Just as pawing over your financial accounts can help you provide the basis of important financial company metrics, peering under the hood of your website can unearth just how efficiently the online arm of your business is faring. Tapping into the right website metrics can help you understand the actual demographics of your traffic against what you’re actually trying to attract. Beyond that, monitoring your website metrics will help you gauge just how potent your online marketing campaigns are.
Here are the main website metrics that are the most important:
- Email Marketing Metrics. Still a titan of a marketing technique, keeping tabs on your email numbers will help you understand how targeted your list is and how your email content is being received. Keep a close eye on stats like the number of opens (how many people actually open the email), Bounces (incorrect emails) and Clicks (how many people actually clicked on your links). So, if you sent out an email to 10,000 people and only 50 opened the email, that would tell you that your list on the whole are not especially engaged with, or look forward to your messages.
- Website Metrics. Website metrics tell us who is visiting our sites and from which countries and specific referring sites. There are many stats available when you install a free tracking tool such as Google Analytics. You should keep an eye on the total visits as well as the returning visits to see just how many people are coming back for a second bite at the cherry. Referring websites can be a valuable snip of information to see which other sites are referring the bulk of your traffic, so that you can leverage upon this. The keywords metrics will tell you what keywords have been searched for to get people to your pages. Other features you may find useful within a good tracking program will include the geographical location of visitors and a graphical representation of how the traffic has performed over the days, weeks and months.
- Google Adwords. For those using pay per click such as Adwords, keep an eye on the Click Through Rate (CTR, which is the percentage of people who saw the ad who clicked on it), impression share (compares the impressions to specific search terms), bounce rate (people who after clicking your ad failed to explore the site further), and conversion rate (how well your clicks convert to sales).
- Mobile Metrics. Mobile devices are accounting for increased traffic over traditional sources. This has meant that online businesses are now increasingly monitoring not only how their websites are doing, but how much of this performance is due to access from mobile devices.
- Social Metrics. There are now a wide cache of tools and measurements to help us pinpoint the potency of our social marketing campaigns. Social metrics might be a little tricky to measure against sales, but are valuable nonetheless – how many people are talking about your products on Facebook? How many repins do you manage on Pinterest? Tools like Klout can help you decipher how influential your social media campaigns actually are.