Digital metrics (web metrics, website statistics, or website analytics) are tools used to measure and analyze the effectiveness of a website. They provide information about the number of visitors to a website, page views, bounce rates, traffic trends and more. Digital metrics are the first place website owners should look to begin to measure the effectiveness of a website.
Website statistical software is often included as part of a web hosting package or can run remotely using Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, a snippet of code is added to the pages on a website and the statistical information is recorded and compiled through your Google account.
What you measure to assess whether your website and/or web marketing campaigns are working will ultimately depend on your goals, but we can offer a few suggestions of where to start.
- Website Traffic: Measuring the number of visits or the number of unique visitors to a website can give a good overall picture of how effective your web marketing is.
- Pageviews: Pageviews will show you what pages on your website your visitors are viewing. Your analytics should help you determine the most popular and least popular pages on your website.
- Bounce Rate: Your website bounce rate is the percentage of users who came to you website and left immediately without viewing other pages. A high bounce rate is bad — a low bounce rate is good!
- Organic Search Traffic: Organic search traffic is the number of visitors that find and come to your website through non-paid listings in a search engine. This can show you how well your organic website optimization is working.
- Inbound Links: Inbound links (or backlinks) are when another website links to yours.
Of course, there are many other metrics available for analysis, but these are good basic places to start. You’ll want to keep in mind that, when measuring the effectiveness of your website you need to measure what is important to your customers too, but by analyzing your web metrics, you should be able to better determine the actions needed to improve both your website content and ways to attract and retain users.
