What is a website performance report?
A website performance report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Analytics, Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., page load time, bounce rate, user sessions), enabling teams to monitor website performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Website performance reports are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a website performance report?
An actionable website performance report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive website performance reports
Executive reports for CTOs, CEOs, and stakeholders show the website's impact on business goals. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Website traffic analysis: by source, using attribution for large traffic volumes.
- User behavior analysis: bounce rate, session duration, pages per session
- Conversion analysis: goal completions, conversion rates by user segment
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Website manager reports
Manager reports have cross-source views with drill-downs to see performance by page, region, device, and traffic source. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-source reporting: overall website performance, page speed, and user engagement across sources
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for benchmarking website performance
- Content and SEO research
Operational Website Performance Reports
Operational reports for analysts and web managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Page speed: load time, time to first byte, render time
- SEO: keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, errors, backlinks
- User engagement: session duration, bounce rate, exit rate
- Technical performance: server response time, error rates
Operational website performance reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a website performance report?
To build a website performance report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Google Analytics for web analytics, Google Search Console for SEO data, PageSpeed Insights for performance metrics, and CRM or E-commerce for conversion data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of website performance report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like traffic monitoring, page speed analysis, and user engagement tracking.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point, make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom events, CRM contact data, GA4 events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your website performance reporting use cases, such as traffic monitoring, page speed analysis, and user engagement tracking.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1) modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Pageviews, Sessions, Bounce Rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, page, device, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your website performance reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your website performance reports:
Share
Share your website performance reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a website performance report?
Website performance reports should include a mix of traffic, engagement, conversion, efficiency, and technical metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of the website towards business goals. They include:
Website traffic KPIs measure the user journey (from the website perspective), regardless of the source:
- Traffic metrics: pageviews, sessions, unique visitors
- Engagement metrics: bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session
- Conversion metrics: goal completions, conversion rates, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your website outputs to the cost, including:
- Traffic: cost per session
- Engagement: cost per engaged session
- Conversion: cost per conversion
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Traffic: return visitor rate
- Engagement: engagement rate
- Conversion: conversion rate
Technical and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your website performance:
- Technical: page load time, server response time
- Cost: hosting costs, development costs
- Efficiency: ROI, cost per acquisition
- Effectiveness: average order value, average customer value
To analyze these website performance KPIs, segment them by:
- Source: organic, direct, referral, social
- Time: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Page: landing page, exit page
- Device: desktop, mobile, tablet
- Geography: region, country
- Content: page type, topic, keyword
