At Kooba, we love talking about the “metrics that matter”.
The question is, what exactly are these metrics, and how do web design agencies actually measure them? I’d like to provide a true beginners guide here, which should allow you to understand these basic principles that agencies like Kooba constantly reference, and gauge their importance to your specific business needs.
Traffic
This is a basic, but very important, number to understand about your website. Put simply, traffic measures the numbers of users and visits to your site. This includes the number of unique users, as well as the number of sessions. A session occurs whenever a user visits the site, and one user may produce several sessions as they return to your website multiple times. Both of these numbers are worth tracking, as they provide an indication of how many visitors make it to your website, and how many sessions each of those visitors engage in.
What determines the amount of traffic your site receives? Some important factors include:
- The SEO of your website and content
- The “stickiness” of your website and content (AKA the likelihood of a visitor to return)
- The effectiveness of your promotion on social media and elsewhere
- Your spend on paid traffic (which will boost your site’s ranking on different search engines)
Engagement
Traffic isn’t everything. How your users behave once they enter your website is also extremely important. This is why we track engagement, an umbrella term for everything users actually do during their sessions. This includes scrolling, clicking, navigating from one page to another, submitting forms, or anything else that can be tracked by your analytics tools. Taken together, these actions provide you with an engagement rate (AKA the number of engagements that occur per session) which shows how much users interact with your website and its different pages.
Not all engagement is good engagement. For instance, a website with an unclear layout may see users navigate across several pages to find the information that they need. Here the engagement rate is high, but only because the website is insufficiently streamlined and accessible.
Visit duration
An important sub-category of engagement is visit duration. This measures, quite simply, the amount of time that a visitor spends on a website or a page. Similarly to engagement more generally, this is not necessarily a positive or negative metric, but rather depends on the context it is measured within. For content writers (like me!) this is a great indication of how long readers engage with your blogs and case studies, and longer durations are a sign of success. For a home page however, a long visit duration may signal a lack of useful navigation options.
Key events
Key events are, as the name suggests, particularly important events that occur on your website. These could include, for instance, submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a purchase. Key events need to be chosen carefully, as they should ideally match the overall goals behind your website. As such, they should also provide the most immediate gauge of your website’s success. It may sound obvious, but if you want to generate leads through your website, then measuring the amount of leads you receive through a contact form is a great place to start when judging that site’s performance.
The tools
Now that you have a very brief outline of these metrics, it's worth considering how they are actually collected and calculated. You’re probably already aware of Google Analytics (GA4), but at Kooba we also use Microsoft Clarity, Pagespeed Insights and Screaming Frog. This range of tools allows for the measurement of user behaviour on a truly granular level, which is valuable when compiling UX reports. If, however, you just want an overview of your site’s performance, learning the basics of Google Analytics is a great place to start.
Kooba believe that “metrics are for life”, and that means that we always seek to monitor our chosen benchmarks as closely as possible. For anybody concerned about their own website’s performance, taking the time to regularly check in on some basic metrics can be an insightful and valuable experience.
Unique challenges
Why is it so important to understand the metrics behind your website? Put simply, doing so allows you to make informed decisions around the design of your user experience and the nature of your content and copy. When you know what to measure, you’ve already defined your route towards a successful and productive digital experience.
Interested in some slightly more complex metrics? Check out Ed Kelly's blog on the subject here.
