There are a lot of numbers and more data available to you regarding your site than one person can manage. Yet, it is very important to understand these metrics to know if your website is on the right path. The alternative is that your website could be headed for failure because you didn’t understand your metrics.
Luckily, there is a lot of data that you can safely ignore. Not every data point is something that will make or break your website. It just takes a few tips to understand which metrics you need to pay attention to and which you can ignore.
In this article, we will go over what these are, so you can understand the difference.
Traffic
Traffic is an important metric that, at the same time, isn’t important at all. This may not make a lot of sense. Simply put, it is a metric that doesn’t paint the whole picture but you do need to pay attention.
The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, you can have a lot of traffic but your conversions are low. This means that your traffic may not be coming from quality visitors. On the other hand, you could be seeing spikes in traffic that are not actual visitors but an indication that you have a lot of bot traffic. This is traffic from automated programs that come to your site for various reasons.
Some bots are from software evaluating tools and some are from nefarious sources. In either case, these spikes should be ignored.
Your Site’s Rank
One way to know if your site health is positive is to determine how it does in the SERPs. You should definitely have a rank tracker software to track your rankings for certain keywords.
If you notice that some of your keywords are starting to drop your pages in the rankings, then this is a clear indication that something is wrong. If you see this then it is time to do a site audit or at least to update the pages that are falling in the rankings.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a metric that can be misunderstood. While you do want a low bounce rate, it doesn’t tell you the full story even if yours is high. For example, if you have a link to your offer early on the page, and people click on it and then convert to a sale, it counts against your bounce rate. Isn’t this the point? You want people to convert so you know that your content was good and it worked.
But, your bounce rate is high as a result. As you can see, this metric can be ignored if you see other metrics that are high.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is clearly the most important metric that you need to pay attention to and work towards optimizing. A high conversion rate means that you are doing a great job. If it is very low then you have to comb through the other metrics to find clues as to the reason.
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