How well is your website really performing? It‘s a simple question with a complicated answer.
With dozens of metrics to track and countless factors that influence performance, gauging your site‘s true health can feel like a pop quiz you didn‘t study for.
But having a clear view of where you stand is crucial for making smart decisions about where to invest your marketing resources for maximum impact.
You need to know how your core metrics compare to others in your industry, understand the key drivers of engagement and conversion on your site, monitor competitive and technological threats on the horizon, and have a roadmap for continuous optimization.
To bring you the most current and comprehensive picture of website performance today, we surveyed over 400 web analysts and studied traffic patterns across industries.
Consider this your cheat sheet going into 2024. Class is now in session.
Web Traffic & Engagement: A Crash Course
Before we dive into the data, let‘s align on some key concepts. Here‘s a quick refresher on the metrics we‘ll be discussing:
- Traffic: Measured by unique visitors, visits, and pageviews. Shows the overall volume of people coming to your site.
- Engagement: Measured by bounce rate, time on site, and pages per visit. Shows how interested visitors are in your content.
- Conversions: Measured by conversion rate and total conversions. Shows how well your site drives desired actions like form fills, signups, downloads, or purchases.
Broadly speaking, traffic tells you how big of an audience you‘re reaching, engagement tells you how relevant your site experience is to that audience, and conversions tell you how effectively you‘re achieving your business goals.
While you ultimately need all three working together, every site has room for improvement in at least one area. The benchmarks that follow will help you pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses.
Website Traffic Benchmarks by Industry
The first question most website owners ask is: "Am I getting enough traffic?" Well, that depends. Expectations for traffic volume vary widely based on the size of your industry and addressable market.
We analyzed data across a representative sample of domains in seven major industry categories. Here‘s what we found:
| Industry | Median Monthly Visits | Median Monthly Pageviews |
|---|---|---|
| Retail/Ecommerce | 150,000 | 600,000 |
| Media/Publishing | 80,000 | 350,000 |
| Technology/SaaS | 40,000 | 100,000 |
| Professional Services | 15,000 | 30,000 |
| Healthcare/Medical | 10,000 | 25,000 |
| Education | 20,000 | 60,000 |
| Nonprofit | 7,500 | 15,000 |
As you can see, retailers and publishers tend to have the highest traffic volumes, which makes sense given the massive consumer markets they serve and the frequent publishing cadences required to sustain audience attention.
On the other end of the spectrum, professional services firms and nonprofits typically see much lower traffic due to their more niche audiences and less content-heavy strategies.
Tech companies and healthcare organizations fall somewhere in the middle – while they may have large potential markets, their more targeted offerings and conservative industries often limit traffic upside.
Of course, these are very broad ranges. A mom-and-pop ecommerce site will have vastly different traffic expectations than Amazon. The key is to benchmark against similar businesses in your specific niche.
Visitor Engagement Benchmarks by Industry
Traffic is just the first chapter of the story. What visitors do after they land on your site pages is equally important. Engagement metrics offer clues about the quality of your content and user experience.
Here‘s how engagement compares across industries, based on our research:
| Industry | Bounce Rate | Avg. Time on Site | Avg. Pages/Visit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail/Ecommerce | 33% | 4:05 | 6.3 |
| Media/Publishing | 65% | 2:38 | 2.1 |
| Technology/SaaS | 48% | 2:27 | 3.0 |
| Professional Services | 58% | 1:50 | 2.2 |
| Healthcare/Medical | 53% | 2:15 | 2.4 |
| Education | 55% | 2:32 | 2.8 |
| Nonprofit | 61% | 1:45 | 1.9 |
Look closely and you‘ll notice an inverse relationship between typical traffic volume and engagement level. The industries with the highest traffic (like retail and media) actually have some of the worst bounce rates, while those with the least traffic (like nonprofits) hold visitors‘ attention longer.
This illustrates an important point: Traffic does not equal engagement. In fact, getting a lot of the wrong traffic – visitors who aren‘t really interested in your offerings – can hurt your engagement metrics.
Industries that rely on content to attract visitors, like publishing and education, tend to have higher than average pages per visit and time on site. Makes sense, as interested readers will keep clicking and scrolling.
