A lot of digital marketing agencies provide their clients with 50-page reports monthly. These clients are presented with every metric a reporting tool can produce, the good, the bad, and the unimportant. But they don’t always have a good way to tell which. So what digital marketing metrics matter, and how do you understand them?
Let’s try and help you put these into context. The two most commonly used metrics are traffic and conversions.
Understanding Website Traffic
It seems like a no-brainer, on first glance, to say that if traffic is up that’s good and if it’s down it’s bad. After all, the more people you have on your site the better, right? And this is mostly true.
The thing is, mostly true isn’t the same as completely accurate. If you increase organic traffic by bringing in visitors who don’t fit your customer model, there probably aren’t going to be any more sales out of it.
You Need the Right Traffic
It’s very easy to bring in extra visitors to a site dedicated to selling machining components to seasoned engineers. Publish a blog that explains those components at a school level of understanding, and your blog will perform really well – with teenagers who have homework to do. But those visitors aren’t buying your product, and even the ones who join your target market will have had years to forget your brand before they do.
(To bring in useful traffic your agency should instead be looking to make any new or revised content suitable for your actual customers – which, for a site like that, takes more research, more time, and more fact-checking. But it can pay off, especially if you support it well with the best way to earn backlinks.)
The most effective way to get more traffic through Google Ads is to increase your budget. Do that and your ads will be shown more often. And this can be great for your business!
But you would get a better return on your spending by carefully monitoring what searches your ad runs for and eliminating the ones that don’t work, or splitting out the best target keywords to give them more of the daily spend. Perhaps your ad copy isn’t engaging enough, or just doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Or, worse, it’s aimed at the wrong market, so the people you’re bringing in aren’t customers.
Understanding Traffic Drops
First things first: There are times when dropping traffic is absolutely a problem and needs to be fixed. If your paid ads or email campaigns were effective, and you see that effectiveness drop, you should be asking why – maybe the competition has increased for your ad keywords, which affects your cost per acquisition.
Maybe your email template needs freshening up, or you sent some emails your mailing list weren’t interested in and they stopped paying attention. Or maybe your email marketing platform (or your email domain) has been suspected of spam and penalised, so messages aren’t getting through anymore.
Similarly, if your site stops showing on the first page of results for the keywords your customers are searching for, your organic traffic will have dropped, and that’s a problem. There might be an issue with the content on the site, or it might just be that competitors have better content so you’ve slipped down the rankings.
Any time traffic drops it should be investigated, and if your team can’t explain the drop there’s reason to be cautious. But there are still some traffic drops that can be expected, and some that aren’t harmful.
The most obvious example of these is this:
Any florist website will get less traffic in March than it did in February. That’s simply because Valentines’ Day represents a seasonal peak in flower sales. So it’s not a big deal that traffic has dropped – but if traffic is lower than the previous March, you’ll want to ask questions.
Similarly, if your eCommerce site drops one of its best-selling lines, you’re going to see traffic to the site decrease. The point to be worried about this is if you don’t start to see signs of a bounce back.
Sadly, in the past year, a new reason for traffic to drop has crept in; AI Overviews. You’ll have seen these at the top of some of your Google searches.
They use the information from the countless sites Google has indexed to generate an answer to the search, and if that answer is good enough, the search user won’t bother to click through to the sites that Google drew on.
Unless, of course, they were searching for a product, in which case your eCommerce site might still get the traffic.
Understanding Conversions (or Key Events)
You may have heard the expression conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) before. If not, a conversion is what the digital marketing industry calls the moment where a site visitor becomes a lead (or a customer, if it’s an eCommerce site). Recently, Google Analytics renamed these as Key Events.
So how do we measure that?
Aside from purchases, you have to decide what counts as a conversion before you can set it up. It’s pretty common to treat someone filling out your contact form as a conversion, especially if any support queries would be handled differently. If there’s an option on your site to request a quote, that’s a definite expression of interest and should be tracked.
There are definitely other factors that might be conversions, depending on the site. But:
- If there are errors in conversion tracking, the metric isn’t useful
- If there are errors in conversion tracking, that can directly affect your Google Ads performance on a feedback loop
- If an event that doesn’t really represent buy-in for the user is treated as a conversion, this causes the same issues
When looking at an Analytics account for a new client (one set up by someone else) this week we noticed that New Users had been set as a conversion. So for that user, any time a visitor who hadn’t been to the site in the past 30 days visited the site, that counted as a conversion – even if they immediately left. Needless to say, we can’t approve of that as a conversion metric.
Understanding the Bottom Line
For almost all businesses, the goal of their online presence is to bring in more business, resulting in more money for the business. This would be the perfect digital marketing metric, except that it’s difficult to directly track – and that’s the reason you see so much work go into other metrics to use as an approximation.
There are many different ways you can do this, including:
- Attracting more customers
- Targeting areas or demographics you’ve had difficulty reaching but who could benefit from your products
- Targeting people who buy from your competitors
- Building awareness of your brand, so that users come back to you when they’re ready to buy
- Discussing the problem your product solves so people who didn’t know there was a solution can find out and buy it
- Showcasing case studies, testimonials, and other proofs to help build trust
- Offering free downloads or video tutorials to encourage user buy-in
Most businesses will do a mix of several of these.
Some results are easy to track, but it’s much harder to precisely measure (for example) how much business brand awareness brings in, especially as that can pay off months after the first exposure.
And, of course, if someone searches for local businesses on their phone, the reason your listing was at the top of the list is partly due to optimisation done on the site – but they may never click onto the site, just seeing the point on the map and heading across. Google will record these visits if they click to ask for directions, but not if they don’t.
So which metrics should you be focusing on?
You’ll want to keep an eye on traffic from whatever marketing channels you’re using, but make sure it’s the right traffic.
You should identify the right conversions to track and implement or troubleshoot their tracking.
If you’re not sure which would be the right way to go, why not contact us and see how we can help?
