With all the technology available today, there’s absolutely no reason to fly blind into your marketing campaigns. Every marketing decision you make should be calculated and intelligent. It should be backed by data and the results of all your actions should be bookmarked for future reference.
At the end of the day, what’s the point of running marketing campaigns if you’re not using historical data to improve and adapt?
There is a lot of data available at your disposal and it can be difficult finding the relevant metrics. More often than not, the main issue I come across is that businesses are focusing on too many metrics. And yes, it is possible to have too much data. You’ll end up spreading yourself too thin by not focusing on your core aims and goals.
The core data you need to focus on, can all be found with Google Analytics. Check out our other helpful Google Analytics blog posts.
So, when it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness, what metrics matter?
Know your marketing goals
Before you decide what metrics matter most to monitor, you need to figure out what you’re trying to achieve. Without a goal, you are essentially wasting your time and money. These goals can be as broad as “create awareness of a new product”, or as specific as “reduce bounce rate of SEO blog posts”. Give yourself a target and aim for it.
Conversions
Let’s face it, your ultimate goal and the reason you’re even doing any digital marketing is to increase conversions. These conversions take place when a visitor or customer completes certain actions, as a result of your digital marketing. Conversions do not always have to be directly connected to a monetary figure. As well as online or offline sales, they can also be as simple as leads from a web form or phone call.
Online Behaviour
In my eyes, there are 4 main metrics you should be focusing on when it comes to website traffic. These metrics will tell you more about the quality, rather than just quantity of the visits you had to your website as a result of your digital marketing.
Website Visits
Website visits is a nice and easy metric, be it a rather shallow one. For instance, by viewing your traffic from Organic Search (visitors from search engines) over time, you can judge how effective your current SEO efforts are. If they are working, you should see a gradual increase in the number of website visits from organic traffic.
Page Views per Visit
As useful as total website visits are for tracking SEO, they don’t exactly indicate whether people are engaging with your website. By tracking Page Views per Visit you’ll see, on average, how many pages each person is viewing on your website. I would also recommend paying close attention to the specific pages people are navigating to. You could find some of your blog posts or products are more popular than you thought.
Average Session Duration
Not only is it useful knowing which pages your visitors are viewing, it’s handy to know how long they’re spending viewing them. This is where Average Session Duration comes into play. Although this doesn’t directly lead to sales, visitors who spend more time browsing certain products are more likely to buy further down the line.
Bounce Rate
As fun as bouncing sounds, it’s definitely not good when it comes to digital marketing. With bounce rate, you can see which products or services your visitors aren’t engaging with. Bounce rate is dictated by the percentage of people entering the page but then leaving without clicking onto another.
If you notice of any your pages have a high bounce rate, I would suggest investigating further into the issue, to understand why traffic are not engaging with a specific page. There’s software available, such as HotJar, which will track how visitors are interacting with the page – how far they are scrolling down, where they are clicking on the page, and many more useful behaviours.
Conclusion
So there you have it, those are my essential marketing metrics to track how effective your campaigns are. These will give you the ability to make the correct decisions when it comes to growing your business. Now you can adjust your own campaigns or simply turn off anything that isn’t working. You’ll also be able to refine your campaigns to really hone in on your goals.
Last but by no means least, always know your goals and how to measure them before you start the campaign. I’ll admit, this may require slightly more planning but you should never launch a campaign that doesn’t have a specific goal.
Plan, aim and measure. 3 words with huge value to your business.
Any questions?
I hope you have found this useful, and it gives you a better understanding of measuring your marketing campaigns. If you want me to explain anything in more detail give me a call on 01472 878 496 or alternatively email me on [email]marketing@laser.red[/email]