10 Website KPIs Every Growth-Driven Marketer Should Track

In the past, if you wanted to boost sales you’d run TV ads with catchy jingles or clever ad copy in newspapers.

These marketing methods still work today, but modern buyers are more likely to purchase online. In fact, buyers make around 12 online searches before making a purchase. This means your site needs to act like an attractive storefront that engages visitors quickly with relevant and personalized messages.

But how do you know if your website is optimized to grab buyers’ attention? This is where website key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. 

How to select the right website KPIs  

A website KPI is a measure that ties your online marketing efforts with business goals. A glance at these metrics should tell you the business impact created as a result of your marketing efforts. 

In addition to the impact and results, website KPIs also help: 

• Measure the progress and success of marketing strategies 
• Understand shortcomings and tweak your strategy accordingly
• Identify trends and analyze patterns over time

While various web analytics platforms give you a goldmine of information, you should be able to differentiate and pick out the ones that actually impact your business. 

Your website KPIs should be: 

• Quantifiable: A KPI shows the exact result of your work backed by hard numbers. It could be the number of downloads, clicks, or website visitors. Quantifiable KPIs are straightforward, leaving you with no guesses. 
• Actionable: The KPIs you track must offer actionable insights, and enable you and your team to make informed decisions. If you’re looking to improve your website engagement, then identify solid metrics that indicate audience interaction with your website. It could be anything from chat conversations to clicking on your CTAs. If you aren’t happy with the numbers, revisit your messaging to resonate with your visitors or make the CTAs more clickable.
• Aligned with your business goals: There are tons of metrics that go into the details of audience interactions. But only a handful can be directly tied to the bottom line of your business. Those are your most impactful website KPIs. For instance, it’s common to track the traffic on your website, but it’s even more essential to monitor how much of that traffic converts to leads. 

Core website KPIs to track

While it might be overwhelming to narrow down all your website KPIs in one go, read on as we discuss the top website KPIs that are relevant for any business.  

1. Acquisition 

Acquisition comprises a set of metrics that gives information about the traffic you’ve received on your website. It helps you answer questions such as 

• Where do my website visitors come from?
• What channels bring in the most traffic?
• What is their engagement like on the website?
• How many of them convert into customers? 

2. Traffic sources 

Traffic source is a part of the acquisition metrics. It measures the sources that drive traffic to your website, such as: 

• Direct: Visitors who typed in your URL and directly landed on your page
• Organic search: Traffic from search engines as a result of your SEO efforts
• Email: Visitors from your email campaigns or other email marketing efforts
• Social: Traffic from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc
• Referral: Traffic from other websites whom you’ve partnered with, such as listicles, guest blogging sites, review sites, etc. 

By keeping an eye on this website KPI, you’re able to double down on the channel that’s working well for you and contextualize your messaging for these visitors. Additionally, you can identify gaps and opportunities in channel traffic and focus on building your audience base from those channels. 

3. Sessions 

A session represents a set of activities a visitor performs on your website during a certain time period. Say a visitor lands on your blog, clicks on a few related articles, and even downloads your eBook. This entire user interaction is considered as one session. 

A session starts right after a user visits your website and ends after 30 mins of inactivity. If the same visitor comes back a few hours or days later, it’s considered a separate session. In other words, a single visitor can contribute to multiple sessions.

Tracking website sessions help you evaluate if your marketing strategy is engaging enough for prospects to return. Maybe you receive four sessions from a user on a daily average. That means you’re doing a good job in keeping visitors engaged. These users could eventually be nurtured into customers.

Conversely, if you receive as many sessions as visitors, it indicates that your prospects aren’t returning to your website. 

You can improve website sessions by: 

• Creating content that would be useful for your prospects
• Following regular content and social media cadence. A good cadence followed by many businesses in the industry is the 4-1-1 rule. This includes publishing four (4) educational posts for every one (1) soft promotion and every one (1) hard promotion.
• Using scroll maps to learn where your prospects drop off and optimize your website in those areas

4. Pages per session 

Pages per session is the average number of pages a user has visited in a session. For instance, if a prospect lands on your blog through organic search and then clicks on a related article that you’ve placed on your blog, then the pages per session for this visitor is two.

This metric allows you to track the overall website engagement. It indicates if your prospects find your content helpful and are interested to learn more from you.

You can improve your pages per session by: 

• Intuitive interlinking: Hyperlink intuitive and action-oriented anchor text to related pages. Say you're writing about sales cadences. Instead of hyperlinking the actual word “sales cadence,” you could link the action verb in the sentence. In this example, it could be something like, “One of the ways to boost sales is using sales cadences to convert more leads.”
• Being in tune with the user journey: Map out your user journey and guide them to the next best page. For instance, if a reader is on a TOFU blog called “What are sales cadences and how to use them to nurture leads,” use CTAs that stand out and drive them to a MOFU blog post on “How to create sales cadences that convert using a CRM.”
• Including well-placed CTAs: Placing CTAs in the right places can garner more clicks and improve page views. Using heatmaps, you can gain an insight into what your visitors are clicking on and the optimum places to position your CTAs. 

5. Bounce rate 

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors leaving your website immediately after entering or without interacting further. If a prospect visits your landing page and leaves without downloading the eBook, this would contribute to the bounce rate. However, if the prospect downloads the eBook on your landing page or navigates to another page on the same website, it would reduce the bounce rate.

Bounce rate is an essential website KPI as it indicates that a visitor has decided to move on to the next page without interacting with your website. This is a precious lead lost. By stopping a visitor from bouncing, you are increasing the chances of conversion. 

