Key Metrics & KPI Widgets
Understand what each core metric means, and put the important ones front and center.
The KPI Metric Widget
The KPI Metric widget displays a single metric as a large number with its trend — perfect for the top of a dashboard.
- Open your Dashboard
- Open Manage Dashboard → Add a widget
- Choose the KPI Metric widget
- Pick the metric it should display
- Drag it into position
Each KPI widget shows the current value for your selected date, the change versus the previous period, and a trend arrow. Add one per number you actually steer by. KPI widgets respect the dashboard’s date selection, so changing the date updates them all.
Core Metric Definitions
Traffic
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Visits | Sessions on your site. A returning visitor more than 30 minutes after their last pageview starts a new visit. |
| Unique Visitors | Unduplicated people. A person visiting three times in a day counts once. |
| Pageviews | The number of times pages were viewed, including repeats. |
| Unique Pageviews | The number of visits that included a given page — multiple views of the page within one visit count once. |
| Actions | Everything visitors do: pageviews, internal searches, downloads, and outlinks. |
| Actions per Visit | The average number of actions performed during a visit. |
Note: unique visitors are computed for day, week, and month periods. Year and custom-range periods don’t show unique visitors by default — contact support if you need them.
Engagement
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bounce Rate | The percentage of visits with only a single pageview — the visitor left directly from their entrance page. |
| Avg. Visit Duration | The average length of a visit. Bounced visits count as 0 seconds. |
| Avg. Time on Page | Average time spent on one specific page (not the whole site). |
| Returning Visits | Visits from people who have visited before — compare them to new visitors in the Visitors reports. |
| Max Actions in Visit | The most actions recorded in a single visit. |
Conversions
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Conversions | Total goal completions. |
| Conversion Rate | The percentage of visits that converted at least one goal (a visit converting several goals counts once). |
| Revenue | Goal and ecommerce revenue, in your site’s configured currency. |
Content
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Downloads / Unique Downloads | Clicks on tracked files; “unique” counts visits, not clicks. |
| Outlinks / Unique Outlinks | Clicks on links to external sites; same unique logic. |
| Site Searches | Internal searches performed on your site. |
Users
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Users | Unique visitors who had a User ID set (your site identifies signed-in users via setUserId). Only meaningful if User ID tracking is configured. |
Using KPI Widgets Effectively
Choose Metrics That Matter
Don’t add every available KPI. Focus on the metrics that:
- Align with your organization’s goals
- Inform decisions you make regularly
- Indicate the health of your website
Common KPI Combinations
For Marketing Teams:
- Visits
- Conversion Rate
- Conversions
For Content Teams:
- Pageviews
- Avg. Visit Duration
- Bounce Rate
For Executive Dashboards:
- Unique Visitors
- Conversions
- Revenue
Create Focused Dashboards
Use Manage Dashboard → Create new dashboard to build separate views:
- A daily-monitoring dashboard with a KPI row on top
- A campaign dashboard pairing KPIs with acquisition widgets
- An executive dashboard with just the numbers leadership asks about
Next Steps
- Dashboard — Dashboard customization in full
- Goals — Set up conversions to track in KPIs
- Custom Reports — Build detailed reports beyond KPIs