When it comes to owning and operating a business, a huge portion of your time is spent tracking and calculating the effectiveness of certain decisions. From tracking employee time to ensuring budgets are being kept to, there are metrics to be aware of in every aspect of your business, and this is especially true where your website is concerned.

If you’re using an analytics system like Google Analytics to help track how your website is doing, you can get really overwhelmed with the amount of data you’re inundated with on even an hourly basis. It can be hard to know how all this information works together to give you a clear picture of what’s going on with your online presence. To help make this easier, here are the top three metrics you should be concerned with when understanding your website analytics.

Your Traffic Sources

Knowing and understanding where your website visitors are coming from will help give you tons of useful information when trying to have a successful website. According to Corey Eridon of HubSpot, you can tap into the most advantageous information only once you understand what each traffic source actually means.

For example, getting referral traffic usually means that someone came to your site from a link on someone else’s website. This helps you to understand that there is another website out there linking to your pages and helping to share your name and products or services. Once you know how your visitors are getting to your website, you can spend more time and money focusing on the traffic sources that work and less on the ones that don’t.

Your Cost Per Acquisition

To help you better understand what cost per acquisition means, Jason Spooner of Social Media Explorer states that this metric shows you how much of your money you have to spend on marketing in order to make a sale. Once you know and understand what this metric is, you can see the true value of all your online marketing efforts and what your return on that investment is. Depending on how much your customers spend when they’re with you, your target cost per acquisition will vary, so make sure you do your research and get the right metrics when finding your true cost per acquisition.

Your High-Performing Keywords

Keywords are getting harder and harder to track using tools like straight Google Analytics because much of the organic data Google collects is now unavailable to website owners. However, Kristi Hines, a contributor to KISSmetrics, shares that there are still five solid ways to get a handle on your high-performing keywords without Google giving them to you directly. By using Hines’ tricks for finding your high-performing keywords, you can get a better understanding of what type of content or products are driving traffic to your website, making this a very important metric to track.

While tracking a large number of metrics will help to give you a greater picture of your website’s overall health and success, acquiring the time and expertise to understand all these metrics just isn’t plausible for many business owners. So for those of you who just want to get down to the nitty-gritty, the above three metrics will give you just what you need.