Are your technology PR efforts paying off? This guide helps B2B marketers identify the right metrics to prove their impact on business goals and revenue. By Allison Mattina, Client Services Director
The Foundation of Your Website: Essential Metrics for Success
A great website is the cornerstone of your digital strategy. But how do you know if it works? Look at the data! When you explore your website metrics, you aren’t just collecting numbers; you’re using them to understand your audience, find out what works, and pinpoint where you need to improve.
Let’s break down the most critical metrics you must watch. We recommend an analysis of data over a 13- to 15-month period to account for seasonal trends like holidays and vacation seasons.
Core website metrics: Does your site attract and engage visitors?
This section focuses on fundamental website metrics that reveal how well your website does its job.
Traffic and audience
- Unique visitors & total sessions: Unique visitors represent your audience size. Total sessions show how often they return. Together, they tell you if you consistently attract a growing number of people and if your content is interesting enough to bring them back.
- Pageviews: This is your popularity contest. Pageviews show which content is most popular and which pages get the most attention. You can then analyze these top pages to understand what resonates with your audience.
Content engagement
- Entrances: This metric shows which pages people first land on; a lot of traffic comes in sideways from sources such as social media, backlinks, media coverage and search engines. Analyzing entrances helps you see which pages act as the primary gateways to your site.
- Average time on page & average session duration: These metrics are key to understanding content stickiness. A high average time on page means people actually read your content, not just glance at it and leave. A long average session duration indicates that visitors explore multiple pages, which suggests a strong interest in your brand and offerings.
- Bounce rate & engagement rate: These are two sides of the same coin. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. An unusually high bounce rate (e.g., over 50%) suggests a problem with the page’s content or design. Engagement rate (the inverse of bounce rate) measures the percentage of sessions when visitors interacted with the page or stayed on it for a certain amount of time. Your engagement rate should be consistently higher than your bounce rate.
Beyond the basics: Conversions, SEO & technical health
Once you understand the fundamentals, you can look at more advanced metrics that directly impact your business goals.
Conversions: The ultimate measure of success
Conversions are the actions you want visitors to take, whether that’s a form fill, a video view, or a document download. You define these key events in your analytics platform. The most important metric is your conversion rate. This is the percentage of unique visitors who complete a desired conversion.
ConversionRate=(NumberofConversions/NumberofUniqueVisitors)∗100
A high conversion rate proves that your website effectively guides prospects toward your solution.
Technical performance & SEO
- Core Web Vitals: These are technical metrics (like loading speed) that Google uses to gauge your website’s user experience. You can check them in Google Search Console. Mobile performance is especially critical—even for B2B tech companies—as Google’s algorithms prioritize the mobile experience.
- Authority score & backlinks: Your website’s authority score (or domain rating) measures its credibility and SEO strength. To improve it, get backlinks from other reputable websites—especially those with a high authority score themselves. This is why securing press coverage is so valuable; a link from a major publication can significantly boost your score.
The bottom line: Communicate the why to leadership
All these metrics are meaningless unless they help you tell a story that connects to your company’s business objectives. A great report isn’t just a collection of charts; it’s a narrative that proves how your marketing efforts contribute to growth.
When you present to your leadership, don’t assume they understand every metric. Walk them through the narrative every time:
- Objective: What was the business goal?
- Strategy: What was your plan to achieve it?
- Proof: How do the key metrics prove that your strategy was successful?
By translating data into a clear story, you show how your work underpins the KPIs that drive your company’s growth and success.
Let HCI help
If your website metrics are missing the mark, talktohci@hcimarketing.com. We can analyze your site performance, develop a strategy to improve, and even execute that strategy for you.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.