Marketing strategies can be a lot of fun to play around with, but they don’t mean much without data analysis and reporting. That’s why we offer several KPI (Key Performance Indicators) for our clients to determine if their campaigns and marketing strategies are successful.
If you’re a current website or SEO client, this article is designed to help you understand KPI’s so you can best judge your results.
About Website Metrics
Website Metrics: Shows how people are finding your website, how many people are finding your website, where they are coming from and how much time they spend on your website.
- Selected Period: The calendar period selected in the dropdown above. Defaults to the previous full month.
- Trend Over Time: Shows how your website has performed over the last year.
- Previous Period: Shows how the selected period (one month) compares to the previous period. Green indicates improved performance compared to the previous period.
- Previous Year: Shows you how the selected period compares to the same time last year. Green indicates performance has improved over last year at the same time.
Site Visits and Visitors Explained
- What’s the difference between visits & visitors?
- A visitor is a single person (or IP address associated with an internet user) who visits your website. A visitor can visit your website more than once.
- Visits count how many total visits there are, even when it’s from the same visitors.
- What are organic visits?
- Organic means that the visits are unpaid.
- This means that people arrived without the aid of paid advertising, such as with Google or Facebook ads.
- What does mobile visits measure?
- Mobile is any device that isn’t a laptop or desktop computer.
- This includes mobile phones and tablets.
- What are pageviews? How is that different from visits?
- Visits measures how many times users arrive at your website.
- Pageviews shows how many web pages were visited in total.
Keywords and Top Pages
Understanding “Not Provided” in Keywords Reporting
- Landing Pages: These are pages where people initially arrive on your website. Usually, your home page is the top landing page, though many second and third tier pages or posts may be higher depending on SEO. This gives you a sense of what people are really looking for when they find your website.
- Top Pages vs. Landing Pages: Top pages are the pages that receive the MOST visits. Top landing pages are the pages that visitors arrive at FIRST.
- Top Exit Pages: These are the pages that people see last before they leave your website. If your top landing pages and top exit pages are the same, this could indicate a high bounce rate (people who change their mind and leave once they arrive at your website). If you have a high bounce rate, we should investigate why this is happening and improve calls-to-action to keep visitors on your site longer.
Traffic Sources Explained
Where are people coming from when they visit my website?
Website visitors come from many sources, including search engines, social media and referrals from other websites. This section seeks to break that down so you can see exactly where your web traffic is coming from. Using this, we can determine what’s working and not working and where we should focus more attention to send more traffic to your website.
Top Sources: This is an overall snapshot of how people are getting to your website broken down by category.
- Organic = Search Engines
- None = User Typed in Your URL
- Referral = Non-Search Engine Website Link (social media, vendor website, external blogs)
- CPC = Cost-Per-Click, or Paid Advertising
Source/Medium: This breaks down your top sources for web traffic so you can see deeper numbers.
- Which organic/search engines are referring you most?
- How many people are typing in my web address directly?
- Which social networks are performing the best?
It gives you more detailed information about your top sources of website traffic.
If you have more questions, contact your account manager or fill out our online form to learn more.
