Blogs have been around for decades, and they still generate big returns and brand visibility for many companies. In fact, there are more than 600 million blogs out of an estimated 1.9 billion websites in the world. Recent data shows that 70% of internet users prefer to learn about a brand from its blog posts rather than ads, according to Demand Metric.
But how do you know if your blog is driving traffic and resonating with your intended audience? It comes down to keeping a close watch on your website metrics so you can identify trends in user traffic and behavior to help you optimize your blog to meet specific business goals. Let’s take a closer look at the most common website metrics and why they matter when evaluating your blog’s performance and engagement.
Why Website Metrics Matter
Think of website metrics as your website’s vital signs. Just like a doctor checks your heart rate and blood pressure, your website metrics tell you if your digital brand presence is in good shape or needs attention.
Website analytics like web traffic, time on page and keyword rankings can help you understand what content marketing efforts are working and what strategies and tactics you might need to do more (or less) of to make your blog an effective marketing tool.
Essential Website Metrics You Need to Track for Success
Website Traffic Metrics
Check these insights regularly to find out how many people are seeing and experiencing your content.
- Pageviews: A pageview (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is the total number of pages viewed, including repeated views of a single page. Using Google Analytics, you can also slice and dice to see where people are coming from geographically and what days and times they look at your content.
- Visits (sessions): Visits measure each time someone comes to your site, including multiple page views by a single visitor.
- Unique sessions: This metric is similar to pageviews, but it tells you how many unique readers you had, shedding some light on your blog’s audience size.
- Traffic sources: This metric analyzes how people find your site: social, Taboola links, and paid display ads, for example. Not many sites can survive on organic traffic alone; they need to amplify content and drive new visitors from paid tactics. Knowing where your site’s traffic is coming from helps you optimize your media plan to focus on the tactics that provide the highest engagement and conversions.
Engagement Metrics
Keep track of these metrics to see how much of your content is read and how well the audience is enjoying your content.
- Average pages per session: Sometimes called page depth, this metric lists how many different pages visitors looked at during one visit. It tells you how engaging your blog is and how well your site encourages visitors to check out multiple pages by digging deeper.
- Bounce rate: A bounce is when a user has a single-page session on your site and doesn’t send any more data back to the analytics monitor for a specific period of time. Usually that means the user has left without clicking into another page, though it could be a signal of page inactivity. If your landing pages are part of content strategy that expects readers to go to several pages, a high bounce rate could be a red flag because it means you didn’t reach the right audience, or, once on your site, they didn’t feel compelled to explore further or take any action. On the other hand, if your landing pages are meant to convert users without further action, a relatively high bounce rate may be acceptable.
- Average time on page: The length of time a visitor stays on a page before moving on to another page on your site is referred to as average time on page. If a user exits the page immediately without interacting further, that session typically isn’t included in the average time calculation. It hints at the quality of the engagement with your content. The longer the time on page, the better.
- Scroll depth: This number shows you how far (25-50-75%) the reader scrolled down a page, which is important for today’s long scrolling sites and, of course, for mobile. This metric measures engagement and shows how interested readers are in your content.
- Return visits: For a publisher, this one tells you what percentage of users are returning visitors and how many are new to your site. Both are important for your audience development efforts, as you want to build up loyal repeat visitors while also bringing in new eyeballs.
Conversion Metrics
Use these metrics to measure how often visitors take a desired action on your blog.
- Conversion goals: Set goals to keep your audience engaged. Conversion goals are as varied as the types of blogs out there, depending on what action you want your visitors to take. This might include subscribing to a newsletter, clicking an affiliate or product link, signing up for a paid subscription or filling out a contact form to book a call. You can set conversion goals in GA and track them closely — especially what kind of traffic is more likely to convert.
- Cost per conversion (CPC): This measures what you spend to get a single user to take a desired action on your website. For instance, if you spend $1,000 on marketing and get 50 conversions, your CPC is $20 (1,000 / 50 = 20). To analyze CPC, track by channel (paid search, social, email, etc.) and add in all costs, including content creation and maintenance.
- Exit rate: This metric shows the percentage of site visits that end on a specific page. Unlike the bounce rate, which measures single-page visits, the exit rate tells you where exactly people leave your site after viewing multiple pages. Typically, you want to see higher exit rates on contact or thank-you pages and lower exit rates on conversion pages, such as checkout or product pages.
SEO Metrics
Keep an eye on traffic sources to understand how people are finding your blog. You can find out which sources give you the best quality traffic and which make an audience more likely to take a desired action.
- Keywords rankings: These metrics show you which keywords your site’s pages are ranking for and which keywords drive the most visitors to your blog content on search engines such as Google or Bing. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a whole art in itself, but you can get a sense of what kind of keyword searches are triggering visits to your site. Based on that, you can add more content (or optimize existing content) to earn more organic traffic.
- Ad unit measurement: This metric shows how many impressions your ads are getting and the click-through by ad unit. This metric is found on your ad server or the platform / vendor you use to run your ads, like Taboola. For the best results, run multiple creatives, units or headlines and use A/B testing to determine which ads drive the most traffic to your website.
Technical Performance
- Website speed: This measures how long it takes your website to load on a user’s browser. Websites that load slowly can cause users to bounce out, while sites that load quickly tend to see better traffic and stronger conversions.
