Stop Guessing: Let Website Analytics Guide Your Investments

According to data from a recent Clutch survey, 90% of small businesses plan to invest in their websites in 2025. This reflects broad recognition of the value of having a great site. But designing one can be challenging.

For example, you may know that you want your website to convert more of the traffic it captures, but what metrics do you track to make it happen? And how do you optimize for traffic, dwell time, and other key performance indicators over time to continue improving?

This guide covers everything you need to know to start using website analytics to prioritize updates. We also take a look at how other small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will be investing their web design budgets over the next 12 months.

Key Website Metrics Defined

First, it’s important to understand best practices for evaluating website performance. You’ll need to know which metrics truly matter before deciding how to allocate your limited investment dollars. Some of the most important include:

There are two main ways to use metrics like these:

1. Measure them over time, so you can see how trends evolve in your website usage. For example, if you have a 5% bounce rate in January, but a 2.5% rate in June, you’ll know that the strategies you’ve implemented are working.
2. Comparing your metrics to industry benchmarks to better understand how your rates compare to the average website in your sector. For instance, you may only average 1.5 pages per session, but that could be high for your industry and not worth priority investment.

Both strategies are equally valuable and should each be practiced for the best results. Understanding your own internal improvements and how they compare to standardized averages are two key steps in leveraging website analytics effectively in 2025.

One last thing to note before we dive into addressing specific metrics: If you see multiple below-average metrics at once and aren't sure what to invest in first, it often makes sense to start with site experience. Investing in better navigation and faster load times can help you everywhere and show you where to spend first.

Website Traffic: When To Invest in More Visitors

Many companies prioritize investments in building website traffic. They see it as a baseline metric that’s easy to use to measure progress. However, the number of people who visit your site doesn’t tell the whole story of how it’s doing.

If your traffic is already high for your industry, that’s often a sign that you should prioritize solutions for driving conversions, not capturing more leads at the top of your funnel.

If your traffic is low but engagement and conversions are strong, it’s worth investing in traffic-driving solutions. You would want to spend on SEO, ads, content marketing, and other traffic-first strategies.

One way to drive traffic is with paid ads. Rachel Cunningham, Content Marketing Director at Bop Design, recommends, “properly managing and monitoring your ads to ensure they’re highly focused on actual buying terms. Not just driving random traffic to the website.” Cunningham advises prioritizing “SEO strategies that focus on key buying terms will bring the right traffic to the site to be educated, nurtured, and converted.”

Ultimately, it's not always worth investing in traffic just for the sake of getting more of it. Depending on your conversion rate, it may or may not be a better use of your limited budget to spend that money elsewhere.

Bounce Rates and Exit Pages: Where Visitors Drop Off

Next, consider investing in solutions to address the problem of high bounce rates. These often indicate a poor website experience, slow speed, or content that doesn’t match your users’ expectations.

Josh Locke, Marketing Manager at Harrison Carloss, says, “If traffic is dropping off on specific pages, navigating to low-priority pages, or your homepage has a higher-than-average bounce rate, this can be a telling sign that your navigation needs improvement.”

Heral, Managing Director at a WooCommerce Agency, adds, “Page speed is one of the most common challenges we solve. We’ve seen how much of an impact it can have on conversions, user experience, and overall business performance.”

Analytics can help you pinpoint the issues driving your high bounce rates. You can use them to find common exit pages, optimize them based on user flows, and monitor them over time to reduce bounce rates and prioritize future updates.

Engagement Metrics: Dwell Time, Pages Per Session, Average Session Duration

Once you feel good about traffic and bounce rates, you can start prioritizing engagement metrics. KPIs like dwell time, pages per session, and average session duration are tools for measuring conversion potential.

Essentially, the more someone engages with your site, the likelier they are to convert. So, by optimizing for metrics that measure engagement, you can start converting more of the traffic you get.

