SEO Tracking Metrics

This might not directly imply that the content on the page was interesting enough to pull back the visitor. It could even mean that the navigation menu is poorly designed or that the page content is confusing, and the visitor had to return to make more sense of it.

So a higher value of pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean that our website is receiving several visitors. The higher value could also come from a small number of visitors revisiting the page multiple times.

Unique pageviews

Pageviews do not give a complete picture of the size of the traffic coming to our site. For that, we have another metric: unique pageviews. Unique pageviews also count the number of visits to a web page, similar to pageviews. The only difference is that even if a single visitor reloads the page multiple times during a session, the metric counts it as one. The metric gives us a better picture of the number of unique visitors coming to our site.

Session

A session refers to the set of interactions a user has with our website during a given timeframe, say 30 minutes. A single session may include several pageviews, conversions, or other activities. If a user visits our site, leaves, and then returns within the time frame, in our case, 30 minutes, it counts as one session. However, if the visitor leaves our site and returns after 30 minutes, it counts as two sessions.

New users

New users, new visitors, or unique visitors all mean the same thing. A new visitor is a user who visits our website for the first time. This metric counts the number of unique visitors coming to our website. If we’re getting a steady flow of unique visitors over time, it implies that the SEO efforts we are putting in are paying off.

The Audience Overview Report in Google Analytics gives a number of metrics to measure the audience size, including new users.

Returning users

As the name implies, a returning user is a visitor who has visited our website before. While new users give us an idea of how well our site is attracting fresh traffic, returning users tell us if our site is capable of retaining visitors. A high number of both, new users and returning users is important for a healthy website.

Active users

Active users count the number of active users on the website in real-time.

Audience demographics

The set of metrics discussed above helps us evaluate the size of the traffic visiting our site. Next, let’s look at the metrics that help us understand the demographics of the people taking interest in our website. Google Analytics gives us a dedicated report to understand our audience demographics.

Important metrics under this category include:

Audience age

Audience age helps us identify what age groups are taking the most interest in our content. We can use this metric to refine our content plan and target audience.

Audience gender

Similar to audience age, audience gender further helps us understand our target audience and optimize our site’s content to match the kind of visitors we are getting.

Geographical location

Google Analytics offers this information under a dedicated category called Geo. The report tells us which geographical locations our audience belongs to and the languages they speak. This metric is especially important to businesses with an international market. It helps us understand the kind of optimizations we need to perform on our site to attract an international audience.

We may, for example, find out that we can benefit from dedicated landing pages for countries or cities where we’re most popular. Other than that, we may notice that there are a lot of Spanish customers interested in our website. In such a case, we may be able to boost the traffic further by creating a Spanish version of the site.

Desktop vs. mobile users

It’s worth comparing the size of the traffic we’re getting from desktop users and mobile users. Looking at this metric using a web analytics tool will tell us if we have a substantial degree of mobile traffic visiting our site. We may notice, for instance, that the percentage of mobile visitors is high, but the conversion rate for mobile visitors is low as compared to that for desktop visitors. This would suggest that we need to work on our site’s mobile experience so it may drive conversions.

Visitor behavior

When users visit and interact with our site, they generate an extensive class of metrics. Some of the important ones include:

Landing pages

The Landing Page metric on Google Analytics refers to the first page that a user opens when they land on our website. Users can come to our site from different sources; through a search result on Google, a backlink we acquired from another site, an email, or elsewhere. When they click the link, the first page they see on our site is the landing page, according to this metric.

This information can be helpful in many ways. If we’re running a PPC campaign, for instance, we can compare the conversions driven by the individual landing pages to see which one is achieving the best results.

Exit pages

As the name suggests, an exit page is a page where a user leaves the site. If several users are leaving the site when they reach a specific page, it could mean that that particular page is having a hard time keeping visitors on the site. We can use this metric to identify problematic pages and diagnose them for issues, such as broken links or thin content.

Frequently visited pages

Most frequently visited pages, or top viewed pages show us the most popular pages on our site. The list can reveal a number of things. It can help us understand where most visitors are in the purchase funnel (awareness - interest - desire - action) and refine our content strategy accordingly. Furthermore, it can also tell us what customers are most interested in, what they are searching for, and what questions they want answered.

Average time on site

Average time on site or average session duration tells us how much time, on average, a visitor spends on our website. The more engaging our site is, the longer visitors will stay active on it.

Average time on page

Pageviews and unique pageviews only partly reflect the depth of the page content. Many times, users land on a page, only to find out within the next three seconds that the page doesn’t have what they’re looking for and move on to a different page.

In addition to page views, we’ll also need to look at the average time on page to find out whether the page is engaging enough to attract and hold visitors on the page. Average time on page will tell us the number of minutes, on average, that visitors spend on a specific page on our site.

We’ll find this information under "Behavior - Site Content - All" Pages report in Google Analytics, as shown below.

Bounce rate

A bounce is when a user visits our site and then hits the back button without visiting any more pages. The bounce rate for a page is the number of visitors who bounce expressed as a percentage of the total number of people who visit the page.

A high bounce rate for a page indicates that the page isn’t delivering what the visitors coming to the page are looking for. An unusually high bounce rate, e.g., 80%, might indicate a technical problem.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is one of the most important indicators of our site’s success. It refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on our website. The desired action could be purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or something else, depending on our site’s structure.

Traffic sources

It’s worth finding out where our site’s visitors are coming from. If we’re using Google Analytics, we’ll find this information under the Acquisition section. Selecting the "All Traffic" option under the Acquisition section will tell us the amount of traffic we are receiving from different sources.

Looking at the top traffic sources will tell us, for example, if we’re getting more traffic to our website from our YouTube channel, Instagram page, Facebook page, or another website.

Diving deeper into the traffic sources, we can also compare the average time on site for each of the sources. For instance, if we observe that the average time on site for YouTube traffic is four minutes and that of Facebook traffic is 35 seconds, we can tell that visitors coming from our YouTube channel are finding the content of our website more engaging than those coming from Facebook.

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