- Page speed: This is the amount of time it takes for a single page on your website to load for users. Page speed is an important metric to watch because it can impact your visitors’ experience when they click into pages from organic search results or elsewhere on the web. A faster page speed is likely to boost a page’s search rankings than a slower one.
How to Track Website Metrics
Monitoring and analyzing website metrics is paramount to understanding the nature of your traffic, where it comes from and what topics interest your readers.
By tapping into these insights, you can get a quick gauge of your blog’s health, especially when you look at both reach and engagement metrics and how they contribute to your goals.
If your web metrics are underperforming, take steps to optimize and improve your blog. You can start by checking out Taboola’s Landing Page Optimization Tips, Tactics, Tools and Examples. This is one of the real strengths of online media: You can make continuous changes and iterate repeatedly to boost results.
How to Improve Website Metrics
Track your blog’s metrics regularly to understand your audience and your content’s performance. For example, devote some time each month to check on the most important numbers for your blog and try to identify patterns and areas that could benefit from changes.
Get more eyeballs on your blog by increasing and optimizing your paid media spend and watching it closely, so each dollar has an impact on growing your audience totals. Some outside help is available from companies like Taboola, which will optimize your headlines and images with A/B testing and provide intelligence from other customers, such as their publisher benchmark report.
You can improve your content quality and write more based on what blog post topics receive the most engagement and clicks from organic search. You can also do things to increase page depth by providing more cross-links to other pages and content recommendations within each blog. For instance, adding a tool like Taboola Feed can help here. Rather than letting a blog post become a dead end on your site, provide a link and suggestion to go elsewhere on your site for related content.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Analyzing Your Website Metrics
It can be easy to obsess over inexplicable blips in your website metrics, especially with sudden drops (or surges) in traffic. Here are some common traps to avoid when analyzing your data:
- Looking at numbers in isolation: Raw numbers without context can lead you down the wrong path entirely. A high bounce rate on a contact page, for example, might mean people found your email or phone number and will reach out, not that they’re dissatisfied with your site or its content.
- Obsessing over vanity metrics: Going viral with page views while ignoring conversion rates is like celebrating a packed restaurant where no one orders food. Instead, focus on metrics that move the needle on your business goals rather than the ones that make you feel good.
- Ignoring mobile performance: Many web users are accessing websites through their mobile devices rather than desktops. That’s why you can’t afford to treat desktop user metrics as your only source of truth. Mobile users often have different behaviors and expectations, and they require separate analysis and optimization strategies.
- Not setting benchmarks: Flying blind without established benchmarks won’t be as fruitful to your marketing efforts if you don’t know what “good” looks like. Set realistic goals based on your industry, historical performance, competitors and key business goals to give your metrics meaning.
- Forgetting about seasonal trends: It’s easy to get discouraged when you see big drops in traffic or engagement, but don’t forget that there are seasonal patterns that can impact website metrics. Always look at year-over-year comparisons and take seasonal fluctuations (such as the winter holidays when traffic might slow down) into consideration when analyzing performance data.
- Not segmenting data: Looking at aggregate data alone without digging deeper into metrics by traffic source, device type and user behavior isn’t helpful. Break down your metrics more granularly to get actionable insights that will better inform your website content decisions.
- Overreacting to short-term changes: If you see a big traffic or SEO keyword ranking change, your gut instinct might be to go on a content overhaul spree. But making major content strategy shifts based on just a few days or weeks of data is like changing your investment strategy because of one bad day in the stock market. Look for sustained patterns and trends before making big changes. Keep in mind, too, that Google regularly updates its rules and algorithms. These changes can have an outsized impact on your website’s performance.
Key Takeaways
To effectively achieve your business goals, it is important to focus on website metrics that truly matter. Rather than fixating on a single snapshot, tracking trends over time provides a more comprehensive understanding of your website’s performance. Regularly monitoring specific metrics can offer valuable context about how users interact with your brand, helping you uncover patterns and insights. By leveraging this data, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing efforts to maximize return on investment (ROI).
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
How do I analyze my website performance?
Start with Google Analytics 4, which is a comprehensive tool that tracks audience insights, organic search traffic, direct traffic, paid search, email, and social platforms. Your website content management system might also offer a built-in analytics function, but Google Analytics is most widely used. A paid SEO tool, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, can help you do SEO competitor research and track keyword rankings.
What are the top three website performance metrics to monitor?
The top three metrics to pay attention to are the conversion rate (tied to your specific objectives), user engagement (time on site and pages per session) and the bounce rate in context with the purpose of specific pages. While traffic and page views are important to inform you of what content performs well, traffic without conversions or deeper engagement may signal that your content isn’t doing enough to keep visitors engaging with other pages on your site.
How do you benchmark your website?
It’s best to analyze patterns and trends over time. Some content-heavy publishers (like blogs) pay attention to weekly or monthly performance data. Otherwise, you can benchmark your metrics to historical data, industry standards, direct competitors and your own business goals. Remember, your website metrics provide valuable insights into how well your content connects with your target audience. Regular monitoring and reporting can help guide you toward making better content marketing decisions that can lead to stronger business results.
