KPI is a way to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
You can gain insight into your site’s performance and make improvements.
Google Analytics, however, gives you more data than you can ever imagine.
Each of these reports can be useful in learning about your audience. However, you don’t have to monitor them all regularly.
What metrics should you measure?
It all depends.
It all depends on the type of website you have, your business model, and what you are trying to accomplish.
We’ll be looking at three types of website KPIs: A blog, e-commerce, and lead generation websites. Also, learn how to measure KPIs.
How to choose effective KPIs for websites (Key Performance Indicators Metrics).
It is important to understand what KPIs are before we can jump into choosing the best KPIs.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator) can be defined as any measurement that measures the performance of any business activity. We’ll focus on KPIs that assess the effectiveness of websites.
The best website KPIs are simply the metrics that you have determined to be most important for your site to easily measure its success.
These tools should be used to help you and anyone who works on your website establish a clear link between your online efforts and your business goals. These data can then be used to make data-driven business decisions.
Let’s look at the KPIs and why they are not to make things clearer.
First, every KPI must be quantifiable. You should make it easy to measure them with simple, numerical values.
Many companies have goals such as “increase brand awareness”, but this type of goal leaves much up for interpretation. You will need to look at simpler metrics to measure your progress.
It is important to focus on metrics that relate to key factors for your company’s success. You have a lot of data in Google Analytics. However, not all of it is directly related to key goals such as leads or sales.
When choosing your KPIs for website visitors, limit them to the 5-8 most relevant metrics to your business goals. You don’t have to use every KPI on your website as a key indicator of performance.
This would also make it difficult to analyze and read every single time your site is performing.
These KPIs should be used consistently by your entire team. The best way to measure improvement over time is to use the same metrics. It will also ensure that everyone on your site is working towards the same goals.
However, you should avoid focusing on data that isn’t actionable in your KPIs. You want to ensure that your KPIs are focusing on data that can be used to make positive changes.
Also, your KPIs shouldn’t be complete reports. These reports can be accessed in Google Analytics, but it is not easy to access them.
Instead, choose one metric that makes it easy to track your progress.
It’s also important not to use “vanity metrics”, as KPIs, for your business.
A vanity measurement is any measure that makes you feel positive about your site’s progress without telling you anything about your business.
Want an example of a KPI? The following chart shows the differences between vanity metrics and actionable metrics.
The metrics to the left, such as page views or social media “likes”, can help you gauge overall impressions but they don’t tell much about how Miami’s digital marketing efforts are affecting your company’s goals.
Your business’s goal is to generate revenue, not just traffic.
This is a mistake. Many business owners spend too much time measuring metrics such as overall traffic, social media shares, and rankings.
According to a Content Marketing Institute survey, the majority of companies use these metrics to gauge their success.
However, just because they are popular isn’t necessarily a sign that they are the most effective.
As the chart shows, successful marketers with 10,000+ page views per year use advanced metrics such as leads, subscriptions, comments, sales influence, and individual impact to measure success.
These metrics provide more insight into engagement, and purchase behavior, and are therefore better suited for driving business results.
It’s okay to keep an eye on data that isn’t directly relevant to your primary objectives. These data points can give you an overview of your site’s performance.
Site visits, Google rankings, and tweets do not necessarily translate into sales, so they should not be your top priorities.
You can also monitor vanity metrics, but there is likely to be a more useful metric that you can use to measure your success.
Let’s take, for example, the monitoring of your social media performance. This can be done by tracking post impressions, likes, and total followers.
These metrics do not represent actions that will have an impact on your company. You could gain more insight by measuring your social media referral traffic and the number of leads, donations, or other conversions that each platform generates.
Bottom line: If you are going to spend your time measuring metrics, metrics that matter should be used.
Now that you have identified the main types of metrics to focus on, it is time to get into specific details about those metrics.
As I said, I will be focusing on KPIs in this post about a blog, e-commerce website, and lead generation-focused website.
There are chances that your company doesn’t fit into one of these categories.
That’s fine.
