How to set KPIs for your website

Firstly, you need to decide what tools and platforms you are going to use to monitor the metrics you are interested in. GA4 is considered the most recognisable and is free to use. However, lots of oragnaisation are not comfortable with using GA4 because of its cookie GDPR compliance, we have another article here on recommended analytic alternatives.

There are other plug-ins to consider like WordFence for security protection or Yoast for SEO.

Once you have your chosen platforms in place it’s time to think about your website’s objectives and what results are going to be important to your business. For example, if your website is to encourage users to get in touch with your company for a quote, you’ll want to monitor how many times the contact page has been visited and then how many successful actions have taken place (called the number or filled in a capture form) to work our your conversion rate. You would want to know how users got to your contact page, and what landing pages did they visit before deciding to make contact.

Below we have listed some metrics to help you choose what is relevant to you.

Traffic Metrics:

• Website Visits: The total number of visits to the website.
• Unique Visitors: The number of individual users who visited the site.
• Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed on the website.

Conversion Metrics:

• Conversion Rate: Percentage of website visitors who take the desired action (e.g., make a purchase, sign up).
• Goal Completions: Number of times a specific goal is completed (e.g., form submission, product purchase).
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of users who click on a specific link or call-to-action.

 

User Engagement:

• Time on Page: Average time users spend on a page.
• Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
• Session Duration: Average amount of time a user spends on the website.

 

User Experience:

• Page Load Time: Time it takes for a page to load.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Percentage of users accessing the site from mobile devices.
• Exit Pages: Pages where users are most likely to leave the site.

Content Metrics:

• Content Engagement: Metrics related to the consumption of content (e.g., video views, blog post reads).
• Popular Pages: Pages that attract the most traffic.
• Scroll Depth: How far users scroll down a page.

 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Metrics:

• Organic Traffic: Traffic that comes from search engines.
• Keyword Rankings: Positions of key keywords in search engine results.
• Backlink Count: Number of external sites linking to the website.

 

Social Media Metrics:

• Social Shares: Number of times content is shared on social media.
• Social Followers: Number of followers on social media platforms.
• Social Referrals: Traffic generated from social media channels to your website.

E-commerce Metrics:

• Revenue: Total income generated through online sales.
• Average Order Value (AOV): Average amount spent by a customer in a single transaction.
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate: Percentage of users who add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase.

Customer Support Metrics:

• Live Chat Interactions: Number of interactions through live chat.
• Customer Support Tickets: Number of support tickets submitted.
• Response Time: Average time taken to respond to customer inquiries.

 

Security Metrics:

• Security Incidents: Number of security incidents or breaches.
• Vulnerability Patch Time: Time taken to patch identified vulnerabilities.

 

We recommend that you take a look at your metrics each month and create a monthly report that you can use to compare results. You could create this manually or some platforms help collect all the data like Tableau.

Getting started can seem overwhelming but once you have everything in order and have implemented you can step back and review the data with ease.