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.
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?