This article does not attempt to give a comprehensive list of KPIs that can be used for all website types. Its purpose is to help you identify, measure, analyze, and tweak the most important metrics for your website.
You can mix and match the Key Performance Indicators metrics and add your own if you wish.
Let’s now get started.
KPI examples for blogs
There are many types of blogs.
These are often part of business websites. They are designed to draw traffic, which later leads to leads and sales.
Others are created solely for informational purposes. They do not generate any revenue from the display or affiliate advertising.
This means that each blog’s KPIs can vary greatly. The most important goals for blogs are:
- Brand awareness can be increased
- More subscribers
- Get more leads
These are not easily-measurable goals on their own. These goals can be difficult to measure, but there are some KPIs that you can use.
| KPI | Description | Notes |
| Subscriber rate | # of unique visits/subscribers | Every blog needs to be important |
| Generated leads | # of leads directly attributable to blog referral | Important for a lead-driven model of business |
| Avg. pages per session | How many pages do your visitors see? | Reflects engagement |
| Distribution of traffic | A breakdown of the traffic sources for your blog | This report will give you insight into where your best traffic is coming from |
How do you determine key performance indicators? Let’s dive a little deeper into each one.
Subscriber rate
Every blogger should aim to gain new subscribers. Subscriptions are the best way to reach established readers.
Subscriptions aren’t a way to generate revenue directly, but they allow you to communicate with your target audience.
Your list can be used to drive users to your blog to make a purchase or to sign up for your lead program. For ad-driven models, you can draw readers to your site each time you post new content to increase clicks and impressions.
Your subscription rate is easy to track.
You’ll first need to ensure that you have email subscriptions set as a goal within Google Analytics. A destination goal is the best way to go about this if you haven’t already.
This can be done by using your email marketing software to redirect users who subscribe to a page on your website immediately after signing up for your list.
MailChimp can be used to send email marketing campaigns. You can change the Confirmation Thank You page to a custom page by changing your signup page settings.
You can then set a destination goal on this page in Google Analytics.
Open your Admin Settings, and then click “Goals” below the view you wish to use. Then, click “New Goal.”
In the Goal description section select “Destination”, then add the URL to your confirmation page.
Once you have done this, every new subscription will be registered as a conversion in Google Analytics.
You can then use the Conversions Overview Report to track how many visitors to your site convert into email subscribers.
This allows you to quickly assess if your site is converting well.
Generated leads
You should also measure the number of leads generated by your blog if it is part of a business website.
Email subscriptions are technically a type of lead. However, it all depends on how you use your list. These will most often be email subscriptions or requests for quotes.
This is the best way to measure conversions.
Make sure you create unique thank you pages or confirmation pages for each of these goals when you are setting up additional goals. If you use the same page for all your conversions, it will make it difficult to distinguish between different forms on your website.
After you have added your goals, the Reverse Goal Path report can be used to track who did what before you reached your goal.
This report will display the three pages that a user visited before completing a goal. If you want to find out what motivates your visitors to fill out a contact form, the report could look or something similar.
This report will give you an insight into which pages are driving visitors to take action. It can be used to analyze each goal individually to determine which content is driving conversions.
If you observe that case studies posts generate a high number of submissions to contact forms, you might decide to concentrate your content creation efforts on this type of post.
Average pages per session
Your average session view count is an important metric to monitor if you want users to engage with your content.
This data is more valuable than pageviews overall because it can indicate whether visitors are staying around.
This metric can be accessed by going to the Audience Overview report. You’ll be able to see all sessions and other high-level metrics like this.
This number is indicative of how much time users spend engaging with your site after they leave their landing page.
Distribution of traffic
A second way to see your traffic is by looking at how it breaks down according to referral sources.
This information can be accessed by going to Acquisition > All Traffic and then selecting the Source/Medium Report. You’ll find a list of all the sources that sent traffic to your site, such as this.
These are some of the referral sources:
- Organic search traffic
- Traffic directly
- Social traffic
- Referral traffic
- Paid traffic
- Campaign traffic
The KPI report will provide you with a broad overview of the channels driving traffic to your website. It will also reveal which channels drive qualified traffic to your website.
