If you haven’t already, now’s the time to create a plan for how to boost important website metrics that contribute to your overall business goals. Once you understand the crucial website indicators related to lead generation and client acquisition, as well as what your competitors are targeting, it’s easier to create your own strategic plans to boost online visibility and bring in more clients. 

Website metrics are specific measurements for measuring site performance. Benchmarking your website helps you know where it stands in comparison to competitor websites so that you can determine impactful next steps and succeed in your industry.

Why do website metrics matter?

Comparing your website metrics to general or industry standards helps you understand how well you’re doing and where you’re falling short. They also tell if your website is optimized to meet client and visitor needs.

By evaluating your website metrics, you gain insights into your performance, stay on top of industry standards, and position your business for success by improving your website traffic and converting leads. Without learning more about website metrics, you lose the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and can fall behind in your goals.  

Important website performance metrics in 2024

There are two types of benchmarks you need to target in order to be successful. The first is what’s typical of your industry – specifically businesses in your industry in the same area — so you can compete with them. The second is what’s necessary for your business to be profitable, meaning what conversion rate do you need to hit or how many leads do you need to attract each month to allow you to meet your revenue targets?

However, knowing the gaps in your website based on industry standards or business goals isn’t enough. You have to be able to close any gaps. But before we get to that, let’s start by taking a closer look at notable metrics for optimal web performance.

Number of website visitors

The number of visitors is an important metric for tracking how many visits your site gets on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It demonstrates how many people visit your site in a given period.  

The average number of monthly website visitors each month ranges from 10,000-15,000, but an impressive 31% of websites average over 50,000 unique visitors per month. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to hit these benchmarks to be successful online, but maximizing your website traffic is a valuable piece of your conversion and search engine optimization strategies.

To improve your number of website visitors, you have to increase the quantity of content you produce. Content gives you more opportunities to be indexed by Google, which can lead to high search engine results and more opportunities for web traffic.  

You’ll want to evaluate your content strategy and review the competitiveness and search volume for your keywords and topics. You’re more likely to rank and receive traffic for less competitive keywords, but lower competition usually means lower monthly search volume. There’s very little benefit to ranking high for low-volume keywords since it doesn’t translate to website visitors. 

SEO is complicated, and Google’s algorithms change fast, so if you’re busy with your business, you may want to outsource parts of your optimization and content creation to a team of experts.

Average bounce rate

Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a site without interacting, divided by your total website traffic for the same period. For example, if 100 people visit your site in a day and 20 of them leave immediately, your bounce rate is 20%. A high bounce rate suggests there’s a mismatch in content or experience compared to visitor expectations.

A bounce rate of 41–50% is considered average, 25–40% signifies you’re doing well, and over 70% is a cause for alarm, meaning you need to review the quality of your content and user experience.

To improve your bounce rate, try enhancing your content with a video or infographic, which keeps people on your page longer and lowers your bounce rate. To keep visitors from bouncing, you should also ensure your page loads fast — in less than two seconds. The chance of a visitor bouncing goes up 32% when page load time slows from 1 second to 3 seconds, so truly, every second counts.

One final tip to reduce bounce rate is to add internal links to your other content pieces, motivating visitors to check out other pages on your website, increasing your total pageviews, and giving you more opportunities to capture new leads.

Conversion rate

Your site’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete your desired action, whether that’s a sale, scheduling an appointment, or submitting a form.  It can be calculated by dividing conversions by the total number of visitors.

Your targeted conversion rate should depend on your industry, but across all industries, the average conversion rate of a landing page is 2.35%, with the top 25% of landing pages converting at higher than 5.31%.

The average website conversion rate benchmark for B2B companies is 2.23% to 4.31%, for ecommerce it's 1.84% to 6.25%, and for legal websites it's 1.07% to 6.46%.

Even if a visitor doesn’t immediately convert, you still need to keep them in your conversion funnel, as they might be willing to make a purchase later on after more interactions with your firm.

To improve your conversion rates, first, make sure your website is easy to navigate and the benefits of working with your company are clear. Reduce the number of steps it takes to complete your desired action and ensure the copy and design support conversion. Display reviews and social proof on your site, include contact information and live chat, and add a form that makes it easy for people to submit an inquiry or information to you without leaving your site. 

Lead generation by channel

This metric tracks the number of leads generated from each channel, such as paid ads or organic/SEO. It’s important to know this because it helps you determine which channel performs best for your business so you can either direct more resources to that channel, tweak your strategy, or focus on another channel to improve your lead generation. 