Keeping track of bounce rate is also important for two other reasons:

• A high bounce rate indicates a fundamental issue with user experience, such as page layout, load time, copywriting, etc
• A study by SEMrush indicates a correlation between bounce rate and SERP ranking 

Having a high bounce rate could also indicate that site visitors don’t find your content helpful and bounced to another website, or they found the answers they were looking for (in the case of TOFU content) but aren’t ready to further engage with you. In such cases, it is essential to combine bounce rate with another metric: time on page. Time on page tells you how long a visitor spends on a specific page on your website. 

• High bounce rate + low time on page: Visitors aren't getting the answers they're looking for. You will have to revisit your copy and create content that resonates with your prospects.
• High bounce rate + high time on page: Your content is engaging, and your prospects take the time to read through it. But they don't know where to navigate next.

To improve your bounce rate: 

• Make your content engaging and easy to read
• Include videos related to the content on the page
• Design images or infographics that are easy to understand and improve readability
• Optimize your website for mobile readers
• Optimize the page load time
• Create breadcrumbs to make it easier for users to navigate through the website

6. Average session duration 

The average session duration indicates the amount of time a visitor spends on your website during one session. Website visitors with a high average session duration are likely the ideal prospects for your business. They resonate most with your content and would like to learn more. 

To improve your average session duration: 

• Publish content that is helpful for your audience
• Make your content easy to read with adequate spacing
• Break the content with appropriate subheadings and visual images or infographics 
• Interlink with other pages on your website
• Place strategic CTAs 
• Include related videos wherever possible

7. Page speed/load time 

Page speed/load time is the time it takes for your page to load in the user’s session. Page speed and load time is crucial for three main reasons: 

• The slower your page loads, the more leads you lose. A study by SEMrush shows that if your page takes more than 10 seconds to load, you’re likely to lose all your visitors. 
• It is one of the factors that contribute to SERP ranking. This directly comes from Google, as a Google site performance video for Webmasters recommends less than a half second load time.
• It is directly proportional to the bounce rate as users are far more likely to bounce from a slow website.

Using a site performance in webmaster tools, you would be able to view your site’s average load time and your site speed is compared to other websites. If your site is faster than most, all you need to focus on is creating quality content. But if it’s slower, you need to make speed a priority. 

To improve page speed and load time, reduce and optimize image sizes on your webpages, avoid auto-streaming videos, and implement browser caching. 

8. Dwell time 

Dwell time is a measure of how long it takes for a user to return to the SERP results after clicking on your page. In essence, it determines the time spent on your page before getting back to the SERP results. 

When a user enters your page, they quickly scan to see if they find your content valuable. When they spot what they’re looking for, they spend time reading more. If they don’t, they instantly go back to SERP to find another page. 

Search engines use this as one of the factors to determine your authority in the subject and rank your page: “A minute or two is good as it can easily indicate the visitor consumed your content. Less than a couple of seconds can be viewed as a poor result. And while that’s not the only factor we review when helping to determine quality, it’s a signal we watch.”

You can improve dwell time by: 

• Creating quality content and copywriting that resonates with your audience
• Improving the readability of your content
• Aiming to educate rather than sell
• Using engaging visuals such as infographics
• Improving page load time 

9. Number of leads 

Leads are individuals or businesses who are interested in your business. By nurturing them and tapping into their curiosity at the right time, you can convert them into potential or even repeat customers. Depending on their qualification to be an ideal customer, there are two types of leads, MQLs and SQLs. 

• Marketing qualified leads (MQL): MQLs are individuals who’ve entered your funnel through various marketing activities and campaigns. These leads are nurtured by the marketing teams with content related to your business, such as ebooks, checklists, or whitepapers. When a lead displays sales-ready behavior such as visiting the pricing page or engaging with your case studies, they are qualified and passed on to the sales team. 
• Sales qualified leads (SQL): SQLs are prospective buyers whom your sales team has verified as buy-ready. One of the popular methods to qualify a lead is the BANT framework. It involves asking leads questions that will help you understand if they have the Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe to buy from you.

Leads are literally your future potential customers. Without fueling your sales funnel with quality leads, your business won’t be able to grow sales and will subsequently lack a customer base, which means it’s essential to strategize and grow your lead funnel. 

There are various lead generating strategies a business could use. Here are a few quick ways to get started: 

• Lead magnets: Create and promote gated content that would stir your prospect’s curiosity. This will help you acquire the contact details of leads who are interested.
• Email marketing: Send personalized email sequences to the leads you’ve collected through lead magnets and other campaign activities. This helps nurture them into buying from you.
• Customer referrals: The best source for new leads is a recommendation from an existing happy customer. It provides social proof that your product/solution is helpful, and the referred leads will be warmer towards you. 
• Search engine marketing (SEM): A digital marketing strategy that involves paying to get your pages to rank at the top of the SERP. When you bid for a keyword with high search volume, it gives you instant traffic as people tend to click on the first few web pages in SERP. It is a good idea to promote landing pages targeting ready-to-buy prospects to get more quality leads.

10. Conversion rate 

When you put a lot of time and effort into bringing leads into your website, you need to measure if it is paying off. 

There are two layers of conversion rate: 

• Traffic-to-lead ratio: Measuring how much of your website traffic is converting to leads will help you understand if you’re creating the right kind of content for your prospects; targeting your audience on the right platforms; and optimizing the website using the right metrics. 
• MQL-to-SQL ratio: MQL-to-SQL conversion rate measures the percentage of MQLs who get converted to SQLs. This number helps determine if your marketing teams are generating the right content and resources as well as observing and qualifying the right audience. 

Conclusion 

Website KPIs help you understand how your visitors engage with your website. If you understand the why behind each website KPI, it will enable you to draw inferences and create strategies to optimize your website better. Tracking and acting on these KPIs regularly will help you build an attractive storefront for your business with free flowing leads that positively impact your revenue.