As an online business owner, one thing you can do for your business to improve upon your chances for success is to track several metrics to determine if you’re reaching your goals. First, set goals, then match them with data. Finally, match that data with online software to help you track the metrics that will help determine whether or not what you are doing is working. Here are ten metrics to track.

1. Traffic Sources – Where is the traffic coming from? Knowing this will help you know where to put your attention. If you have places you’re spending time but getting no traffic, you can stop and spend more time on places that are sending traffic.

2. How Many Unique Visitors – If you’re getting plenty of unique visitors and that number is going up with consistency, then you’re doing something right for your business. But, there are numbers that are more important than visitors, such as conversions and revenue.

3. How Many Repeat Visitors – If you are bringing back people that have been to your website before, you’re doing even better. How are you bringing the repeat visitors back? Are you using email marketing or are they doing Google searches that bring them back?

4. Total Visitors – How many total visitors you have each day is a good indicator if your content marketing and other promotion methods are working. But, do they stick around? If not, is your content targeted enough?

5. Bounce Rate – How many of those total visitors “bounce” off your site without doing anything or spending any time on your site? Most sites have a bounce rate; you’ll need to know the industry average to know what you should shoot for.

6. What Visitors Do on Your Site – Tracking what your visitors do on your site is important because you can see how many articles they read, how many menu items they click on and more.

7. Conversions Per Visit – With this information, plus healthy calls to action, you can determine how many people convert per visit and compare that to industry standards to see how you’re doing.

8. Dollars Earned Per Visit – Knowing how much money you are making per visit is an important number to know so that you know how much you can spend on marketing. After all, the bottom line of any business is earnings.

9. Which Pages Your Visitors Leave On (Exit Pages) – If people are leaving on the same page a lot, you might want to check that page to figure out if you can optimize it better to keep people on your site longer.

10. Conversion Costs – With the information of how many visitors you have going to your site, and how much revenue you’ve earned during that same time period, you can track conversion costs which are very important to help with marketing.

Metrics that you track should be based on your goals. Every goal you make should have a corresponding numerical figure to track, along with software to help you track it. Some software to look at are Google Analytics and KISSmetrics.com.

Link to Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics/
Link to KISSmetrics – http://www.kissmetrics.com/