Analytics is fun. It’s interesting, useful and it gives you scope to use several tools that help you measure important website metrics.

Tracking these metrics gives you an idea about how your site is received by its users. Diligent tracking can help identify room for improvements and spot any abnormal results (such as those caused by a site outage).

The most basic tracking tool is Google Analytics. Let’s look at the most basic metrics that matter.

1. Website traffic

The most important metric that serves as the base for all other metrics is the number of people who visit your site. Obviously, all metric analysis tools start with information on web site Traffic. Traffic comparison between sites gives information on how your website fares in comparison with other sites. Similarly, the growth of a particular site can be measured by comparing the site traffic statistics periodically.

If a certain trigger causes a surge in traffic, it’s an indicator that you should be doing it often. A blog post, a sale, a new product or a new ad; if there is anything that makes the traffic swell, you should be doing it again. And again.

2. Source of traffic

Knowing the source of site traffic is just as important as knowing the traffic volumes. Google Analytics categorizes site traffic into:

Organic Search traffic coming via the search engines

Referral traffic from another website

Direct traffic typing your domain into the browser

Social traffic from social media

So, this helps focus marketing efforts accordingly.

3. Bounce rate

Great site traffic is meaningless if the Bounce Rate metric is bad. Bounce rate, displayed as a percentage, tells you how many visitors leave your website immediately after arriving. A low bounce rate indicates that most of your visitors like what they see and stick around to know more about your site.  If bounce rate is high, it means that you have to rework the site to be attractive enough for the visitors and hope to convert enough visitors.

4. Top Pages

If your site has certain pages that attract several visitors, analyze the pages to see what makes them click. Mirror that in other pages so that the other pages also have good traffic. More importantly, the pages that attract more visitors must contain the information that makes people spend on your site. It’s not just number of visitors that help you come up with top pages. The time spent on pages, number of shares, likes and social media mentions are also important when deciding what the top pages are. Top pages help you come to a conclusion on what kind of content people like. When you know which content your audience likes best, the next step is to produce more of it!

5. Conversion rate

This is the most significant metric once the first level of metric (total traffic etc) is analyzed. Tracking this metric gives you information that helps profitability. If you can increase your conversion rate, your profits also go up.

6. Conversion by traffic source

Don’t have all your eggs in one basket. Have different sources from which you have inbound traffic. But not all sources are equal. Your Facebook page might bring in more people while Twitter lags behind. That happens! It tells you how you can mirror successful content from sources throughout.

7. Customer’s lifetime value

A customer’s lifetime value is a little difficult to calculate, but is very important when making forecasts and setting marketing budgets. Every customer has his value. It goes up with every purchase, every referral and review. This metric helps forecasting future purchases, membership viability etc.