How to analyze site traffic: key metrics for a business

Very often it happens that a company, despite having a well-structured site, fails to obtain new customers through its online activities, or that it fails to reach the commercial feedback it had foreseen.

Therefore, doubts and uncertainties begin about what are the errors in its communication strategy or on which sectors to implement. Before you let yourself be taken down or make any changes to your website, however, you need to learn how to evaluate the performance of your web site by analyzing the right metrics.

The analysis of visits, numbers and frequencies allows you to get to know in depth the winning characteristics and critical points of your website, thus managing to continuously implement and improve your communication and marketing strategy. Not only that, this work will also allow you to improve your ranking on search engines, thanks to the creation of content perfectly in line with users’ interests and search intents.

In order to achieve these results and improve the service offered, it is first necessary to set operational and strategic objectives for your site, in order to be able to measure and analyze them through precise metrics and parameters.

So let’s see what are the fundamental metrics to analyze the traffic of a website.

Site traffic metrics

Sessions

In analyzing website traffic, the first thing to consider is sessions. These are the total number of visits in a given range. A session also corresponds to the time a user interacts with your site, a relationship that stops after about 30 minutes of inactivity or when the source of traffic changes.

Pages/Sessions

This metric is the average number of pages displayed during a single session, including repeated views.

Page views

This item is the total number of pages displayed, even when a user reloads the same page or when they change section while staying within your site.

Average time on the page

The average time on the page is nothing more than the period in which a user stays on a single page of your website.

Users

In analyzing website traffic, this metric indicates everyone who has started at least one session in a given time frame. Always remember that a user can be a new visitor or can return to your site after having already visited it.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate, or bounce rate, is a figure that shows the percentage of users who clicked on your site and who, after entering, abandoned. In this case, users may not have visited the rest of the pages on your site. Always keep in mind, though, that the lower the bounce rate, the better your website’s performance.

Most viewed pages

The last important metric for analyzing your website’s traffic indicates which pages are most visited. Having this information allows you, on the one hand, to improve those that are less successful among users and, on the other, to strengthen and focus even more on the most popular pages.

How to use data

As we know what are the fundamental metrics to be able to analyze the traffic of a website, it is necessary to understand how to interpret the data in order to use it concretely. In fact, it is not enough to know how to read numbers and graphs, but it is necessary to understand how to use these factors to improve the positioning of your site on search engines.

Sessions, users, and pages are metrics that allow you to get an overview, but the really important elements are the bounce rate, the most viewed pages, and the average time on the page.

By crossing the numbers of these three parameters, you can easily understand what to aim for to build an effective communication and marketing strategy.

For example, page views and charms give a scale of importance to pages that can be improved. Surely it is better to give priority to the most viewed pages because, since they have already attracted the attention of users, if they are strategically incentivized it is possible to attract the interest of many other people.

With the bounce rate and the average time of stay on the page you get qualitative indications, since you can understand which pages and what content have been less successful than the other pages. In case of high bounce rate, therefore, it is necessary to analyze the website page to understand how to optimize it in the best way through technical or content interventions. This allows you to reduce user dropouts and improve your site’s ranking on search engines.

With this in mind, it is also important to focus on SEO writing, creating original content within which the goals you want to achieve are evident. It’s also important to set a writing style that suits the users you’re targeting, using clear, simple language combined with specific keywords.

Analyzing a website’s traffic can be a long and tedious process, but if you learn about your users’ behaviors, you can bring your business to success.

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