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Website traffic is an important indicator of online marketing campaigns. But, to understand it fully, you must break it down into multiple sub-metrics. This is how to scale your online success.
Knowing where your most valuable traffic comes from will allow you to increase your efforts. Knowing your lowest performing traffic source will also help you to reduce your efforts.
Revenue is the name and essence of the game. If your website traffic isn’t converting into revenue, it’s essentially worthless. Many digital-marketing agencies use traffic volume to measure success. However, visits alone are meaningless.
Related: How to Make Your Small-Business Website Really, Really Effective
Five key website traffic metrics are essential to running a successful marketing campaign for your company online. Let’s dive into them below.
1. Total unique visitors
The number of unique visitors that each campaign delivers is a good starting point to determine whether or not it’s successful and worth continuing. A unique visit is only counted once. So if a consumer clicks on a Facebook ad and hits your website, that initial visit counts, and if he or she returns an hour later, that visit isn’t counted.
A blog post might drive 500 visits to your site. This could be a content-marketing campaign. After digging deeper, you find that 300 of those visits were from one person. You now have 200 unique visits, which is a significant difference.
This is an important metric to track over time. If a traffic source has a declining number of unique visitors, it may indicate that it is losing effectiveness in introducing new customers to your business.
2. 2.
Your bounce rate measures how many people leave your website after they have not clicked on another page or completed any other actions, such as submitting forms or completing conversion goals.
A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors aren’t finding what they need when they visit your website. This could be caused by an offer that promises too many and leads to a website which delivers little. It could also indicate that the visitor felt the website’s user experience was poor or the navigation was too confusing.
You might consider installing a heat-map tool to your website if you have a high bouncerate. This will allow you to see where visitors are clicking and how far they scroll. This can help you pinpoint the problem and fix it.
Related: 5 Tactics to Drive Website Traffic That Aren’t SEO
3. Referral traffic sources
This information can be very valuable and help you grow your sales. Once you have identified all traffic sources, you can reverse engineer them to determine which one is most valuable in terms both of revenue generated and cost per visitor.
If one traffic source is bringing you sales at a $15 conversion cost, but another one is delivering the same traffic value at $8 per conversion, wouldn’t it make sense to scale the lower cost referral source?
There are several different referral sources you will want to track and dive into, including organic traffic from Google, referral visits from embedded links on other websites and social media. If you are running multiple campaigns, you might also want to utilize Google’s UTM parameters to help you analyze all of your data in Google Analytics.
4. CPV and RPV
These two metrics are extremely important as they allow you to understand the profitability of each marketing campaign, which will help you budget and plan for growth. They are cost-pervisitor and revenue-pervisitor.
Let’s imagine you ran a Facebook ads campaign and were able to track 100 sales with a value of $10,000. The Facebook campaign brought 1,000 people to your website during this time. This means that your Facebook campaign’s RPV was $10 ($10,000 / 1000 = $10).
The CPV is the sum of the total dollar spent on a channel and the number of visitors it brought. These numbers should be known for each traffic source.
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5. Page views and AVD (average duration of visitor)
This information is useful to track and analyze in your Google Analytics account. You want to look at how many pages a visitor views when he or she is on your website, how long he or she remains on your website each visit and what he or she ultimately does. Do users leave without completing an action? Are they submitting a form or leaving? Do they make a purchase?
Reverse engineering all the most profitable actions (the ones that generate revenue) can help you make better optimization decisions.
It is possible that most of your conversions occur after users interact with a particular piece of content on your site. You might consider using paid traffic campaigns to drive traffic to that content asset.
You might want to improve your content and create longer-form articles if you find that conversions are most common after visitors have been on your site for at least three minutes.
