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If you are an entrepreneur starting an online business, money and costs are going to be a big factor. Since you are operating online, you need to have a good website that will do the sales and marketing for you. A good website is an investment and being price conscious, you want to make sure you get the most bangs for your buck. The question then is, how do I measure the return on investment (ROI) of my website? The first thing to consider is your goals. It is important to note that some metrics can be difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of your site. Consider brand awareness. This is important for business big and small, but looking only at your website it can be difficult to measure just how big (or small) it is and how effective you are at communicating your brand. The metrics of a website each provide precise information on how the site is performing. Used together these metrics are pieces of a puzzle that form a picture of visitors’ behavior on the site, and a roadmap of where to improve. If you’re just getting started, you can gain a lot of insight just by starting to measure these 5 metrics: Impressions Click-through Rate Unique Views Bounce Rate Conversion Rate Impressions Impressions are the number of times one of your website pages shows up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a given keyword. Typically the first page of a SERP will receive most of the impressions from visitors, meaning not many users click to the second page when searching for something. By measuring page impressions, you can identify opportunities where improving a page’s SEO will make a big difference. Click-through Rate The Click-through Rate, or CTR, measures the conversion of how many people go from seeing the website in search results, to clicking and visiting the site. This number sharply declines after the third result that is returned on the SERP. Unique Views “Unique views” may seem self-explanatory but the he key here is the distinction between unique views and general views, General page traffic stats will include pageviews by individuals who come back to the site repeatedly, but unique views will only count a visitor once. Unique views are valuable for ROI because they help to understand the reach of your site in attracting new visitors. While you don’t want only unique views, as returning visitors express repeated interest and more qualified leads, this metric is a good indication of baseline awareness of your brand. This can serve as an underlying metric for your site’s ability to produce new revenue. Bounce Rate Bounce Rate measures how many visitors leave the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate means that people may be finding you through a search engine, and then immediately leaving to click on a different search result (possibly a competitor). Sometimes this is because they came to your site for the wrong reasons, which is a different conversation. However, other times it is because you gave them nothing to do once they came to this page. Conversion Rate Conversion Rate is one of the most important metrics for measuring your return on investment. The first part of a Conversion Rate gives users the ability to convert. This may seem basic, but commonly, websites will only provide limited ways for a visitor to convert on their website. The most common mistake is providing only “sales” based offers. Websites will often offer conversions such as scheduling a call, signing up for a webinar and downloading marketing collateral. The marketing collateral is a great start, but having several other opportunities to engage will help increase conversions. It is important to note that while these metrics may seem basic to some, they are essential to building a strong foundation that will allow for easier adoption of advanced analytics. All of the metrics used in this post are available freely by using a Google Analytics account.