The significant KPI for lead generation is the total number and quality of leads from all channels. This allows you to predict how much revenue you're bringing in from incoming clients, so you can make more informed decisions regarding your lead generation strategy. For 85% of companies, lead generation is the most important marketing goal because it’s what ultimately brings in revenue.

A way to improve your lead generation is to identify your target customers, create engaging content for them, and develop a strategic lead-generating funnel. The most popular lead gen channels among marketers are email and content marketing. Content marketing is a powerful and popular lead generation tactic because it's 62% cheaper than other channels (e.g., paid Facebook ads) and can generate 3x more leads.

Traffic sources

As the name implies, this metric tells you the source of every visitor to your website — where are they coming from? Possible traffic sources include organic search, direct, referral, paid search, social, affiliates, and display. Tracking this metric helps you to analyze your company’s highest-performing sources and refine the low-performing sources. 

Generally, higher traffic from organic sources is a good indicator of your business success because it’s a sign of healthy SEO. However, ideally, you have a well-balanced number of visitors from multiple sources. Pay attention to any steep increases in declines in growth from one source, and continue A/B testing your messaging to see what resonates across sources. 

According to HubSpot, the distribution of website traffic by source is:

• Direct (22%)
• Organic search (17%)
• Social (16%)
• Email (14%)

Average session duration

The average session duration is the amount of time a visitor spends on your website engaging with your content. The average time on a website page is between 3-5 minutes, according to Databox. A longer average session duration indicates they find value in your content and are interested in what you offer.

To improve this metric, do a review of your content to ensure it meets visitors’ intent and optimize your loading time for pages — a consistent theme in trying to boost many of your important website metrics. 

New and repeat visitors

This metric measures and compares the number of new and repeat visitors to your website. Of course, both groups are important to the success of your business, but you certainly want a high number of returning visitors because they’re more likely to convert. It makes sense — they were interested enough to come back, which means they’re likely still considering working with you.  

Aim to hit a repeat visitor rate of 10-30%. Less means your site isn’t adequately providing value and more means you’re lacking enough fresh traffic to grow your client base. To improve your ratio, consider offering incentives, such as a discount. 

Not sure where to find your new and repeat visitor data? It’s available in Google Analytics in the “Behavior” section of your account, then by clicking on “New vs Returning” and comparing the data.

In 60 seconds, generate a professional, client-engaging website for free.

What are the best tools to measure website metrics?

The best website analytics tools to improve your metrics include Google Analytics, HubSpot, SEMrush, Similarweb, and Kissmetrics. Of course, the best tool for you will depend on your data needs, budget, and engagement goals. Here's more information on some of the top tools for website metrics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful, reputable tool that tracks and measures more than 200 website metrics. Even better, it’s free. It works through the use of a small tracking code on your website, which collects website performance data, aggregates it, and presents it. When you sign up for a Google Analytics account, you’ll get a snippet of JavaScript text to add to your website pages’ HTML or to your site’s tag manager. 

At first, Google Analytics is intimidating because it’s so robust, but it’s important to use because it can tell you nearly everything you need to know about your website performance in order to improve it. 

Important metrics you can track and visualize within Google Analytics include: 

• Sessions
• Users
• Bounce rate
• Average session duration
• Percentage of new sessions
• Sessions by channel
• Pages per session
• Goal completions
• Pageviews

PageSpeed Insights

We’ve repeatedly mentioned page speed as an important part of improving your website metrics, and PageSpeed Insights can help you optimize your current speed. It’s an analytics tool by Google that analyzes your website and offers recommendations to improve speed and performance. You’ll receive a score out of 100 that indicates how your website stacks up against other sites. 

To access your score, simply go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/, input your website’s URL, and click "analyze." You'll receive your page speed score and some website performance best practices to help you improve. 

Optimize your website performance using B12

Achieving the best possible website performance for your business is a continuous activity that requires regular updates, an eye on changing industry standards, and a sense of what your clients expect to experience from your online presence. As a business owner who’s focused on providing excellent services day-to-day and making crucial decisions in order to scale, you probably don’t have enough time to dedicate to tracking, testing, and optimizing your site. 

B12 is the all-in-one online platform for businesses that builds websites based on industry best practices, security, and SEO standards. A team of web design, copywriting, and SEO experts set up your site for you, so you’re well-positioned to hit your targets and exceed important online benchmarks. Even after your site goes live the B12 team is available to help you re-optimize and keep your website fresh, as well as answer any questions you have about important website metrics.

So whether you’re using your site to sell services, capture more leads, or simply communicate your expertise online, B12 is the solution to help you grow. You can sign up for free to get started by seeing a draft of your new website in 60 seconds or less.