Nowadays, website popularity and financial profits depend on various factors. Some of them are quite obvious and others are only slightly noticeable. Analytics helps to keep an eye on those factors and provide useful visual representations, which are called metrics.

Every analytics service provides a set of metrics you can use to improve your website to get better impressions, conversions, profits, UX (User Experience), etc. Let’s take a closer look at the most popular metrics and how they impact your web product.

Some pages or modules of your website could be “bottlenecks”. It’s a term that stands for the part of a site that slows down the entire product. In web development, bottlenecks could be represented as poor web page optimization, non-user-friendly interface, content lack or flooding, etc. They are hardly noticeable from the developer’s side. Gladly, metrics are able to point out those issues in the implicit or explicit way. We would like to point out 6 common but important metrics for every website.

Pageviews/Pages per Session

Pageviews is a direct indication of website conversions. Pageviews data counts all visited pages over a certain period of time (day, month, year, etc). We can highlight two main types of pageviews statistics. The first one counts only pages visited by unique users. The other one counts possible multiple website visits as well as unique ones.

On the other hand, Pages per Session metric only shows the number of pages surfed during the single session. Use this data to understand how popular your website is and combine the given information with other metrics to develop a strategy to improve website conversions and impressions.

Bounce Rate

This metric shows the percentage of users who leave your website after visiting only one page. It’s a marker of user attraction level. Try to keep this value as low as possible. High bounce rate reveals severe issues with your website. In those cases, people leave your website almost immediately. You’ll need to check your products’ visuals, content quality, UX, and page load time to work out possible reasons why people leave without engaging with any content, filling out your opt-in form, or clicking through to another page.

Average Session Duration

This is a chunk of information that helps to determine how good your website retains the user attention. Low value, especially combined with high bounce rate indicates serious problems with website visual design, interface, content, functionality, user-friendliness, optimization, and so on. Ideally, you should aim to maximize average session duration and ensure that your website is eye-catching and interesting for users.

Traffic Sources

Use this data to understand how users find your website. We can split all incoming traffic into 4 major categories:

• Organic traffic – represents the situations when users reach your website through search engines (like Google or Bing).
• Social traffic – it’s all the traffic generated from social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, Google+)
• Referral traffic – all the traffic from emails, posts on forums or blogs referred to your product, etc.
• Direct traffic – users reach your product that way by simply typing the URL of your site.

Use the described metric to analyze the success of different traffic sources; to boost less efficient and build on the success of more efficient ones.

Devices

Use this metric to understand which devices visitors use to surf your website. For example, a decent percentage of mobile users is a sign that you should develop a mobile version for your product. On the other hand, the low ratio of smartphones and tablets indicates possible issues with the mobile version of the website. This data can also help reveal poor performance optimizations.

Demographic Info

This metric may usually show the age and gender of website visitors. This important data will help you find out who is the majority of your website users in order to improve content targeting. It’s also an option for you to develop a strategy to attract more users – to refactor your content, add new interesting sections, change the appearance of the website, optimize the product for devices that are relevant to the certain user groups, etc.

Analytics is an extremely useful tool for creating a successful and profitable website. Analytic metrics are used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your current development and marketing strategies and track down possible bottlenecks. Use statistics to find possible ways to improve the weak points of your product, highlight the strong points and boost their positive effects.

Combine the use of the described metrics and you may significantly improve UX, impressions, number of visitors and decrease the bounce rate of your website.