There’s so much data you can be recording about your online activities, but the problem is that there’s no single report which can bring everything together, unless you create it yourself. Here’s a core list of things you might like to track, perhaps in a spreadsheet or whatever you’re comfortable using to keep records. It’s very basic, and you may have much more sophisticated breakdowns you’d wish to make under one or more headings.
1. Website visitors
The most obvious metric to measure. I tend to record the New Visitors and Returning Visitors numbers, and the session data, from the New vs Returning report in Google Analytics. Always ensure your spambot filtering is up to date.
2. Advertising response
Record the visits from each advertising source you use, and the spending involved that month. Include subscriptions to directories and any other ongoing promotions.
3. Email enquiries
Record the number of email or web form enquiries, and the original source of these where available.
4. Site health
Run a reports such as the one at web.dev.
5. Search engine performance
Record the inbound traffic from search engines. Monitor position in Google results for a few key search terms. They don’t have to be the most important, or the most prolific – sometimes those where you’re not ranking very highly produce interesting results. Use Search Console to record impressions and clicks in Google results.
6. Inbound links
Use an online tool like this to monitor the number of referring domains and whatever system the tool uses to give some sort of rating.
7. Videos
Monitor the views of your videos (and of course the number of videos) on any third-party sites like YouTube.