A portfolio website provides a place for freelancers, artists, photographers, designers, developers, marketers, writers, and other skilled professionals to showcase their work. It can work as a platform that has the collection of your best work and a summary of your talents and experiences presented in digital format.
Such websites could be in the form of a blog, video channel, images, etc. They are great for attracting attention to one’s work and attracting new clients or customers. A well-designed portfolio website can make a big impression and help you stand out. But that is not enough.
Often, portfolio website owners need to track KPIs that help tracks the website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. A lead-generating website would rely on some of the major KPIs to enhance user experience and offer more chances of conversions.
Platforms like Pixpa help artists, marketers, and freelancers kickstart creating a portfolio website in a simple yet effective way. Once you are done creating the website, start tracking KPIs.
Let’s find it out.
Why track portfolio website KPIs?
KPI tracking is an important aspect of measuring the success of the website in the longer run. Just as a sales personnel knows what are sales KPIs or marketers know about marketing KPIs, business professionals must track certain KPIs for their portfolio website.
Tracking KPIs is important for a portfolio website since it helps understand how users behave and interact with your website. Understanding which KPIs are most important for your website can help track the progress and ensure that a portfolio website is on track to meet your goals.
Identify areas of improvement
Tracking KPIs can help identify areas of improvement for your website. If your website is not performing as expected, you can look at your KPIs to see where to make changes.
For example, if you notice that your website’s bounce rate is high, work on improving your website’s content and design to keep visitors on your site longer.
Track the website performance
Tracking the right KPIs can help discover the website’s growth over time. This brings out trends that help in optimizing your site to drive more visitors.
Benchmark against competition
KPI tracking helps benchmark your website against other websites since it helps you understand how your website’s KPIs compare to other websites. This can help identify areas where your website needs improvement based on competitors’ actions.
Make informed choices
KPIs provide data — evidence of what is working and what is not. Therefore, understanding a portfolio website’s KPIs lets you decide where to invest your time and resources to meet long-term goals.
What are the key KPIs to monitor on a portfolio website?
There are a lot of key performance indicators (KPIs) that you could track for a portfolio website, but which ones are the most important? Here are 10 key KPIs to track for a portfolio website:
1. Number of unique visitors
This KPI measures the number of new people visiting the website. Unique visitors measure the number of people visiting a website and the frequency. It helps track their online engagement over a specific period. The number of unique visitors gives insights into whether or not your portfolio website is performing well.
Check for the source of the visits — domains, links (direct or indirect), search engines, social media, etc. to understand where they land on your site and how you can modify strategies that drive more such visitors. By tracking the number of unique visitors, you can gain insight into their performance, identify their target audience, and optimize their strategies to convert more visitors into customers.
2. Number of returning visitors
This KPI measures the number of people who return to your website after initially visiting it. The number of returning visitors to a website helps understand customer engagement and loyalty to optimize the user experience.
Suppose you discover that the returning visitors are more than new visitors. In that case, customers engage with the content, find value in it, and access your capabilities based on their requirements.
By tracking the number of returning visitors and analyzing the data, you can gain insight into which pages and features have the highest engagement levels and which require adjusting the website’s content and layout and introducing new ways to connect, like scheduling a call button instead of simply providing a form.
3. Average time on site
This KPI measures the average time people spend on your website. The average time spent on site is often used to gauge how effectively a website engages visitors and retains their attention. It is also used to measure the success of any engagement strategies such as content marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
This gives insights into where visitors spend the most time and what areas of the website could be improved to increase visitor engagement. The average time spent on the site is measured in minutes: seconds, calculated by taking the total amount of time visitors spend on the website and dividing it by the total number of visitors.
4. Pages per visit
This KPI measures the average number of pages people view when they visit your website. Pages per visit are valuable as websites strive to provide more dynamic and engaging user experiences. Your professional portfolio website may have different pages depending on projects, clients, skill-based divisions, etc. Here, a high number of pages per visit indicates that visitors engage with the content, explore different areas of the site, and spend more time overall on the website.
Multiple factors can influence its value, from website design to navigation and even your SEO interlinking strategy to ensure that users find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Engaging content that encourages readers to explore further also plays a vital role in driving up page views per session.
5. Referral sources
It’s important to know where your website traffic is coming from so that you can focus your marketing efforts accordingly. Do people find your website thanks to word-of-mouth marketing efforts through search engines or social media?
External site that drives traffic to your company website. This includes search engine results pages (SERPs), social media channels, blog posts, influencer campaigns, and even emails and text messages that link to your website. Each one of these sources will have different levels of impact on visitor catchment, conversion rates, and customer lifetime values.
Understanding and utilizing referral sources requires careful data analysis and developing targeted strategies for each channel. You can identify where their potential customers come from and begin building relationships with those sources through collaborative efforts such as guest blogging or consistently sharing content from them on social media profiles.
6. Social media engagement
This KPI measures how many people convert via social media platforms. This number is important because it gives you an idea of how well your portfolio site promotes itself on social media.
If you’re using social media to promote your work, you need to track how well those efforts are paying off. Are people liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts? If so, you’d also need to know if they are landing on your key portfolio website pages.
7. Email subscribers
This KPI measures the number of people subscribed to receive email updates from your website. This number is important because it gives you an idea of how well your site is building an email list.
Use this KPI when you have an email list for your portfolio website to track how many people are subscribing. This will give you an idea of how effective are your sign-up forms, whether your email marketing is providing necessary results (getting visitors to your site), and identifying the growth rate of subscribers.
8. Leads generated
A portfolio website is a great way to generate leads for your business. And therefore, track the number of leads you are getting to see if your portfolio site effectively converts visitors into leads.
Use this metric to track their website’s ability to attract, engage, and convert their target audiences into qualified leads. Leads generated can be followed at various points along the customer journey. This includes everything from a website visitor’s initial engagement (Google search, ad, social, etc.) to the point when they fill out a signup form on a page.
9. Time on site
This KPI measures the average time people spend on your website. This is important because it gives you an idea of your site’s engagement. Time spent on site is one of the most important metrics in website performance analysis. It tells you how long people stay on your website after landing. This helps you understand user engagement and identify what works and does not.
The time spent on site metric determines the effectiveness of strategies you’ve implemented to drive more traffic to your website. This provides insight into user behaviors to help shape future marketing strategies and improve user experience. If a large portion of users leaves quickly after visiting a particular page, something must be wrong with that page that discourages them from staying longer. You can then optimize it accordingly to ensure visitors are engaged on your website for as long as possible.
10. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is a key performance indicator (KPI) used to measure a website’s performance. It helps evaluate the many numbers of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page, commonly known as “bouncing.” The bounce rate is usually expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing the total number of single-page visits by the total number of visits to the website. The higher the bounce rate, the worse it is for your portfolio website regarding engagement and conversions.
Business professionals running the portfolio website can keep track of website performance and continuously rely on their bounce rate KPI to determine if the content and other aspects of the website are engaging enough for users to explore more pages. Other metrics, such as page views, average time spent on a page, and conversion rate, should also be considered when making decisions about website optimization.
Wrapping up
Tracking the KPIs mentioned above can be a starting point for creating a robust professional website. KPI tracking for portfolio websites gives you more control over the website and helps you make informed choices about the content, design, and structure.
KPIs can help understand what content works best, how visitors interact with the site, and which areas may need improvement. Having insight into these key performance indicators (KPIs) enables unlocking valuable insights that aid with strategic decisions and ultimately lead to more successful websites.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
