Besides these four categories, you should also pay attention to some other standard metrics that pertain to your website overall, such as: Unique The best indication of your site’s overall traffic, unique visitors refers to the number of individuals who visit Visitors your website during a given period, where each visitor is only counted once. This number will vary dra- matically depending on the size of your company, industry, and, of course, the amount of content you are producing. Page The total number of individual pages that your visitors click on during a given period. If your page views are Views higher than your unique visitors, that may indicate that your audience finds your content engaging because individuals are visiting multiple pages. Search The amount of traffic being referred to your site by search engines such as Google or Bing. This number will Engine give you a clear indication of how effective you are at optimizing your content for search. Traffic Social The amount of traffic being referred to your site through social media, which will give you insights into how Media Traffic effectively you are distributing your content and how popular that content is among your target audience. Bounce The percentage of visitors who come to your site and then immediately leave before clicking on any other Rate pages. Aim for a bounce rate below 40 percent. If it’s higher, it may indicate that visitors to your site don’t like what they see and are leaving immediately. All of this information can be gathered using a Web analytics tool like Google Analytics (see this link for information on how to set up a Google Analytics account for your website). It can then be tracked into a simple weekly dashboard that you create using an Excel spreadsheet like the one on the following page. It Takes a Content Factory! | 53