In today’s world, businesses can’t succeed without a solid online presence. In fact, search engines like Google have made it virtually essential for businesses to have a website as well as social media accounts. Having a digital footprint is now expected of every business, regardless of size. And with many people getting their news and ideas online first through social media, businesses must keep up with these platforms if they want to remain relevant.
While there are many success stories of online marketing, there are plenty of examples of businesses that failed due to poor planning and measurement. To ensure you don’t make the same mistakes, we’ve collected several key online marketing metrics that every marketer should know.
Visitor Stats
One of the most important metrics to track is your website’s traffic. Even if you have a single article on your site with a few thousand words, that’s worth something. Having just one very popular article can help you drive a ton of traffic to your site and potentially make you a lot of money. But you need to make sure you measure this metric correctly, because attracting a lot of website visitors isn’t straightforward. There are various tools that can help you track your website’s traffic, but not all of them are created equal. And you certainly don’t want to invest in a tool that doesn’t give you accurate data.
Luckily, there’s a free tool that can help you track all of this data. Google Analytics is one of the most popular and widely used platforms when it comes to website traffic analysis. With Google Analytics, you can set up custom metrics and view reports to understand how visitors are finding your website and what they’re doing on it. You can also set up multiple user accounts so that you can track the behaviour of different groups of people.
Setting up Google Analytics on your site is pretty easy and only takes a few minutes. Then, all you have to do is visit your Analytics dashboard to begin measuring and tracking your website’s traffic. From there, you can easily view the number of visitors to your site each month as well as what countries they’re coming from and what devices they’re using to access your content (i.e. desktop versus laptop versus tablet versus mobile phone).
Demographics
An important factor that can affect a website’s traffic is its audience. After all, not all visitors are created equal and you want to ensure that you’re reaching the right audience with your content. Knowing the demographics of your audience can help you tailor your strategy and approach for greater effect. This is why you should track your website’s traffic by demographics as well as by device.
It’s always a good idea to look at the demographics of your website’s existing audience. You can do this by going to your Analytics dashboard and selecting “Demographics” under the “Audience” section. From there, you can see information like the age, gender and location of your site’s current visitors. You can even choose to show specific demographics (e.g. “Women aged between 20-29”) or specific locations (e.g. “New York, NY”). Having access to this information will help you determine which audience segments to focus on and which platforms to use for your content (e.g. video versus written content).
Conversions
Like many other metrics, the measure of your success as a marketer will heavily rely on the amount of traffic that ultimately converts into paying customers. In other words, how many people reach your site but then choose to do business with you rather than your competitor. For this reason, it’s vital to regularly measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, and conversions is a good place to start.
Once you’ve set up Google Analytics on your site with the previous steps, you can start tracking your conversions. To do this, navigate to your “Conversions” tab under the “Summary” section of your Analytics dashboard. Here, you can see key metrics like the number of visitors that entered your store but didn’t make a purchase, the number of visitors that entered but didn’t scroll past the second paragraph, or the number of visitors that reached your conclusion (i.e. the bottom of the page or the sign up box).
By regularly measuring these metrics (and others, like average order value and basket size) you can determine the success of your marketing efforts and make necessary adjustments to improve sales.
User Behaviour
A website’s user behaviour is another important factor to consider when analyzing its traffic. This includes things like the number of times users come back (i.e. the bounce rate), how long they stay on your site (i.e. the average time on page), or the types of articles they’re reading (i.e. the most popular categories).
You can track your user behaviour by selecting “Users” under the “Behavior” section of your Analytics dashboard. Here, you can see information about your site’s registered users as well as anonymous visitors. To view registered users, navigate to the “Users” tab under the “Settings” section of your dashboard. You can then choose to display only certain user details (e.g. first name, last name or email address) or view everything including IP addresses (i.e. the unique identifiers that identify each device that connects to the internet).
You can use this information to determine the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns or determine the interests of your site’s audience.
Content Marketing
It’s no secret that businesses evolve and change with time, especially when it comes to their marketing strategy. As a result, the way you measure success will also change over time. But to keep things simple, you may want to start by looking at how often your content is being shared and whether or not it’s sparking interest and driving traffic to your site.
To start, look at the demographics of those who have shared your content the most. You can access this information by selecting “Content” under the “Shares” section of your Analytics dashboard and choosing “Content that has grown the most in shares” under the “Content” section. You can then see the most shared articles along with their popularity in the form of “shares” (i.e. the number of unique Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or LinkedIn profiles that have shared your content).
This metric doesn’t show you everything, but it does give you an idea of the overall popularity of your content. Keep in mind that this is a broad metric and doesn’t always reflect the success of your content in driving business.
Email Marketing
Although email marketing is not as flashy as online advertising, it can be an extremely effective way to generate business. After all, who wouldn’t like to receive discounts and special offers directly in their inbox?
To track the success of your email marketing campaigns, you can use a tool like AWeber. With AWeber, you can setup automated email campaigns that send broadcasts or single emails to a list of subscribers. You can even set up autoresponders so that you can follow up with new subscribers directly from your email campaign. And best of all, you can use templates that make creating your emails a quick and easy process.
When you’re measuring the success of your email marketing efforts, it’s important to track four key metrics: open rate (the percentage of successful emails that were opened by the recipient), click-through rate (the percentage of successful emails that were clicked on by the recipient), conversion rate (the percentage of successful emails that were later confirmed as sales or leads) and average order value (the average amount of money spent by a customer as a result of receiving your email). By regularly measuring and tracking these metrics, you can determine the success of your email marketing strategy and make necessary adjustments.
Social Media
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard of social media. After all, who isn’t on social media?
While there are many platforms like Twitter and Facebook that can help you connect with potential clients and customers, measuring the success of your social media marketing strategy can be tricky. This is especially true for businesses that want to see how much exposure their content is getting on social media platforms.
To start, you may want to look at the demographics of those who have used your content the most when sharing it on social media. This can be done by selecting “Shares” under the “Reach” section of your Analytics dashboard and then choosing “Content that has grown the most in shares.” You can then see the most shared articles along with their popularity in the form of “shares” (i.e. the number of unique Twitter accounts, Facebook pages or LinkedIn profiles that have shared your content).