Digital Marketing Metrics to Watch
Ask any seasoned Internet marketer and they will likely agree: metrics are critical to running a successful campaign. Maintaining a commercially driven website without analytics software in place is like driving a car without headlights at night.
You are essentially hoping for the best, without any clear path to guide your way. But which metrics should you be analyzing with your digital marketing efforts?
Traffic
Sounds simple enough, right? You’ll want to keep an eye on your website’s traffic to determine how many people are visiting it, and whether this number is increasing or decreasing. Assuming you use Google Analytics (recommended), it will reveal this information and more.
Log into your GA dashboard and access the Acquisition report section > Overview > Sessions column. Ideally, your overall traffic should steadily increase and not decrease, as this indicates that more people are visiting your site.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors to your website who make a purchase or otherwise take the desired action. You should monitor your conversion rates, especially when you are paying for traffic. Because if your site’s conversion rate is low, you could end up spending more money than what your site earns.
Total Conversions
As the name suggests, total conversions is the total amount of conversions that your website has generated during a specified period. If you have conversion tracking set up in GA, you can access this metric by logging into your dashboard and choosing Conversions > Goals > Overview > Source/Medium > view the full report.
Traffic Sources
Of course, you’ll also want to watch your site’s traffic sources. In other words, where are your visitors coming from?
Traffic sources may include pay-per-click (PPC) platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Ads, as well as organic searches, Google image searches, social media, type-in, news reports, and more. By keeping tabs on your traffic sources, you’ll know which sites are sending the most visitors and which ones are sending the least.
Bounce Rate
Another metric to watch is bounce rate. Not to be confused with exit rate, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors (either site-wide or page-specific) that leave without clicking through to a second page. Want more information on high bounce rates? Take a look at this post.
If half of your site’s visitors exit out after visiting just a single page, your site has a 50% site-wide bounce rate. A high bounce rate is usually indicative of some other problem, such as irrelevant content, long load times or poor navigation. Keep a close eye on your site’s bounce rate, making subtle changes to try and lower it.
Which digital marketing metrics do you think are the most important? Let us know in the comments section below!
