughts
As mentioned earlier in this blog post, the website KPIs are subjective, and they largely depend on the type of promotion activities you have on your website. However, the above KPIs are universal for most websites, and you should track them to have a general picture of your website’s performance.
For all the other activities you will introduce on your page, here is good advice - make sure your user’s behavior on the page is trackable, and you collect the appropriate data to evaluate the results of your efforts.
About Softr
Softr is an easy-to-use no-code platform that turns Airtable bases into powerful web apps, member-only websites, and client portals. Softr offers a way for you to authenticate your end-users, control access to your content and data based on conditional rules like roles, logged-in status, subscription plans, etc. If you're using Airtable as a product catalog you can use a Softr template to build your e-commerce website. Or maybe you'd like to build a custom website for your travel journal, there's a template for that too!
