Analyzing your website performance is a must for anyone who relies on their website for business. However, not all metrics should be added to your dashboard, here are some metrics that definitely might be avoided.
Bounce Rate. Bounce rate shows how many people only visit that one page before exiting a site. While it may have been useful at some point, today it is irrelevant. Think of landing pages which only have one page and their purpose is to generate form submits. And what about websites that are only one page long, those get bounce rates at 100%. Therefore, this metric should not be paid much attention to.
Time on site ? Most people believe the longer someone stays on the site the better. However, that is not always the case. Some of the best customers are the ones that interacted the least amount of time as they were ready to buy and did not waste time.
Active Users – ?Active users? metric shows you how many unique users visited your website within a day, week or month. This metric is useless unless you compare it to the previous day, week, month. However, that also holds a problem as it does not account for seasonality factor. For example, if you were to compare last week of the year versus mid-week in January you will get very different results due to the holidays.
These are just a few metrics that should be avoided when building your dashboard. The other pitfall to avoid is to look at data sources separately. You will not get a full picture by looking only at Google Analytics or Facebook Ad Performance, or your email marketing performance. However, if you combine all sources you will be able to see the whole picture. For example, combining Facebook Ads and Google AdWords will allow you to see what percentage of marketing spent goes where it will also allow you to compare cost per conversion across multiple sources and across campaigns.
There are different ways to analyze your data and there is no universal solution that fits all. Thus, it is advisable to build a custom dashboard that fits your business needs. Start your dashboard build out by asking yourself what data you need to see first, then figure out where the data lives and what metrics you are going to use to answer your question.
