Marketing is an art. No matter how many classes you take, how many tutorials you watch, blogs, articles, and books you read, the most successful marketers will always be one the ones who have an innate touch for it. Still, luckily for all business owners out there, big and small, marketing is also a science. And what makes it a science are metrics, which render all its content quantifiable. Here are the metrics that matter to your online business and which you should measure right now.
6 Metrics that Matter for Your Online Business
#1. The total number of visits
The primary target when it comes to measuring how many clients and potential customers have come knocking on your digital door is your main website page. However, since we are talking about the total number of visits, you should also check out other sources of traffic. For example, you can see how many people ended up on one of the landing pages for your pay-per-click campaign.
The total number of visits is definitely one of the metrics that matter. It gives you a sense of how your campaign is doing from a marketing point of view. If the number of visitors is dropping from one month or quarter to another, then something has gone wrong somewhere. Luckily, you can check all the visiting sources and see where exactly that was.
#2. New sessions
Here’s another one of the metrics that matter, which you can find in Google Analytics. The total number of the new sessions engaged on your website will let you know just how many of your visitors are new and how many have been with you at least once more in the past.
It’s a crucial metric because it will show you if your site and business for that matter, encourages visitors to come back. In other words, did you manage to create brand loyalty? Or are your customers a one-time deal?
As you might have figured out, you need to encourage recurring visits. People that only come to you once and never return again surely discovered a problem or were unsatisfied with something.
#3. What channel is your traffic coming from?
You can find this metric in Google Analytics, the ‘Acquisitions’ section. In simple words, it’s a tool which will take all your traffic and divide it into categories, depending on its origin. Why do you need it? Because the number of total visits, while still useful, cannot tell you which of your channels are performing better than others.
Here are the primary four channels which you need to be on the lookout for.
- The direct channel – tells you how many individuals went to your website in a direct fashion.
- Referrals – they include external links on other sites which brought visitors to you.
- Organic – these are the visitors who came to your website after they performed a search on Google or any other search engine, for that matter.
- Social – this category includes people who found your site thanks to social media.
#4. The bounce rate
As far as metrics that matter goes, this particular one is crucial. It shows how many people left your websites in a matter of minutes or even seconds, before getting to explore its depths. The idea is very simple, and it goes like this.
If an individual finds your website, goes to your homepage but then leaves immediately after without clicking on any other links, then Google considers he bounced. Generally speaking, you should strive to have the lowest bounce rate possible.
Here’s a thing to keep in mind. Google’s algorithm sees sites with a high bounce rate as being very poor when it comes to content or user experience in general. And it’s not hard to see why. When you have a multitude of people leaving without giving you a second thought, then there’s clearly something wrong with your website, products, campaigns or marketing endeavors. Therefore, Google will push you to the back of the line, so to say. And here is the consequence.
Let’s say that you own a clothing store. When someone searches for t-shirts, for example, your site will appear very far away in the results. The higher your bounce rate, the deeper you are in the result pages. And you know no one goes to pages three, four, five, and beyond in Google.
#5. The total conversions
Here is one of the most important metrics that matter when it comes to your online business. It is the one tool that can measure just how profitable your marketing efforts have been. Conversions, in general, are considered to be a victory which you can quantify in the eyes of the marketers.
Depending on how it has been built, you can measure conversions directly on your website. If not, then you can go to the almighty Google Analytics and set up a goal so that you can easily track all your progress.
As a rule of thumb, if you end up with low conversion numbers, then your website might have been defectively designed, or you might have introduced weak offerings. If it’s none of these things and you consider that it is not your fault, then take a look at the visitors. They might just be disinterested in what you have to offer.
#6. The conversion rate
This is the one metric everybody loves and fears at the same time. The CR or conversion rate reveals just how many people, out of all your visitors, actually ended up buying something from your website. Evidently, the higher your conversion rate, the better your business is doing, simply because it means you have more visitors.
Here a short example. If out of 100 visitors 2 make a purchase, then your conversion rate is 2 percent. According to recent research, however, you can improve your conversion rates if you choose to add some visual stimuli to your content. Images work perfectly, but videos are even better.
Retailers who add videos to most of their product pages improve their conversion rates up to 9 percent. Therefore, you must remember to take all the necessary measures when it comes to CR. If you just invest in the other SEO practices and disregard conversion rates, you might find you wasted your time.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you attract to your website if none of them ends up buying anything. You will be left with a highly trafficked site but a storehouse full of products. Prioritize conversion rates out of all the metrics that matter, and you get a real shot at making your business work.
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