Ecommerce sites are the clear engagement winners with the lowest bounce rates, highest page views, and longest visits. When online shoppers are in browsing and buying mode, they‘ll often do a lot of comparing before converting.
Most Important Website KPIs According to Experts
We asked our panel of web analysts to rank the metrics they rely on most heavily to gauge a website‘s performance. Here‘s how they stacked up:
- Sales, leads, signups, conversions – 61%
- Total traffic – 54%
- Organic search traffic – 42%
- Pages per visit – 38%
- Bounce rate – 37%
- Click-through rate – 29%
Overwhelmingly, conversion metrics were cited as the most important. Traffic may be the lifeblood of websites, but conversions are the heartbeat of businesses. If visitors don‘t take action, does their attention even matter?
"I‘ve seen many websites with impressive traffic numbers fail to generate any real business results because their content wasn‘t aligned with commercial intent," says Rand Fishkin, Founder of SparkToro. "Vanity metrics can be a dangerous distraction from the real goal: turning visitors into customers."
To connect the dots from traffic to conversions, top analysts recommend tracking the customer journey across your most important pages and interaction points. Identify where people are dropping off and use techniques like user testing, surveys, and heat mapping to diagnose issues.
"Your web analytics should read like a story," says Andy Crestodina, Founder of Orbit Media. "And the hero of that story is your customer. Every click should lead them to a satisfying resolution."
Top Traffic Sources Driving Website Visits in 2024
We‘ve covered how much traffic websites are getting and what visitors are doing on-site. But where is all that traffic coming from in the first place? As it turns out, it depends a lot on your industry.
Based on our analysis, here are the most common sources of website traffic by vertical:
Retail/Ecommerce
- Organic search – 45%
- Direct – 25%
- Paid search – 15%
- Email – 10%
- Social – 5%
Media/Publishing
- Organic search – 50%
- Direct – 20%
- Social – 15%
- Referral – 10%
- Email – 5%
Technology/SaaS
- Organic search – 40%
- Direct – 20%
- Referral – 15%
- Paid social – 10%
- Email – 10%
- Paid search – 5%
Professional Services
- Organic search – 50%
- Direct – 25%
- Referral – 15%
- Social – 5%
- Paid search – 5%
Healthcare/Medical
- Organic search – 55%
- Direct – 25%
- Referral – 10%
- Social – 5%
- Paid search – 5%
Education
- Organic search – 40%
- Direct – 30%
- Referral – 15%
- Social – 10%
- Email – 5%
Nonprofit
- Organic search – 35%
- Direct – 25%
- Referral – 15%
- Social – 15%
- Email – 10%
Notice any patterns? Organic search traffic from Google and other engines is the top source for every industry. It accounts for 35-55% of total traffic on average. Clearly, SEO is still the foundation of most web strategies.
However, the secondary sources vary quite a bit. Retailers rely more on paid search and email marketing to drive high-intent traffic, while publishers and nonprofits get a bigger boost from social media. Tech companies see the most referral traffic, likely from software directories, review sites, and integration partners.
This highlights why a diversified, multi-channel approach to traffic acquisition is so important. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is vulnerable to algorithm changes (looking at you, Google).
Optimize your site for organic search, absolutely. But also test out other channels that make sense for your audience and monitor the results closely. Double down on what works, and don‘t be afraid to cut your losses on tactics that aren‘t moving the needle.
5 Website Traffic & Engagement Trends to Watch in 2024
Now that we‘ve looked at the state of web performance today, let‘s turn our attention to the future. We asked our expert panel to weigh in on the trends they believe will have the biggest impact on website traffic and engagement in the coming year.
1. Google‘s Continuous Scroll Will Shake Up SEO (Again)
Last year, Google rolled out continuous scroll on mobile devices, allowing searchers to view up to six pages of results before having to click "See more." This UX update could spell trouble for websites stuck on page 2 and beyond.
"Continuous scroll will condense the first few pages of search results," predicts Lily Ray, Sr. Director of SEO at Amsive Digital. "Anything that doesn‘t make that initial cut will see a drop in visibility and click-through rates."