Arham Khan, CEO of Pixated Agency, recommends embedded social feeds for boosting engagement, saying, “Embedded feeds — particularly Instagram and TikTok for lifestyle brands — keep the site dynamic by showcasing fresh content and driving engagement."

You might also consider adding interactive elements to your site, like quizzes and calculators. These can make your site more useful to visitors, which can increase their dwell time. Or, maybe you want to optimize for pages per session. In that case, it could make sense to add more internal links to your pages. For example, you could recommend a related blog post or link to case studies that keep your audience thinking about your brand.

Ultimately, don't guess what content or features to add. Instead, let dwell time and pages per session guide decisions. That way, each dollar you spend is tied to a measurable outcome that you can track and refine over time.

User Flow and Visitor Demographics: Map the Customer Journey

User flow and visitor demographics help you understand how people navigate around your site after they’ve already gotten there from an external source. This information is critical to ensure that your site's traffic is going where you want them to.

Markerle Davis, CEO at SoapMedia, says, “Think about how each page contributes to the user journey and how content can support navigation, engagement, and conversions.”

For example, if users drop off at checkout most frequently, invest in better checkout design or navigation. Or, if the pages with your highest exit rates are key service pages, you’d want to invest in redesigning the layout, call-to-action, or imagery.

Mapping your customers’ journey might also reveal some common, but unexpected paths they take. This can be a sign to adjust navigation and menus to match how your visitors are naturally exploring the site — instead of optimizing for how you thought they would.

As you do this, consider segmenting mobile and desktop users. Each type of user may experience different pain points in their website navigation journey, and you want to be able to optimize for both.

From Insights to Investments: Where SMBs Are Prioritizing in 2025

According to data from Clutch, SMBs plan on a diverse array of website updates in 2025. They include the following:

• Full redesign/visual refresh (58%): Analytics can reveal outdated navigation styles or poor usability, signaling that a complete design overhaul may be due. It's important to note that, "A redesign is needed every 3-5 years or when branding, technology, or user expectations shift significantly,” says Muzammil K, Marketing Manager at Aalpha Information Systems. “The decision should be based on analytics, user feedback, competitor comparisons, and alignment with business objectives.”
• Speed/performance (53%): Slow load times greatly impact the overall performance of your website, and over one in two small businesses are focusing on making their websites quicker in 2025.
• Mobile optimization (45%): Nearly half of the surveyed companies will spend to optimize their sites for mobile user flow and session metrics. These upgrades will help companies convert more mobile users.
• Content marketing (38%) and SEO (37%): Many brands will use metrics like pages per session, dwell time, and traffic sources to decide how to invest in content marketing and SEO. They may spend on blogs, keyword optimization services, and other upgrades.
• Security updates (34%): Your website analytics can reveal potential security vulnerabilities, like suspicious traffic patterns or repeated failed login attempts from the same IP range. These insights highlight areas where you may need stronger authentication, bot protection, or other safeguards to protect user data and keep trust intact.
• E-commerce and payment functionality (32%): Exit page and user flow data can show where checkout or payment obstacles exist. Businesses will use the information in 2025 to prioritize investments that maximize conversions.

Together, these metrics illustrate a clear trend: SMBs are letting analytics shape their priorities. This way, every investment they make ties back to a justifiable business goal.

Final Thoughts: Put Your Website Analytics Into Action

There’s a reason why 90% of SMBs plan to invest in their websites over the next 12 months — it works. But only if you optimize based on real user metrics, and not vague hopes of improvement.

The process begins by tracking the metrics that matter most to your brand. Then you can prioritize, invest, measure, and repeat as often as it takes to hit your targets. Along the way, make sure to let website analytics guide your updates and redesign decisions to improve your ROI.

As part of that process, you may want to work with a top web design agency that can put your analytics into action faster.

About the Author

Jeanette Godreau Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Clutch

Jeanette Godreau crafts in-depth content on web design, graphic design, and branding to help B2B buyers make confident decisions on Clutch.  

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