Analytics Trends: What Should You Measure?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

You already know why it’s important to look at your trends in analytics. But which trends are important? In a word, it depends on what type of site you are running, but there are certain trends that should be important to every webmaster. Bounce rate is generally thought of as an important metric. That is true for the most part but if your site is an AdSense site then you’d expect that your traffic is going to show up, click and ad and leave. Bounce rate might not necessarily reflect the important details for your site in that case so understand that there are exceptions to every rule.

Nevertheless, there are some important metrics to follow. I recommend that, for most websites, you should pay attention to the following metrics:

• Visitors and Unique Visitors
• Pages Per Visit
• Bounce Rate (very important for e-commerce sites)
• Average Time On Site
• Most Popular Pages
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords Trending
• Conversions
• Establish some goals and track how close you to get to achieving them

If possible, check these stats for both your organic search engine optimization results and paid search campaigns. Create custom reports to help you drill down the stats for analyzing metrical data that is unique to your site. Every webmaster has information that is important for their site but that might not be important for someone else’s site. Don’t be afraid to identify those and focus on those trends as well.