How do you know if your website is working? Here’s a look at 10 metrics that can help you gauge the extent of your success online.

1. Number of subscribers

Online visitors that have an interest in your offering tend to subscribe for email updates, promotional notifications and newsletters. Track and evaluate the number of subscribers you gain each month. A higher number of subscribers simply means your audience is engaged. Also, if you run an online store, receiving requests from affiliate marketers is also an important metric to track.

2. Traffic and rankings

The higher the ranking of a website in a search engine often conveys a different story than the actual traffic. Organic traffic is equally as important as search engine results pages (SERPs), whereas some fail to distinguish between the two. Grabbing an online searches attention while they are browsing the search engine result pages is also important because top listing results does not ensure a click-through conversion or ultimate sales. If you are not benefiting from high search engine rankings, it is the time to evaluate the structure of your search engine results: title, URL structure, and meta description.

3. Mobile analytics

Ensuring user experience is flawless across various screen sizes and devices is essential … and a major user interaction metric. Is your website mobile friendly? What happens to key metrics when someone visits your website on their smartphone vs. a desktop? Back in the days, merchants used to own a separate mobile website which was not compatible with different screen sizes, whereas the recent increase in mobile technology has made it a mandatory factor in web designing. It shows the popularity of your websites among users.

4. Sales trend analysis

Online sales trends is a smart way to evaluate the success of your website. As nChannel explains, “It’s not enough to just view your sales trends for your business overall. You need to be able to narrow it done to specific locations, product lines, or sales channels. This granular view is important when understanding what makes up your business as a whole.” Monitor a drop line and compare it with a previous week, month, quarter or year.

5. Time on page

The time a user spends on a page is a common user interaction metric. It is one of the basic metrics in Google Analytics. However, this metric doesn’t always reveal the full picture. For example, according to Analytics Demystified, “I may spend a lot of time on a website because I’m really interested in the content, but I can also spend a lot of time on a website because the navigation is terrible and I can’t find what I need. There is nothing about a time metric that tells you if the time spent was successful.” While it can be used directionally, it shouldn’t be a substitute for a deeper dive into things like dwell time, content page views per visit, etc.

6. Pages per visit

Pages per visit measures how many pieces of content (i.e. pages) a particular user views on your website (Page Views / Visits = Average Page Views per Visit). This is an excellent indicator of how compelling and easily navigated your content is for your audience. By simply adding uniqueness and value to your site design, users are compelled to browse your website further and dig deeper.

7. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a site-level metric that indicates the percentage of single-page site visits. This metric is useful as a signal of user engagement and content quality. However, bounce rate is very dependent on the type of site your un and unreliable on its own. A higher bounce rate means more people are clicking out of your website after a single page visit. If people aren’t sticking around it’s important to understand why.

8. Exit rate

Exit rate confirms the percentage of people who left your site from a specific page. When you look at a high exit rate for a page on your site it could easily mean that the page lacked in user engagement. Meanwhile, it’s not always a negative indicator. For example, “If you have a paginated article – say four pages – and the exit rate on the last page is high, is that really a bad thing? They’ve reached the end of the article. It may be natural for them to leave at that point,” according to online marketer AJ Kohn. However, a high number of exit pages can easily indicated flawed web design, poor content structure bad product presentation. Compare all of your exit pages and optimize the factors they have in common.

9. Related products

It’s pretty important to share related product information and content that is aligned with their searching behavior. For example, if you own an e-commerce website understanding which products are purchased together most often (a Google Analytics feature) can help you make better product recommendations and take advantage of opportunities to upsell. According to Google Analytics, you “can automatically generate a list of related products per product for your Ecommerce enabled property based on transaction data. You can use this data to improve product bundling, merchandizing, remarketing, and email campaigns.”

10. Emails and phone queries

If you are not receiving emails or a phone calls from your customers, either you are delivering top notch customer support or there’s waning interest. If customers are using the touchpoints you’ve designated for customer contact it’s a sign that they want to know more about your product or service. Taking phone calls (because many people are scared to shop online) can increase your chances of closing more sales.

Final thoughts

If your website engagement down, then it is time to focus on user interaction to provide value through your online presence.

This article has been edited.

Alastair Brian writer from FMEModules, a brand well-known for top of the line reliable PrestaShop Add-ons, themes, extensions and services. Connect with @alastairbrian1 on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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