What’s the value of a website metrics?
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
How do you know that your website performs? The most obvious and effective way is to set up and collect metrics. Modern analytics tools provide variety of predefined metrics, they also allow defining custom ones. How do you combine all these metrics to gain valuable insights to your website’s performance?
Which metrics to track?
Some of the most important metrics you need to track are total number of visitors, page views, and time on page. Your marketing team will also find referrals traffic’s source and conversion rates metrics important. These are the most basic metrics. More complex tools would allow to track conversion funnels, heat maps (highlighting more attractive and interactive parts of a page), replay users’ browser sessions, and trigger custom events.
Among the most popular tools for tracking your website performance are Google Analytics 
, Simple Analytics , and DataDog Real User Monitoring . The latter one provides heat maps, session replays, and also various website performance metrics (more on that in the next blog post).
What’s the value?
Page views and time on page are metrics of the highest value. These metrics identify the popular pages on your website, as well as their efficiency. Page views metric gives the best insight into what visitors find interesting about your website (or on your blog in particular). Time on page is very important for landing pages. Ideally, visitors who land there, and spend some time should convert. If they drop off too soon, then there is a serious issue on the page.
One of the most valuable things for your marketing team is referral traffic — where do your visitors come from, and what’s the conversion rate across sources of traffic. Based on the insights from referral traffic behavior, marketing team adjusts their budget and efforts on different content distribution platforms.
If you observe a serious drop in the time spent on a page, and there are no obvious reasons why this happens, your research tools should be heat maps, and then sessions replays. The former one shows where users click on a page. Typically, a heat map is a screenshot of your website’s page with areas highlighted in shades of green to red. Areas highlighted with red are the most clickable ones. Also some heat maps can show how deep users scroll on a page. Using heat maps you can easily find out if users skip clicking a CTA on a page, and modify the page accordingly.
Sessions replays are even more insightful. These are essentially videos showing user’s interaction with your website. It’s a great way to learn if there are user experience issues on the website — how do people interact with a page, and what they expect to happen based on their actions.
Do website performance metrics matter?
There is another dimension of website metrics — website performance metrics. Indeed such things like page full load time, first time to render, and critical errors on a page matter, and are extremely impactful to website drop off rates. There is a lot to talk about making a website work fast and without critical errors, so we’ll unpack the topic in a dedicated blog post later on.