Accurate and insightful web metrics are the key to dominating the digital marketspace. Therefore, measuring and analyzing key digital marketing metrics is crucial. They help understand how effective your digital marketing efforts have been. This allows you to identify areas for improvement, and empowers you to make data-driven decisions.
Why are web metrics important?
Web metrics help you optimize your campaigns and strategies to drive best results. They provide useful insights about customer behaviour as well as the performance of your campaigns. Besides these, web metrics can help you:
- Determine which of your marketing channels are driving the most traffic and conversions
- Identify bottlenecks and weak points in your conversion funnel, so that you can fix them and make improvements
- Measure the ROI of your digital marketing spends
- Make business and marketing decisions based on insightful data rather than on assumptions
- Gain an edge over competition using these metrics to adapt to changing market demands and conditions.
What are the web metrics you should track?
Here are the most important metrics that you should be tracking, to ensure that your marketing efforts yield the desired results. These metrics can be categorized under 3 main groups:
1. Traffic Metrics:
- Total number of visitors- This helps you understand how many visitors come your site each day. A steady growth in this number indicates that your marketing efforts are paying off.
- Sources of Traffic- This helps pinpoint the channels that bring traffic to your site. Traffic may come from:
o Direct visitors, who land on your site by typing the URL
o Organic visitors who visit through search engines
o Referrals, or visitors coming from other websites or pages
o Social media visitors coming from your social media platforms
- New Vs Return visitors- A higher number of return visitors indicates that your content is valuable and engaging.
- Interactions per visit- This shows you what the visitors do on your site, including the pages they visit, what actions they take, etc.
- Bounce rate and exit rate- The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave your site after just viewing one page, and the exit rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave the site from a specific page. Both these metrics are useful to identify issues with campaign targeting and drop-off points in the conversion funnel.
2. Conversion Metrics:
- Total conversions- This is the number of visitors who become leads or customers by taking a certain action, such as filling a form, subscribing, or purchasing something from your site.
- ‘Micro’ conversion rates- Monitoring this provides insights about effectiveness of your sales funnel by tracking small actions or steps that indicate a user is progressing towards the goal.
- Conversion funnel rates- This is the percentage of potential customers progressing through the conversion process.
- Click-Through rates (CTR)- These metrics show the percentage of visitors clicking your ads. They help determine the effectiveness of email marketing and paid ad campaigns.
- Cost per conversion- This represents the average cost of acquiring a conversion.
3. Revenue Metrics:
- Value per visit- This is a measure of the value assigned to visitors’ actions such as giving reviews, sharing content on social media, generating page views, etc. The value per visit gives an understanding about your ability to engage customers.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)- This represents the marketing spend made to acquire a paying customer. It measures the actual cost of acquiring a customer who generates revenue for you.
- Return on investment (ROI), both real and projected- The success of your campaigns boils down to this metric. It combines factors such as cost per lead, lead-to-close ratio, and average customer value, indicating whether your campaigns are profitable, and delivering results to your bottom-line.
All of these metrics are crucial to understand the effectiveness of your marketing channels, identify problem areas, optimize conversion processes, measure profitability, and ultimately drive marketing ROI. By tracking and analyzing these metrics you can get an all-round understanding of your overall digital marketing performance. However, these metrics should always be analyzed in relation to one another, and not in isolation. This way, you can remain agile and optimize your strategies based on real data, while staying ahead of the curve in the constantly-evolving digital marketplace.