Locating and Analyzing Website Metrics: What You Should Know
As a publisher, you know the importance of understanding your publication’s website metrics and analytics. But what should you be paying attention to? And how can you use that information to improve your metrics?
By tracking the most basic of factors relating to your website, you can use real-world data to confirm what works and what doesn’t, spot any unpredictable results (such as those caused by broken links or software updates) and demonstrate to advertisers the value of placing an ad with your digital publication.
Below we have outlined important metrics to be analyzing, and tips on how to report your findings:
Visitors Metrics – Specifically, unique visitors. Unique visitors represent the count of individual people that visited your site throughout a specified period of time. Tracking this number is critical in understanding if your site’s audience is increasing, decreasing, or staying even. This data will help you see areas on your website that need improvement.
Additionally, this metric is also important to share with advertisers. For current advertisers, run a monthly report that shows how many visitors are coming to the site and interacting with their ad. When addressing potential advertisers show a report on your month-to-month visitor traffic and examples of results of previous ads. The more data on the ROI for advertisers placing ads on your site, the better chance you have in increasing your digital revenue opportunities with advertisers.
Page View Metrics – Second visitor metric to pay attention to is pageviews. This is the total number of times the site was loaded, so its counting all the homepage views, article views, category views, etc.
Referrals Metrics – You are likely to wonder, or be asked, “Where do your visitors come from?” Analyzing your referrals report will help you answer that question. Referrals track visitors as they click on links from search engines, outside links, and other websites to your website. Understanding where your visitor traffic is coming from is key to understanding how you can attract more readers to your publication.
Top Pages Metrics – It’s valuable to know what pages your readers think are the most important on your site. By viewing the top pages report, you know which pages to focus on as you look to improve your website, placing advertisements, and which pages will have the most impact when changes occur.
The moment you become a customer with Our Hometown we are tracking your metrics. The platform we use is called Matomo. This easy to use tool tracks and reports all of the key metrics you need. Additional resources to check out:
Get setup with your Matomo Login
So start diving in! And use this as a guide to help you determine which metrics are the most important to track.
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