You can sort your report by conversion rate to see which sources are most likely to send traffic that will lead to leads.
These channels may not be the ones sending the most traffic in many cases.
However, if you want to drive leads and sales, your website traffic must be quality-oriented.
To see the contribution of each channel to your conversions, you can also use our Assisted Conversions report
Navigate to Attribution > Conversions, and then choose the Model Comparison Tool. This tool allows you to see how different channels contribute in different ways to your goal conversions.
MCF Channel Grouping is the default view. It includes assisted and last-click conversions. looks similar to this.
This is because not all visitors will convert on the first visit to your website. You don’t have to consider all interactions your visitors had on your site before you evaluate their referral sources.
Let’s take, for example, a Facebook advertisement for one of your products. They click on the ad and visit your website. Then they leave.
They decide to visit your website again the next day to purchase that product. They enter your URL directly in their browser to complete their purchase.
The Last Interaction model would attribute the purchase to a Direct Visit. This is a little misleading as the user probably wouldn’t have visited your website to purchase the product if they didn’t see your Facebook advertisement.
You can get a better understanding of your digital marketing in Las Vegas strategy by analyzing how each channel contributes to your most important conversions.
KPIs for an E-Commerce Website
E-commerce websites are likely to have the highest number of KPIs than any other website type.
Their sites offer the possibility to monitor all the same metrics as a blog, lead-based site, or website, along with a host of purchase-related metrics.
It can be difficult to choose the right KPI for your sales. This also means you have a lot of data that can help you improve your results.
What are some examples of KPIs? These are the four metrics every e-commerce store should monitor.
| KPI | Description | Notes |
| The conversion rate for e-commerce | A percentage of customers who place an order | This is a very high-level metric that should not be used alone. |
| Cart abandonment rate | Visitors who add products to carts but don’t purchase a percentage | This will give you an idea of where there is room for improvement |
| The referral source determines the conversion rate | Referral source: % of customers who place an order | This will help you to identify the most valuable traffic sources |
| Average order value | Total sales/number of orders |
Let’s now dive a little deeper into each one of these potential KPIs.
The conversion rate for e-commerce
Monitoring your ecommerce conversion rate, similar to the KPIs for subscriber and lead conversion rates in the previous section will give you an overall idea of how effectively your site converts traffic into meaningful actions.
However, setting up ecommerce goals is quite different from monitoring destination-based conversions.
You’ll first need to ensure that ecommerce tracking is enabled on the site. You’ll need Google to set up ecommerce tracking.
Once you have completed the setup, you can access all your e-commerce-related data by going to Conversions > eCommerce > Ecommerce Overview.
You’ll find a high-level overview of your site’s performance. This includes how many sessions have resulted in e-commerce transactions.
This percentage is likely to be very low. The screenshot shows that the average conversion rate for an ecommerce site is 3.09%.
You can also access additional reports from this page, such as the Shopping Behavior report.
You will need to enable enhanced ecommerce tracking on your website to access the data. Navigate to the view that you wish to access and select “E-commerce Settings”.
You can toggle ” Enhanced eCommerce Settings ” from “On”
Access additional information at Conversions> E-commerce Shopping Analysis Shopping Behavior
This section shows you how customers interact with your e-commerce store.
This includes product views and sessions in which the user adds products to their cart. It also includes sessions that lead to checkouts or transactions.
As I said above, there is a lot of information here.
Once you have chosen the most important metrics for your business it is easy to track your progress.
Cart abandonment rate
One of the most important metrics is measuring and improving cart abandonment rates.
This metric is a measure of site visitors who were very close to purchasing a product but then disappeared.
You can identify the reasons why customers aren’t making purchases on your site. This will help you improve your site and increase the number of shoppers who eventually become customers. This is a more powerful goal than simply attracting more visitors.
Users who add products to their shopping carts are already interested in your products. Instead of trying to attract more people interested in your products (which might lead them to abandon their carts), it is better to work towards converting that interest into sales.
Goal funnels make it easy to measure how many buyers have left your checkout process.
