What Web Metrics are Important to Track

By Beacon News | Published January 13, 2012 | Categories: Google Analytics

Clients often ask us what metrics they should be tracking.  The answer to this question is simple.  Review and track the metrics that are most important to your business.  If you have an E commerce website, you should be measuring harder conversions such as sales, revenue, profit, etc.  You should also be tracking softer conversion path metrics such as how many people drop out of the cart during a transaction.  This will help you learn to make improvements to the checkout process (the more people that make it through the process, the more conversions you acquire).

If you do not sell an item or service through your website you will probably care more about softer conversion points such as lead acquisitions, contact forms, page views, and in-store traffic driven from the website via location finder pages and such.  You should also pay close attention to the overall engagements throughout the various pages of your website.

While GA provides great metrics throughout their analytics, there are two important ones you should be calculating and tracking as well.

ROI (Return on Investment) =  ((Revenue x Profit Margin%) – Cost)/ Cost

Profit = ROI * Cost