Driving traffic to one or more pages on your website is obviously the initial primary goal for businesses, blogs and brands. While encouraging them to take specific actions once they arrive are just as important, it can be hard to learn what motivates your audience without analyzing their behaviors.

There are actually numerous actions and behaviors that visitors and users on your website are conducting that should be monitored. Do you know which behaviors can tell you more information about how to optimize your website?

If not, then continue reading to find out which actions you should be tracking.

Content Engagement Metrics

Regardless of your brand’s niche or target audience, it is a common goal to want visitors to engage with your content. After all, an engaged audience often becomes an army of de-facto marketers for your brand, broadening its reach and helping you in pinging users with content, products and more.

The performance of your content highlights important user behaviors and can alert you to how well it is resonating with your audience. Specific metrics like shares and comments on the content itself – as well as on social media – will provide a broader picture of whether or not audiences are pleased with what you’re providing.

Additionally, negative metrics such as bounce rates can also inform you as to whether the content is being deemed irrelevant by those who stumble upon it. In many respects, these metrics are just as important as metrics indicating success; they can help you avoid common pitfalls associated with content creation and marketing.

User Experience Metrics

Ultimately, the experience that users have on your website can dramatically affect your brand’s prosperity. Even the most entertaining, informative and productive websites in terms of content can be derailed through poor interfaces and clumsy design.

This is why tracking various user experience metrics is so crucial. Perhaps the easiest and most common user experience metric to track is site speed: the faster your pages load, the happier your audiences tend to be and the longer they will stick around.

Other measurements of user experience that are important to track are the number of in-page clicks you’re generating and scroll depth. These indicate just how involved with each of your pages your audience is becoming; the less they’re clicking and scrolling, the less of a good impression you’re making.

Conversion Metrics

Lastly, understanding exactly what actions – and at what frequency – visitors are taking is important when directly related to conversions. After all, conversions are the actions that we want users to take, so tracking the ebb and flow of these behaviors is paramount.

For instance, pinging users with a variety of different landing pages and pitches can help you track which elements produce the best results. Monitoring aspects of your sales funnel and the checkout process also will help identify at which points you may be losing vital business, allowing you to further refine the process to account for this.

Tracking user behaviors can generate great benefit for brands. By knowing when, why and how users are acting on your pages, patterns inevitably emerge. With this data, you’ll be able to further optimize your website and ensure optimal conversion rates and traffic growth alike.