The Most Important
Website Analytics

Website traffic

As getting people to visit your website is the first step toward making them act, the total number of visits (or web traffic) is fundamentally important to any web-based resource. With Google Analytics, this metric is quite painless to track.

Why do we need to track this metric? Generally speaking, traffic is a pretty good indicator of your site performance. This KPI will help you to determine if your site is flourishing, stagnating, or declining. Moreover, you can measure the effectiveness of certain promotion strategies by correlating them with the web traffic they generate. For instance, if you’ve noticed a traffic spike after publishing a blog post on a specific topic, this is a signal that you should be doing more of the same to determine whether your blog is effective for bringing more traffic. Alternatively, if you are witnessing a steady traffic decline, this tells you that what you are doing now is not working and you need to try something new.

Even though a large amount of web traffic is a good indicator showing that you are headed in the right direction, it still doesn’t guarantee anything. Driving people to your website is only half of the battle, you need to make sure that the right people are landing on it. So, it is essential to know where the traffic is coming from.

Traffic sources

Knowing the traffic source means understanding where the people who land on your site are coming from. This metric will give you a deeper comprehension of how your website is performing and how you can muster efforts to get more meaningful visitors.

Sure enough, this KPI can be measured through Google Analytics.

Which traffic source is the most valuable? There is no accurate answer. It depends on your business model and the type of your website. Nevertheless, I feel more confident if my traffic comes from different sources. This allows my website to keep the lights on if one of the sources dries up.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one of the most strategic indicators that shows how profitable your site is, as well as how well the chosen marketing strategy is performing. Depending on what action is treated as conversion, this KPI could represent converting the visitors into leads (for instance, if filling up a form counts as the desired action), or converting them into customers (if we count a sale as the desired action). All in all, low conversion raises a red flag for business owners indicating that something is going wrong and the website can’t convince visitors to move toward the next stage of sales funnel.

If you’ve noticed that your website conversion rate is low, there is a screw loose somewhere: in UX, navigation, content, customer journey, or somewhere.

Conversion rate is pretty easy to calculate: all you need is to divide the number of visitors by the number of conversions.

Let’s assume that you run an e-commerce store that sells organic food products. The main conversion goal here is making a visitor go through your sales funnel and purchase a product you sell. Say, your website gets 100,000 unique visitors in June and you are able to sell the products to 2000 people. So, the conversion rate, in this case, is 2%.

If you were never too good at math, here is an excellent conversion rate calculator.

By all means, it is impossible to find a website with a 100% conversion rate on the web. But what figures are considered to be good for an online business? Well, it depends on your business size, the products you sell, and who your customers are. However, marketing wisdom says that a good conversion rate for an e-commerce website is somewhere between 2% and 5%.

Cost of Customer Acquisition

Tracking Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) gives you an idea of how much it costs to get a paying customer over a specific period. This metric has been growing in use, along with the uprise of internet companies, as well as advertising campaigns that can be tracked. It doesn’t matter what way you’ve chosen to promote your website: an affiliate program, content marketing, paid ads, or whatever, the same principle applies.

In order to calculate CAC, you need to divide the cost of your marketing efforts (including salaries, commissions, bonuses, expenses) by the number of customers acquired.

CAC formula:
CAC = (total cost of marketing or sales efforts) / (the number of customers acquired).
To make it clear, if, say, you ‘ve spent $25,000 to acquire 1000 customers, your CAC would be $25, as far as CAC = ($25,000 spent) / (1000 customers) = $25 per customer.

Lots of website owners use this metric to determine the effectiveness of their media campaigns. The higher the number is, the more expensive it is for you to earn a new customer. Reducing CAC will help you to recoup revenue and make your sales, marketing or customer service processes healthier. That is why it is important to measure this metric for every channel separately to get a broad picture of which one converts best and decide whether it is worth to invest money on a particular channel.