The Five Numbers Every Website Owner Should Track Monthly
Most website owners look at the wrong numbers. Here are the five metrics that actually tell you if your site is earning - and what to do when each one moves.
Most website owners we work with track 30 metrics and act on 0. The dashboard is rich. The decisions are blind.
Here are the five numbers that, if you watched them monthly, would tell you almost everything important about your website’s health.
1. Conversion rate, by source
The single most important number for any business website. Not traffic. Not page views. The percentage of visitors who do the thing you want them to do.
“The thing” varies:
- Service business: submit a contact form, book a consult, call.
- E-commerce: complete a purchase.
- SaaS: sign up for a trial or demo.
- Content site: subscribe to a newsletter, register for a webinar.
Define your primary conversion. Track it as a goal in GA4 or a conversion event in your analytics. Then watch its rate over time, segmented by traffic source.
Why segmented matters: a 1.8% overall conversion rate could be 3.5% from organic search and 0.4% from a Facebook ad that’s burning money. The average tells you nothing. The segmented view tells you which channels to scale and which to fix or kill.
Healthy benchmarks for a Sydney service business:
- Organic search: 2–5%
- Direct traffic: 3–8%
- Google Ads (good landing page): 4–10%
- Display / social ads: 0.5–2%
- Referral: 2–5%
If yours is lower: the page the traffic lands on is the suspect. For organic traffic, that means service pages and blog post CTAs. For ads, that means landing pages. Audit ruthlessly.
2. Cost per qualified lead (or customer)
If you spend any money on marketing, this is the number that tells you whether you’re winning.
- Cost per lead = (monthly marketing spend) ÷ (leads in that month).
- Cost per qualified lead = (monthly marketing spend) ÷ (leads in that month that were genuinely a fit).
The second number matters more. A platform that delivers 100 leads of which 5 are real is worse than one that delivers 20 leads of which 12 are real, at the same spend.
For service businesses, this is usually $20–$200 per qualified lead, depending on industry. For high-ticket B2B, $500+ is normal. For e-commerce, the relevant metric is CAC (customer acquisition cost) - typically $20–$120 for a $80–$300 average order value.
If yours is high: either the landing pages are weak, the targeting is wrong, or the offer isn’t compelling enough. Test in that order.
3. Top 10 organic landing pages, with rank trends
Most sites get 70% of their organic traffic from 5–10 pages. The rest of the site barely contributes. Knowing which pages those are - and watching them like a hawk - is the highest-leverage SEO activity you can do.
In Google Search Console:
- Performance → Pages → sort by clicks descending.
- Note the top 10. They probably account for most of your organic traffic.
- For each, note: search position (average), click-through rate, impressions.
Watch monthly:
- Position dropping? Page is being outranked. Update the content, check for technical issues, check for backlinks lost.
- CTR low for the position? Title and description need work. A page in position 4 with 3% CTR is a title problem.
- Impressions up but clicks flat? You’re being shown for more queries but not winning the click. Same fix.
- Impressions down? You’re being shown less. Could be algorithm shift, content stale, or losing relevance.
The top 10 deserve continual love. Update them annually. Add fresh examples, current data, new sections. The compounding return is huge.
4. Average load speed (mobile, real users)
The lab number (PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse) tells you what could happen. The field number - what real users on real devices actually experience - tells you what is happening. The field number is what Google ranks on and what affects conversion.
In Search Console → Core Web Vitals:
- Mobile LCP (75th percentile) - should be under 2.5s
- Mobile INP - should be under 200ms
- Mobile CLS - should be under 0.1
Check the report monthly. Note the trend.
If LCP creeps up: something new on the site is heavier than what it replaced. Recent feature additions, new images, new third-party scripts. Investigate.
If INP rises: likely a new tracking script or React component that’s blocking the main thread. Audit recent code changes.
If CLS rises: new ads, new embeds, or font changes have broken layout stability. Reserve space for them properly.
This metric is also one of the most leveraged. A 0.5s improvement in LCP often correlates with 5–10% lift in conversion.
5. Form submission success rate
Most sites lose 20–40% of contact form attempts somewhere between “user starts typing” and “submission lands in inbox.” Validation rejections, errors, slow responses, lost connections, accidental closes.
Track:
- Form views (impressions of the form)
- Form starts (any field interacted with)
- Form completions (submit clicked)
- Confirmed submissions (server got the data and emailed it)
The drop-offs between each step tell you where users are losing patience.
Common patterns:
- Big drop between views and starts → form looks intimidating. Shorten it. Or move it to a second step.
- Big drop between starts and submits → validation is annoying or the form is too long.
- Big drop between submits and confirmed → server is slow, emails are bouncing, or form code has a bug.
GA4 with custom events handles the first three. For the last one, you need server-side logging - which surprisingly few sites have.
This metric is invisible until you measure it, and devastating once you do. Most clients we onboard discover they’ve been losing 15–25% of leads silently for months.
What to skip
Some metrics that show up in every dashboard but mean almost nothing:
- Total page views. Unless you sell ads, irrelevant. A blog post with 50,000 views and 0 conversions is worse than one with 500 views and 5 conversions.
- Bounce rate (GA4’s engagement rate inverse). Hard to interpret. Plenty of “high bounce” pages are actually doing their job (answering a question, then the user leaves).
- Time on page. Mostly noise. Some user left their tab open for 4 hours; you’ve got a 14,400-second “session.”
- Pages per session. Vanity metric. Users solving their need on one page is a win, not a loss.
- Followers / vanity social metrics. Track these for marketing, not for your website.
A simple monthly review
The whole review takes 20 minutes once a month if you’ve got dashboards set up:
- Open GA4. Check primary conversion rate vs. last month, segmented by channel. Note any source up or down >20%.
- Open Search Console. Pull top 10 pages. Check positions and CTRs. Flag any moving.
- Check Core Web Vitals. Mobile LCP, INP, CLS. Note any threshold crossings.
- Check form analytics. Submission count vs. last month. Spot check the inbox to verify deliverability.
- Cost per lead (if running ads). Recalculate from spend / lead count.
Write down what you notice. Action one thing.
Most teams that adopt this rhythm end up making decisions instead of just describing the situation. The site quietly improves month over month. The numbers compound. The site stops being a brochure and becomes a measurable business asset.
Want help setting up the right tracking? Get in touch - we can audit your current analytics in 60 minutes and tell you what’s missing.
