Best page performance metrics to track on GA4 for B2B websites

If someone asks you how your website performs, what metrics would you point at to say it’s a roaring success or a slow burner? Traffic? Bounce rate? Conversions? The right answer is any marketer's answer - ‘It depends’.

It depends on the purpose of the page. You cannot measure the success of a high-intent page built for conversion on traffic, nor can you measure the success of a blog by looking at the number of conversions on it.

So what is the right approach? Your B2B website may have hundreds of pages but they could probably be split into 4 main categories - 

1. The mothership that is the home page. I like to look at this one separately as it’s the major traffic driver

2. Informational or educational pages like blogs, case studies, and press releases (Awareness Funnel)

3. Resource pages (white paper, reports) that are a mix of awareness and conversions (Mid-Funnel)

4. High-intent pages that are built for conversions like demo requests or pricing pages (Bottom of the funnel)

The home page

The entry point into your website is your chance to make a good first impression so customers stick around. While measuring home page performance, take into account its navigational nature. The key metrics that I like tracking here are:

1. New Users - The first thing you look at, because if no one’s looking at your homepage, what are you achieving? I like to track this monthly and assess what sources are driving the most number of users to the site

2. Bounce rate - Tells you if your home page is relevant to users who land on it via various channels. Drill down to the source/medium to understand where there might be a communication gap.

3. Pages/session - A useful indicator to understand whether your menu and homepage are easy to navigate and keep the user engaged.

4. The ratio of new vs returning users - By tracking this, you can tell how well your efforts drive new or existing user traffic. Returning users can indicate an increased affinity to your brand, while an increase in new users can indicate growing awareness.

Informational pages

Pages that help you build brand awareness and project yourself as a thought leader in your respective space. The metrics you need to measure here are all engagement metrics.

1. Avg. Engagement Time per Session - How long does a user spend on your page consuming the content that you put out? This is the most important indicator for informational pages as it helps determine how good your content is.

2. New Users - You want these pages to generate views via your distribution channels and mainly SEO. Keeping a weekly track of this till the topic becomes old or irrelevant will give a good measure of how your pages are doing.

3. Traffic by Source/Medium - This will help you assess which channels are bringing in traffic to your blog and identify which theme of content works well for each of these channels.

Resource pages

All the pages on your site that help warm up leads. This could be a gated report, whitepaper or a webinar page.

1. Conversion rate - The ratio of page visitors to how many fill out the form and submit it. This is the key metric for any page that contains a form and helps make optimization decisions like improving copy on the page, shortening the form, or playing around with different CTAs.

2. Bounce rate - If the bounce rate is high, it could indicate a disconnect between what’s being said on the metadata or ad copy and what’s presented with more detail on the page. 

3. Traffic by Source/Medium - Which channels are working for this type or theme of content and where should you focus your efforts for your next resource.

High Intent pages

Any page that’s designed with the primary aim to get prospects to drop their details.

1. Conversion rate - The only one to measure on this page. All of what I said above for the resource pages holds true here.

That concludes the key metrics to track across different page types for your B2B organization. A good next step would be to segregate your website based on these page types and build dashboards that track page performance for each of these categories.

Happy tracking!