Understanding Website Metrics Reports

You’ve invested in a website for your business, but are you maximizing its potential? If you’re receiving website metrics reports from your web agency, it’s crucial that you understand these reports, as they can serve as a data-backed roadmap to better marketing strategies and enhanced customer service. 

Ready to stop letting unread web agency reports pile up? This guide covers website metrics reports basics, including key web metrics to track, why they are important, and how they can have a real-world impact.

What Are Website Metrics Reports?

Website metrics reports are tools provided by web agencies that give clients a strategic overview of their website’s performance. These reports include key data and trends related to the site’s technical performance, visitor engagement, site functionality, and website security.

By understanding and acting on these metrics, businesses can translate the data into strategic advantages that can drive growth, marketing effectiveness, and help you provide the best website experience for your site visitors and customers. Ultimately, these reports can help you make informed business decisions that have a positive impact on your bottom line.

Key Website Metrics & How They’re Measured

Category	Metrics Measured	Use/Impact
Site Technical Performance	Page Load Times, PageSpeed Score, YSlow Score	Ensures efficient site operation to enhance user experience and reduce bounce rates.
Visitor Engagement	Traffic, User Sessions per Period	Provides insights into user interaction trends, helping refine marketing strategies and content.
Site Functionality	Site Uptime, Updates	Maintains site reliability and optimizes functionality for better user journeys.
Website Security	Security Scan for Detecting and Reporting Threats	Identifies and mitigates security risks, protecting data integrity and building trust.

Your website’s metrics offer a window into the user journey, illuminating critical touchpoints and experiences. Performance, security, engagement, and functionality each play distinct roles in shaping a visitor’s interaction with your site. Let’s dive into each metric to understand how they impact the user journey and, ultimately, your profit margins.

Website Software Updates

Website software updates include changes made to software, plugins, or content management systems to ensure optimal performance, security, and compatibility. Keeping your site updated is one of the best ways to reduce functionality issues, as they are often the product of incompatible tools failing to work together.

Website update reports should include detailed records of updates, listing when they occurred, what was updated, and the specific versions involved. This transparency helps in tracking changes and understanding their impact on your website.

Sample Use Case: Plugin Update Breaks Site

Unfortunately, plugin updates can often impede the functionality of a site, even rendering core functionality useless. Case in point, this plugin debacle from a site owner looking for help in the WordPress support forum:

While this is not a RedTree Web Design client, this is an issue our team has tackled for clients — routine updates causing site functionality issues. In most cases, strict management of your site’s updates can reduce the occurrence of these errors and are a core tenet of website optimization. However, without diligent tracking, issues caused by updates may go unnoticed until they cause substantial impairments to the site’s functionality.

By reviewing the update records in their report, we can more efficiently detect issues and resolve their underlying causes. Providing clients with this data gives them the same point of reference and supporting evidence they need to make an informed decision about their website, from choosing to switch to a more stable plugin to even larger changes, such as changing site hosting platforms.

Website Uptime

Website Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is operational and accessible to users. It’s a key indicator of site reliability. Consistent uptime is an expectation and reduces the chances that a customer is turned away from your website due to site issues.

Conversely, website downtime refers to the amount of time your website isn’t operational or accessible to users. Downtime can be caused by site maintenance, update errors, server issues, and many other site woes. Frequent site downtime means your users can’t buy your goods, even if they wanted to.

Website uptime reports should provide metrics on your website’s availability over set periods, including any noted downtimes, the duration of these downtimes, and potential causes. This information helps identify patterns and develop strategies for minimizing future outages.

Sample Use Case: Site Downtime Causes Millions Lost In Hours

Back in 2019, Facebook and some of its apps went down for over 14 hours due to a power outage, leading to an estimated loss of nearly $90 million in revenue — the backlash from users and 2% stock drop, notwithstanding.

In 2015. Apple suffered 11 hours of downtime that stopped customers from making purchases on its platforms. As Apple earned a little over $394 billion last year, that would be a loss of $45 million — an hour.

RedTree monitors sites based on how often they are accessible or which percentage of time they remain up. If a site is experiencing a high volume of downtime, we assess the situation and make actionable recommendations to ensure that the client is aware of the issue and educated on potential solutions.

Website Analytics Metrics & User Sessions

A user session represents a sequence of user interactions with your website within a single visit, marked by a period of activity separated by at least 30 minutes of inactivity.User sessions are tracked using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. These tools provide reports detailing the number of sessions and changes across different periods. 