You have the option of adding a funnel to each conversion goal you’ve set up for your website.
A funnel is a collection of pages you want visitors to visit before converting. If you want visitors to contact you after they have read a page about a particular service, your funnel may include the page and then your contact page.
Analytics will register conversions from users who don’t visit all pages in the funnel.
It will give you more insight into the factors that are preventing your users from converting to your site.
There are likely many goal funnels on your site that you can monitor and measure. The checkout process is often the best place to make improvements.
This will usually include a cart page and one or more billing/payment pages. A review page and confirmation page are also common.
Once you have created a goal funnel, the Funnel Visualization report will show you how users move through it.
This report can be accessed by going to Conversions > Objectives > Funnel Visualization.
This section will give you an in-depth view of how your website is moving visitors through your funnel.
As you can see, only 30% of users add products to their cart and go to the billing page. 70% of those users move on to the payment page.
At the end of the funnel, less than 17% of users who add products to their carts make a purchase.
You can see that the majority of abandoned shopping carts found on this website are in the first two steps. These pages offer great potential for improvement.
KPIs don’t just help you measure success.
These reports are also useful for learning about the areas where your site is not performing as well as it should. This will help you improve your website in ways that bring you closer to your goals.
The referral source determines the conversion rate
It’s important to identify the best traffic sources, just like a blog.
There are many e-commerce websites, so there is a lot of variability in how effective different channels are at driving revenues.
Take a look at his analysis by Smart Insights, based on more than $1 billion in Shopify sales.
The email was the most effective source for qualified traffic in this study.
Every site is unique, so it’s important to identify the best referral traffic sources for your site. This will allow you to focus your marketing efforts on those channels that are most likely to convert.
Average order value
It is difficult to attract new customers and drive sales.
However, a less difficult way to increase your overall revenue is to focus on increasing the average order value.
It is obvious that 10 sales of $200 or more would be much more impactful than 20 sales of $5, and would require half the amount to convince shoppers to buy.
By navigating to Conversions > E-commerce> Overview, you can monitor your site’s average order price in Google Analytics.
This report will give you an overview of how your ecommerce store performs and will look similar to this.
This example shows that the conversion rate of the store to e-commerce might be quite low at 0.49 percent.
However, each order is worth an average of $889. That’s still a substantial amount of revenue.
This metric will give you a better understanding of the value of each conversion to your site.
If you have a strategy for encouraging customers to order additional products before they complete a transaction, this will help you to see how effective it is in increasing order values.
KPIs for lead generation websites
Although we touched briefly on lead generation in the blog section, there are other metrics that you can monitor to assess the performance of your site.
| KPI | Description | Notes |
| The conversion rate for goals | A percentage of visitors who complete a lead form is successful | Multiple forms and goals may be possible |
| Content downloads | # of white papers, demo videos, and other in-depth content downloaded | |
| Rate of abandonment in the lead form | A percentage of visitors who start but do not finish a lead-form | It is easiest to use multi-page forms. However, it can also be measured with Google Analytics Events |
These metrics will give you more insight into the contribution of your website to your most important business goals.
The conversion rate for goals
This is an easy metric to track if you have already established goals for your website.
You can set up a Google Analytics goal page for tracking purposes, such as creating a thank you or success page to convert visitors.
These types of actions can be correlated with destination goals.
Lead-based websites often have multiple goals, which is not the case with blogs. One form could be used for general inquiries and another for requests for quotes. A third can be used for registrations or appointment creations on-site.
To get an overview of the conversion rate of your site, first, use the Overview report. You can navigate to Conversions > goals > overview and see a list with all the tracked goals for your site along with some important metrics.
This report does not show conversion rates for individual goals. However, you can create a custom report to get more information.
Select “Custom Reports” in the Customization tab of your main menu.
Click “New Custom Report” to give your report a logical title, such as “Goal Conversion Rat”.
The step is to add the goals to analyze. Finally, set the dimension to “Page.”
Next, you will see a report that looks or something similar.
This report will provide information about the conversion rates for each goal. This example shows how the site owner tracks CPD requests, contact forms, quick inquiries, registrations, and sample requests.
