Many online marketers get too wrapped up in measuring data that, though useful, is not the most important for understanding how your website is performing as a marketing channel.
I say that because each investment of your time, money, and people should have a very solid ROI expectation attached to it. Without ROI, there's no pot at the end of rainbow, so you have to focus on those activities/metrics that provide the largest gains.
Therefore, here are five online marketing metrics you should be looking at every day.
1. Conversion Rate
If your website asks visitors to...
- Pay for a product or service
- Sign up for an account
- Provide an email address in exchange for something
- Or take part in any other business engagement
...then it will have a conversion rate. And let's be very, very clear: The success of your online business is directly tied to how well your website is converting visitors to customers/subscribers.
Set up your goals in Google Analytics and monitor your conversion rate by going to Conversions > Goals > Overview
Monitoring your conversion rate every day will enable you to know what kind of messaging works best, what blog posts get you the most signups, and what color scheme is best at ensuring people subscribe for your newsletter.
Your best situation is when there is both high traffic and a high conversion rate. That is when you really should see what you've done, because you've done something right.
The easiest way of increasing your conversion rate is A/B testing, which means you split two versions of the same page to 50% of your visitors each and see which version is better at converting better. (A good intro to A/B testing is the Smashing Magazine article "The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing.")
2. Average Pageviews per Visit
If you run a blog about your industry or niche, this is your second most important metric. Why? Because if people are not moving around reading more than one article, it's quite likely they were not impressed by the first. If you see your average pageviews per visit dropping, have a good look at what the most common landing pages are and what kind of content they present to the visitor.
A subset of this metric is your bounce rate, which is the number of people who come and leave after the first page. If your bounce rate is high, it's quite likely that the profile of visitors coming to your website is not the right match for you.
