Your organization relies on your website. You With all of the metrics available to track, what key stats should you pay attention to in 2022? We’re here to tell you 7 key metrics you should be tracking in the upcoming year.
Traffic Sources
Where are people coming from when they visit your website? A traffic source is wherever people are on the internet that drives them to your website. For example, you have your website linked in your Instagram bio. When someone clicks on that Instagram link, this is considered a social source. If you see that your social traffic sources have a low session duration compared to other traffic sources, you are able to analyze that data to improve your strategy in the future. If you’re using Google Analytics to track your traffic sources, here are the four channels:
- Direct: they’ve typed in your URL to directly navigate to your page
- Organic: a relevant keyword or phrase has brought up your site from a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc
- Social: they’ve clicked on a link through social media
- Referral: they’ve clicked on your link through another website or social media page
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is an important metric to track your progress to your organization’s goals. Your form of conversion depends on your organization and goals. For example, you can track event registrations, email newsletter signups, video views, sales, or donations. Improving your conversion rate means gaining more site visitors that transform into donors or customers.
Exit Pages
Many websites have a multi-step conversion process. For example, if someone is reading through one of your articles and they come across a call to action (whether that’s to donate, make a purchase, or any other trackable activity).
Pageviews per session
This metric analyzes how many pages users visit in one session. This is important because you can see if people visit your website and leave, or they browse the different pages and hop around. It helps you to understand how your site flows and which people are taking the next step to browse your site. Having simple navigation and clear call–to–action buttons are a couple of ways to improve your pageviews per session.
Average Session Duration
Session duration is pretty simple: it is the amount of time a user was active on your website. Session duration is a great metric to analyze how engaging your website is. The higher your session duration is, the more your users are intrigued by your website. If a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, Google Analytics will consider that session closed.
Top Pages
Are there pages on your website that you’ve forgotten about for a while? Whether it be an old article, a blog post, an old staff member page, these pages most likely aren’t on your top pages. By looking at your top pages, you can see what content is intriguing and engaging to your audience. This data is useful when planning your content marketing strategies for increasing monetary goals, leads, or boosting engagement. Is there something you expect to see in your top content, but don’t? Analyze why not. Are people not finding it? Are traffic sources not pointing to it? Or is your audience really not interested in it? Analytics can help us answer those questions.
New and Returning Users
Is there a reason for users to return to your website? For example, if you are selling a product, you want users to return to your website to continue purchasing products versus a single sale. If you are a nonprofit organization, your goal might be for users to return to your website to increase donor engagement and for donors to return to your website to see how their donations are having an impact. New and returning users also connects with other aspects of website data. For instance, if you have a high number of returning users, you might also have a lot of direct traffic to your site. You can use this information to better understand where people are in your funnel.
We’ve provided you with 7 key metrics to watch and improve in 2022. Data analytics can help you assess whether your website is meeting the needs of your organization. The good news is – we are experts over here! If you’re in need of assistance with your website analytics, reach out to us.
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