These are all very different goals that indicate visitors at different stages of the funnel.
Analyzing each one gives you a better understanding of which actions users are compelled to take and if they’re moving toward your main goals.
Content downloads
Many lead-based websites encourage visitors to do more than submit a contact form or lead form.
Visitors to your website can indicate interest in a variety of ways, which doesn’t necessarily involve reaching out directly.
These actions may not result in immediate sales but they are often an important part of the sales pipeline.
This is one of the most popular examples.
Downloads increase user engagement with your brand, allowing them to become customers. They are often “gated” by asking for an email address, which is a great way to grow your email list.
These actions are so important, it is important to track, analyze and improve your ability to drive users to take them.
However, measuring them is not always as simple as a goal conversion.
For example, in the case of white papers, you might ask users to enter their email addresses and redirect them to a page that will allow them to download your content. This page could then be used as a destination goal.
Easy!
How can you track activities such as downloading PDFs or demo videos, or templates that are hosted in Google Docs and Sheets but don’t belong in a lead form?
These cases allow you to track your conversions using either Virtual Pageviews in Google Analytics or Events in Google Analytics.
Let’s first look at how Virtual Pageviews work.
Google Analytics tracking code is not allowed in documents such as spreadsheets, PDFs, or Word documents.
You can’t track how many people visit the content even though it’s hosted on your website.
However, Virtual Pageviews allows you to set up a link that when clicked will register a pageview on Google Analytics.
For example, a site visitor clicks on a link that allows them to download a white paper or guide in PDF format that could be registered as a pageview in Google Analytics even though it does not exist.
(That’s the virtual portion.)
These “ghost” pages can be set up as destination goals pages, just like any other page on your site.
Keep in mind that Virtual Pageviews can increase Analytics recordings’ pageviews. This makes sense if a visitor is visiting a page like a PDF.
You can learn more about setting up Virtual Pageviews on Google’s tutorial.
However, if you have to track an action that doesn’t involve a page being viewed, this method will artificially increase your page views. This can cause distortions in your Analytics.
Instead, set up Events in Google Analytics to track these types of goals.
Although events can be used as goals, they do not generate additional pageviews.
They allow you to track actions and not create the illusion that users are visiting additional pages on your website.
This type of tracking can be used for many actions, including:
- Video views and view time
- Interaction with widgets or other tools
- Clicks on outbound Links
- File downloads
- AJAX elements
These actions are all signs of engagement, but they don’t necessarily warrant you registering another view.
You could, for example, make visitors watch a video and add a new pageview to their page. This could make it appear that you have generated a lot of traffic. But what you did was keep them on one page for longer periods.
This type of tracking is useful for clicks on external links. This is a valuable tool for your business if you have content hosted on other platforms or use referral hyperlinks to earn income through affiliate marketing.
These pages are not on your site so you can’t make their goal destinations. It wouldn’t be fair to track them as additional page views.
Take, for example, a look at outbound links that are being tracked on The Daily Egg as events.
It’s clear why virtual page views are not a good option. These eight Events actions would increase pageviews by approximately 12,000
This could cause huge data discrepancies, and result in decisions that are based on incorrect metrics.
You can track actions on your website using ‘s helpful tutorial.
Rate of abandonment in the lead form
E-commerce site owners may benefit from tracking cart abandonment. Lead-based site owners, however, can benefit by monitoring how many users start to fill out forms but never submit them.
It’s similar to cart abandonment. If you use multi-page forms, it’s easy to track your goal funnels.
If you ask users for their email addresses and then ask them for more information, each page could be added to your funnel before you reach your destination page.
This approach doesn’t work as well if you use one-page forms.
Instead, you can track the engagement with your forms using Events as explained in this tutorial.
You can then monitor the number of users who interact with your forms but don’t submit them. A high abandonment rate is an indicator that your forms need to be optimized to increase sales and leads.
Conclusion
It is essential to identify and evaluate the website’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and evaluate your site’s success.
You can use the metrics you choose to prioritize to determine your progress and how you can improve your site.