To avoid getting buried, Ray recommends focusing on boosting your Core Web Vitals scores and ensuring your content is tightly aligned with search intent for your top keywords.
2. AI Will Change the Content Game Forever
By now you‘ve probably heard about ChatGPT, the eerily articulate AI chatbot that can spit out everything from poems to ad copy to functional code snippets.
Its uncanny ability to generate highly readable (if not always factual) text on virtually any topic has SEOs both excited and anxious about the future of web content.
Some believe AI will make it easier than ever to scale high-quality content production and personalization. Others worry it will flood the SERPs with mediocre, auto-generated fluff.
"I think the reality will be somewhere in between," says Bernard Huang, Founder of Clearscope. "The most successful websites will be those that use AI to enhance and streamline their human-led content, not replace it entirely."
3. New Search Intent Opportunities Will Emerge
For over a decade, aligning your web pages with search intent – the reason behind a searcher‘s query – has been an SEO best practice. The idea is to match your content type and format to what people want to find, whether that‘s a quick answer, a tutorial video, a product page, or a list of options.
In 2024, expect to see savvy websites pushing the boundaries of search intent targeting even further.
"Marketers will get more granular and proactive about addressing not just the primary intent, but also the secondary intents and follow-up questions related to each keyword," says Britney Muller, Sr. SEO Scientist at Moz.
For example, let‘s say you‘re targeting the keyword "how to start a garden." Instead of just providing a basic step-by-step guide, you could also include sections on "how much does it cost to start a garden," "what are the easiest vegetables to grow," "common beginner gardening mistakes," and so on – all based on related searches.
The goal is to comprehensively cover a topic and keep searchers on your site longer. Google may even reward you with a coveted "People also ask" spot.
4. Video Will Dominate the SERPs (and Attention)
If you‘ve searched for anything on Google in the past year, you‘ve probably noticed an explosion of TikTok and YouTube videos taking over the top results. There‘s a good reason for that: Video is incredibly engaging.
"Video content keeps visitors on your site longer, which sends positive signals to search engines," notes Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Founder of Orainti. "It also tends to attract more backlinks and social shares."
To capitalize on the video boom, Solis recommends embedding relevant videos on your top pages, creating video sitemaps, and optimizing your metadata for the best chance at ranking in video carousels.
Short, snackable videos tend to perform best, so break up longer content into bite-sized chunks. And don‘t forget about closed captions for accessibility.
5. Site Speed Will Be More Critical Than Ever
In 2021, Google made waves by introducing Core Web Vitals, a new set of user-centric performance metrics, as official ranking signals. The message was clear: If you want to rank well, you need a fast, responsive site.
"Two seconds is the new threshold for acceptable page load time," declares Ashley Ward, Director of Web Strategy at Semrush. "Anything slower than that increases your bounce rate exponentially."
To accelerate your site, Ward advises using a content delivery network (CDN), minimizing redirects and plugins, compressing images, and lazy-loading off-screen page elements. Regularly testing your Core Web Vitals using tools like Google‘s PageSpeed Insights can help you benchmark and troubleshoot.
"Site speed is a rare case where you can directly improve both SEO and user experience in one fell swoop," says Ward. "It‘s low-hanging fruit that every website should be optimizing for."
Passing Your Website Traffic Exam
We‘ve covered a lot of ground in this guide, so let‘s recap the key takeaways:
- Traffic and engagement benchmarks vary widely by industry, so it‘s important to compare your website‘s performance to similar businesses.
- Conversion metrics are the most important KPIs for gauging a website‘s overall success and contribution to business goals.
- Organic search is the primary traffic driver in every industry, but a diversified, multi-channel strategy is crucial for long-term growth.
- In 2024, the websites that will win at traffic and engagement are those that adapt quickly to Google‘s UX updates, harness AI strategically, target search intent more granularly, embrace video, and prioritize site speed.
Of course, this is all easier said than done. Keeping up with the ever-changing world of web analytics is a full-time job. But simply being aware of these benchmarks and trends will put you well ahead of the curve.
Consider this guide your cheat sheet. Refer back to it often as you create your web strategy, set your KPIs, and optimize your site. With a little studying and experimentation, you‘ll be acing your traffic exams in no time.
Class dismissed!