The first and most important analysis that helps improve your website or business is knowing the behavior of your users. If you have a thorough understanding of your website’s user actions, interests, likes, and dislikes, you are left with no effort to optimize your website performance, reach the required goal of your business, and enrich your online presence with high status and reputation. This guide is going to be the most effective source for analyzing user behavior and engagement with your website. To have a systematic user behavior you can read our blog:  User Experience and Website Performance. Now, this blog will elaborate on all key metrics that should be tracked with Matomo for interpreting an in-depth understanding of user behavior, improving website strategy, and gaining more traffic and conversions.

1 – Tracking Pageviews:

Pageviews are essential to be tracked for analyzing the total number of pages visited by users. Further, it displays the entry page and the exit page of your website, the most time spent on which particular page and what was the reason for the stay. Page view tracking enables judgments for the comprehensive user journey from the first-page visit to the last. You can examine the pages most interacted by the users and make advancements to make your website stand out.

2 – Unique Visitors:

Unique visitors are the important key metrics to be tracked in Matomo as these indicate total number of varied or distant visitors who visit your website within a specific time frame. With the measure of unique visitors, you can analyze:

User Outreach: You can understand the actual users of your website. Calculating User Numbers:  By judging the actual visitors of your website you can measure the improvement of visitors, the fluctuations in users and the full-scale audience reach. Visitor Consistency: With the help of visitor consistency you can better estimate the development of your site and make adjustments to your content as per the interest of upcoming visitors.

3 – Bounce Rate:

By tracking bounce you’ll analyze how many users exit from the landing page of your website leaving the rest of pages without visiting further . The bounce rate indicates user engagement. If your site has a high bounce rate then it symbolizes the lack of user interest and interaction with your website. If the bounce rate is low then it suggests more interaction and interest of users on your website. The bounce rate evaluates the effectiveness of the landing page. If a page contains a high bounce rate, the reason can be it is taking more than the standard loading time, or your content is not valuable and engaging. As a result, you can change the strategies of marketing and campaigns.

4 – Average Visit Duration:

Average session duration tracking help you analyze the total timing that a user spend on your website within a single session. If a user is spending a long duration on your site it indicates a high level of interaction and it shows that the user likes your website, it is valuable for the user and it meets the requirements of the user. You can take help from the guide Strategies For Data Tracking In Matomo: A Comprehensive Guide for a thorough understanding of data tracking key metrics that are essential for analyzing user behavior.

5 – Goal (Conversion Rate) Tracking:

Goal or conversion rate is a vital key metric that should be tracked in Matomo for analyzing how many users reached or completed the required goal and particular action on your website. Conversions can include form submission, making a purchase, booking start, booking complete procedures, subscribing your signups, downloading a file, etc.  Goals tracking entails how many users are completing your target point and this helps in the growth of your business.

6 – Traffic Sources:

Tracking the traffic sources indicates the pathways from where the visitors are coming or discovering your website. Traffic sources involves traffic from direct entries, search engines, social networks, organic search, websites and campaigns. All of these traffic Channels signifies the user acquisition. For example, if a major part of users is coming from organic search, then you can invest more in search engine optimization. Thus, by analyzing all channels you can make your marketing efforts more effective. You can estimate the required adjustments in the methods of All Channels and improve the channel that drives more traffic on your site for optimization and excellence of the website’s performance.

7 – Location Metrics:

Location metrics play a vital role in examining your website’s user behavior. By understanding the geographic locations of your customers, you can gain estimation of their interests, needs and requirements. You can know which language and currencies they prefer. With is information you can add features like displaying content in their languages and offers in their currency formats. This attempt will create an impressive impact on the users and can increase the traffic of your site.

8 – Heatmaps and Session Recordings:

Heatmaps and session recordings are significant key metrics that must be tracked in Matomo for analyzing where the user clicks, mouse-overs, scrolls, and stays on your website. Heatmaps indicate the most interacted high or low elements and pages in your website. With the assistance of heatmap tracking metrics, you can improve the usability and styling of your sites to suit your customer’s interests. Session recordings enable the website owners to watch a video playback of user’s sessions. You can watch where the visitors of your website are clicking and staying. With heatmaps and session recordings, you can optimize user flow, discover the hindrances to conversions, and examine the entire website performance with actual user interaction.

To conclude, analyzing user behavior is highly important to enhance the overall performance of your website. To understand the user behavior, the key metrics like tracking page views, unique visits, bounce rate, Goals tracking, All channels’ settings, locations tracking, heatmaps and session recordings are the most effective methods. With the setup of these key metrics, you can make valuable adjustments and drive the most accurate decisions for the performance of your website. You can visit the blog section of the MatomoExpert platform if you want to set up and maintain Matomo and then take your website to the apex of success.