Tracking user sessions provides valuable insights into visitor engagement and behavior over time. By comparing changes over time, you can identify positive or negative trends to assess whether your marketing strategies are succeeding.

Sample Use Case: Track Analytics On Your Website!

If you own a website, you should be tracking website analytics and user sessions. More specifically, tracking user sessions and their changes over time, provides an essential foundation for your digital marketing strategy. 

The data reveals how many visitors are reaching your site. By comparing user sessions period over period, you can spot trends that indicate either growth or areas needing improvement. A consistent increase in sessions may reflect successful marketing strategies, while declines could signal the need for adjustments.

RedTree monitors user sessions to assess trends that may reflect a need for an SEO strategy shift, UX updates, site functionality enhancements, and many other possible causes. We bring this data to you, so that we can work together to improve your site’s analytics and increase your user sessions count. 

We offer SEO services and data analysis to get to the root cause of your site’s issues and provide data-backed recommendations to improve your site’s traffic. However, if you’d like to dig deeper into your site’s analytics, we recommend utilizing Google’s free analytics tools. 

Website Security

Website Security involves protecting your website from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious threats. Ensuring robust security measures safeguards sensitive information and maintains user trust.

Strong website security helps prevent data breaches and cyberattacks that could compromise user information and damage your brand’s reputation. It helps maintain compliance with data protection regulations and promotes a secure user environment, fostering customer confidence and loyalty.

Website security reports provide details about security assessments, identifying vulnerabilities and threats encountered during sitewide security scans. They usually include information about detected malware, unauthorized access attempts, and any breaches, along with actions taken to resolve these issues.

Sample Use Case: Website Security For The Major Players

Cybersecurity attacks can be particularly devastating to larger companies that have stores of customer data or other valuable ones and zeros that bad actors desire. As such, there have been many well-documented cybersecurity attacks on some of the world’s largest companies. 

For example, Google noted a recent increase in DDoS attacks in which hackers attempt to disrupt a website’s performance and operation by overwhelming it with requests. These attacks are getting bigger, more sophisticated, and are highly targeted. Google is able to easily fend off these attacks because of their constant cybersecurity monitoring and reporting, but a sizable cybersecurity department is the key differentiator. 

We’re just a bit smaller than Google, but we take your site’s security seriously! As a part of our website maintenance services, RedTree takes the same approach of continuous monitoring and reporting to ensure that your site stays secure. If there are any cybersecurity concerns, we make it a priority to inform clients, resolve any vulnerabilities, and actively monitor the situation.

Website Performance Metrics

Website performance refers to the speed and efficiency with which your website loads and operates, encompassing elements like page load times, responsiveness, and the overall user experience.

Faster load times enhance user experience and reduce bounce rates, directly impacting conversion rates and search engine rankings. A slow website can lead to user frustration and potential revenue loss.

Website performance is evaluated using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow, which provide scores and insights on how well a site performs. These tools analyze various factors such as load time, server response time, and resource optimization, offering actionable recommendations for improvement.

	PageSpeed	YSlow
Focus	Emphasizes optimizing web page speed and performance based on Google’s best practices.	Concentrates on overall front-end performance improvements based on Yahoo’s guidelines.
Metrics	Provides a score based on factors like load time, render-blocking resources, and server response.	Offers a grade by analyzing components such as HTTP requests, use of a CDN, and cookie sizes.
Tool Origin	Developed by Google.	Developed by Yahoo.

Sample Use Case: Test Your Own Website Performance

You can test your site’s PageSpeed Score and YSlow Score by using these tools yourself. Simply submit your site’s URL and get your results. Test PageSpeed

YSlow is a little more challenging, as you’ll need to install the extension into your browser, but its a relatively pain-free process that’s detailed in the YSlow installation support page. 

Regardless of the tool you choose, if you notice anything that is loading slowly, frustrating to use, or something just isn’t working — let your web agency know.

At RedTree, we encourage clients to be proactive in reporting any issues or points of concern. We may build, maintain, and host your site, but you’re the architect of its success. So, if your vision of success requires snappy loading speeds that you want to mimic on your own site, we’ve got you covered!

Find An Agency To Nurture Your Website

At RedTree, we value making data-backed decisions to benefit your website and overall brand. 

As a part of that core value, we make it a point to send our clients regular website metrics reports, or “Nurture Reports” that cover key metrics like user sessions, website performance, uptime, and security measures. These reports provide peace of mind for site owners who want to focus on business objectives and leave the website maintenance to a web agency they can trust.

Our goal is to empower your business with the data-driven knowledge needed to enhance user experience, optimize marketing strategies, and ensure robust security.