A website is the first point of contact between your business and your potential customers. This means, whatever the nature of your business, you really can’t do without a website anymore. However, having a website alone is not enough. For your business to grow, your website should be able to make a positive impact on your prospective customers. So it has to be a good website! But then again, a good website alone can’t do the trick. To be able to survive online, your website should perform well…and to thrive, it should perform exceedingly well. The only way you can make this possible is by constantly assessing and improving your website’s performance. How do you do that? By measuring the KPIs. Yes, this is why KPIs are important. Not only that, KPIs are also invaluable in evaluating the performance of your online marketing campaigns. They give you useful insights that can help you make more informed decisions.
So, what are KPIs?
KPIs are short for Key Performance Indicators. They are metrics that help you assess the effectiveness of your online efforts. The internet has become a bustling marketplace with a whole lot of businesses and websites trying to get the attention of potential customers. Online marketing campaigns are now an inevitable part of every company’s marketing efforts. So, having a way to measure the success of these campaigns is crucial. KPIs help you do this. They measure the performance of your website by taking several metrics into account. They help you understand how visitors interact with your website, and more importantly tell you if your marketing efforts are aligned with your business goals, and whether they are bringing good results.
Studies have proven time and again that businesses making decisions based on consumer data tend to significantly outperform their peers. So why not make use of the goldmine of data that KPIs provide, to identify areas for growth and improvement?
What KPIs Can You Track?
Before exploring the benefits of KPIs for online marketing, let’s find out what KPIs you can track and what they indicate about your website:
- Traffic – You can track how many visitors found your website through an organic search. With this data you can determine whether your SEO efforts have been paying off or not. Similarly, you can also track where your traffic comes from. Does it come from social media, links on other sites, or other referrals.
- Duration of your visitors’ stay- This tells you the average amount of time spent by a visitor on your web page in a single session. With this data you can understand what interests your visitors, and how you can give them more of what they like on your website.
- Popular visiting time- KPIs can tell you what time of the day your website receives the maximum traffic. Identifying patterns in the visiting time allows you to determine the best time for promoting new products or posting new content on your website.
- Tracking the bounce rate- The bounce rate tells you if your visitors are leaving your site quickly. This could mean that you need to optimize your website with relevant and engaging content in order to reduce the bounce rate.
- Number of pages viewed- Pageview metrics tell you the number of pages that were viewed by your visitors, and how much time they spent on each page. This can reveal a great deal about how engaging your web pages are and which are the most popular ones.
- Rate of conversions- The conversion rate can be a very clear indicator of how effective your website is, in persuading visitors to take the desired action. This allows you to make necessary changes or improvements on your website.
How KPIs Help Your Online Marketing Campaigns
- They help track progress. KPIs are like markers that help assess the impact of your digital marketing campaigns. They tell you the progress you have made and how far you are from your marketing goals.
- They promote better decisions. Data driven decisions almost always produce desired outcomes. Online marketing campaigns are meant to deliver results. KPIs tell you whether the digital marketing strategy you adopted for these campaigns is working or not, so that you can make the necessary intervention based on the insights derived from KPIs.
- They guide you in allocating resources. Whether it’s time, money, or manpower, your resources are valuable. They are also limited. The insights derived from measuring KPIs tell you where and how to allocate resources for optimal results. They help you prioritize the allocation of resources based on your online performance.
- They enable improvement. KPIs help you identify areas for improvement. By telling you where your efforts yield the best results and which areas need your attention, they help you optimize your online presence. With KPIs you can make sure your website speed is optimal, your content strategy is working at its best, and your visitors are having an engaging experience on your website.
- They boost marketing ROI. When your marketing decisions are based on numbers rather than assumptions, you’re likely to achieve the best results. Successful web pages give you the opportunity to identify patterns that can be replicated across all your webpages, and guide you in future optimization initiatives.
Website KPIs give you invaluable information about the performance and effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. Moreover, they identify areas that need improvement and help you optimize all aspects of your website by aligning them with your business goals. In fact, instead of treating these KPIs as mere numbers on a dashboard, you should start making the most of them, because paying attention to these metrics can help you turn your website into a powerful tool that can help you understand your potential consumers like never before.