What Metrics Actually Matter in Your Business?

AH! What metrics actually matter?!

Sessions, users, bounce rates, conversions, oh my!

Let’s chat a little bit about metrics to break down this confusion cloud.

If you’ve ever been into Google Analytics, or even into your social media analytics or insights, and started looking at those numbers – unless you’re a data nerd (hats off to you!) – it can feel a little overwhelming.

Let’s change that.

The metrics that actually matter really depend on what you’re trying to get your users to do.

For example, bounce rate is a metric that gets mentioned quite a bit and is one of those metrics that’s wildly misunderstood in my opinion. A bounce rate is the percent of users that leave your site after viewing only one page. You may often hear that you want a low bounce rate, but it depends on what you want users to do if a high or low bounce rate is ideal. If your user came to your page, got what you offered and left all from one page – great! Your page had all the information they needed and did it’s job. So a high bounce rate in that case could be a good thing.

There are also things that we call “vanity metrics” such as number of followers, number of visitors, and while those things are nice, they’re not always telling the whole story. They look good, but may not actually result in sales. Depending on your goals, vanity metrics may not matter much.

So knowing what you want users to do is really critical in interpreting your metrics and to see where things could be improved.

Thinking of metrics in terms of what user interactions you want will help you figure out what metrics matter and be able to interpret them correctly.

If you’d like help figuring out which metrics matter for your business, let’s start the conversation.