What Are Gym Website Metrics, and Why Are They Important?
Website metrics are objective data – generally numerical – that measure the performance of your website. These metrics can tell us how well your gym website attracts visitors and converts them into members. Some are technical, some are time-based and others are based on user experience. Together, they paint a picture of how well your website convinces someone to choose your gym over another.
Why Do These Metrics Matter for Your Gym Website?
Measuring and tracking metrics helps you identify what is working and what needs improvement. Just like tracking workouts to see if you’re getting stronger or faster, measuring website performance ensures your efforts yield results. Without tracking, you’re essentially guessing at what drives progress.
Certain gym website metrics also help us understand your ideal users. For example, website analytics can reveal where most of your visitors are located geographically and what devices they use. This insight allows you to tailor your site to attract more of the right visitors and convert them into paying members.
How to Check Your Gym Website Metrics
Tools like Semrush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics can provide you with just about every website metric that you will need.
- Google Analytics tracks how visitors interact with your site, including how long they stay, which pages they view, and how often they return.
- Semrush monitors site performance, keyword rankings, engagement, and more.
Additionally, at Kilo, we use these tools alongside our software to track gym website metrics and ensure gym owners achieve the results they need.
The Gym Website Metrics That Matter
Below, I’m going to outline the top 9 gym website metrics that gym owners should be measuring regularly. But before I do that, I have one caveat: all of the website metrics require some input from YOU. Even the best website company/developer can’t read your mind, share your website on social media, etc. You need to understand what your business goals are to push your business and your marketing forward.
I’ve said this hundreds of times, but I will say it again: You can have the best website out there but if you don’t tell anyone about it, it is useless. At the end of this article, I’ll give you a few tips on getting your website out into the world to help boost these metrics.
The majority of your gym website metrics should be measured every month, but some need a longer timeline and should be measured quarterly. For example, long-term SEO strategies take months to build, so results should be measured quarterly or annually. However, things like traffic can be measured and compared month over month.
1. Total Number of Visits
This is straightforward: the total number of times people land on your site. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
The ideal number of website visits varies based on your gym’s location, what your gym offers, your target audience, advertising, etc. But you can start to develop your ideal number by tracking it in conjunction with leads and sales to come up with your ideal formula (see also “Conversion Rate” below).
For example:
If you had 400 visits in January that generated 35 leads, resulting in 20 booked appointments and 10 new members, your conversion rate would be 2.5%. From there, you can reverse-engineer how many visits you’ll need to achieve your sales goals.
2. Total Unique Visitors
This is a little different than the metric above in that if one person visits your site twice in the same period it would count as 1 unique visitor but 2 total visits. In short, unique visitors of the actual number of people who visit your site. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
Why would you care about this? It gives you a more accurate picture of your audience size. Are people checking out your site and returning often? Or do they only visit once and bounce?
3. Traffic Sources
This metric shows us how people find your website. They could find you via Google, social media, a marketing email, or paid ads. Understanding where people are finding you will help you understand user behaviour and be more focused with your marketing efforts. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
4. Page Views
This is the total number of times your pages were viewed in a browser on the internet. This is an interesting metric because it tells us what pages people actually care about or are interested in. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
For example, at Kilo, we built super elaborate product pages for our products. When we dug into the page views metric, we saw that the most viewed page was our pricing page (duh), and it was buried in the footer of our site. So we gave it more love and started using it on that page to drive more sales appointments.
5. Session Duration
This is how long people spend on your site before they leave. The longer the session, the better. But just like the visitors’ metrics, it will be dependent on where you are and who your target audience is. If someone is on your site for a longer time, it tells us that you are putting out good content and that the user experience and website design are good. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
This is where I see a lot of gym owners mess up. They will often link a booking software to their site buttons which redirects them after a user clicks a “free intro” or “free trial session”. This is bad and hurts your website’s reputation. It decreases session duration and increases bounce rate (more on that below). Instead, simply collect leads and let them book on a booking calendar embedded into your site or embed scheduling software directly into your site if you can.
Note: you can also measure pages per session, which tells us how many pages someone visits during the time they are on your site. Again, more is better.
6. Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions that are less than 10 sessions long, had no conversion and had fewer than 2 page views. Generally speaking, a bounce rate of under 40% is good. You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
7. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate measures how many visitors complete a specific action, like filling out a form or booking a free intro session (aka, Conversion Event). You can find this in your Google Analytics account.
You will need to define what you want your main “Conversion Event” to be when someone lands on your gym website but after that the math is easy. To calculate it, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors (from above). his is one of the most critical gym website metrics because it directly ties to your revenue.
8. Sales
The golden metric: sales. The one that turns your website into cash. The bottom line is that your website should be making you money by turning visitors into leads and leads into paying members.
This can also be referred to as the lead-to-customer ratio which tells us how many leads we need to get one paying member. This metric can be calculated as the number of paying leads divided by the number of paying customers.
9. Keyword Rankings
This gym website metric falls into the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) category. (and other SEO metrics like organic traffic, backlinks, internal links, page load speed, etc, link to SEO article)
There are a ton of SEO metrics that should be optimized, like page speed, backlinks, internal links, etc., but I’m keeping it simple and just focusing on keywords, as it is one of the most misunderstood gym website metrics among my clients at Kilo.
When someone goes to the internet and searches using a term or terms that are relevant to your business, where (in the search results list) your website shows up on the search results page is your keyword ranking for that term or terms.
For example, if your gym website is the 5th one listed on Google, when someone searches “gym in Toronto,” your keyword ranking is 5 for that term. Most gyms have various keywords that they want to rank for, and ideally, you’d like to rank as highly as possible for as many relevant keywords as possible.
Ranking highly for all relevant keywords takes time and effort. Things like blogging, building out program pages, metadata descriptions, etc., can help. But you have to be consistent about it; there are no shortcuts. You can’t just magically rank number one for “personal training” if you’ve put no time and effort into that term.
You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find relevant terms and then start to build those into your keyword strategy. I also like using Rank Math to make sure I am optimizing my keywords.
How To Boost Your Gym Website Metrics
I’ve given you a lot of gym website metrics to measure but not a lot of strategy. If you are ready to start improving the above metrics, here are some tips:
- Promote Your Website Everywhere
- Add your website link to all your social media profiles (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.).
- Include it in your Google Business Profile and email signatures.
- Leverage Social Media Posts
- Share your website link in Facebook and Reddit posts, especially when answering questions or engaging in local groups.
- Run targeted ad campaigns that link directly to landing pages on your site.
- Optimize for SEO
- Write keyword-focused blog posts that answer common questions your audience searches for.
- Update metadata and improve page load speed.
- Get Involved in Your Community
- Host events or webinars and include your website link in all promotions.
- Partner with local businesses and cross-promote each other’s websites.
- Add Internal Links
- Link to your blog posts and program pages within your site. Internal linking improves SEO and keeps visitors exploring your site longer. It also helps Google understand your site.
- Track and Adjust
- Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor progress. If a specific metric isn’t improving, experiment with changes, like redesigning a page or refining your call-to-action (CTA).
- Call Kilo
- If you aren’t sure where to start. Book a call with Kilo and we can take a lot of this off your plate.