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| It's crucial to monitor six key metrics in your internet marketing strategy and know how to do it effectively. |
In today's world, digital marketers have access to web analytics platforms that make it simple to monitor a broad range of user behaviors and browsing trends, producing useful insights. Nevertheless, determining which metrics to track and evaluate can be a daunting task. This job becomes more complex as your website or mobile app grows and serves diverse users and social media channels. To make things easier, I've identified six crucial marketing metrics that will provide you with valuable strategic insights and gauge the efficacy of your organic and paid digital marketing endeavors.
But before we jump into the metrics, it’s crucial to ask yourself the following three questions:
1. What goals does your business aim to achieve?
2. Which components of your website or application are indispensable for your company's immediate and future expansion?
3. Which actions taken by users have the most significant impact on your company's success?
Now that you have this information about your business let’s dive in.
1. Conversions.
Defining macro and micro conversions that align with your business objectives can help you measure user behaviors that matter to your business. Macro conversions refer to primary conversions on your website, such as completing a purchase, submitting a lead form, or making a click-to-phone call. On the other hand, micro conversions are useful indicators of users’ interest in your company’s products and services, such as signing up for newsletters, reading blog posts, or downloading whitepapers. A set of micro conversions can potentially accumulate and lead to higher-valued macro conversions. For example, a user who performs a micro conversion by subscribing to a newsletter could end up clicking on a product link, exploring your site or mobile app, and completing a macro conversion by placing an order.
How to Track Conversions.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager offer ways to track various types of goals, such as destination, duration, and event goals, allowing you to measure your conversions effectively.
You can easily set up goals on these platforms to keep track of your progress. Take a look at the screenshot below to see an example of goals on Google Analytics.
2. Spend.
In the world of marketing, it's common for businesses to invest large sums of money in order to drive traffic and increase conversions. To ensure that this investment is worthwhile, it's important to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. This includes not only monitoring your total costs on a monthly or quarterly basis, but also analyzing the cost per click and cost of conversion for each individual campaign. By doing so, you can adjust your marketing budget and strategy to better target your desired audience and maximize your return on investment.
How to Track Spend.
- To create a report on marketing budget, I suggest utilizing Google Data Studio to merge multiple data sources into a single representation that displays the budget for each social platform.
- In the image provided, I have combined data from prominent social platforms by using the date as a joining factor.
- Google Data Studio enables the blending of data from up to five sources, thereby allowing for a side-by-side comparison of monthly budgets for different social platforms in the dashboard.
- If you encounter challenges while merging data sources, refer to our article on resolving blending issues on Google Data Studio.
3. User Engagement.
Pages per session and session duration are two metrics that provide a concise view of the broad spectrum of user activity and purchase patterns that occur on your site/app.
- Pages per session: as users find more relevant content on your site, you might notice that the number of pages browsed in a single session is relatively high. Consider the pages per session metric for the recent few months as a baseline and as your team incorporates relevant content, blogs, and media on your site, keep track of this metric and how it correlates to the overall conversion rate.
- Session duration: social media sites are a prime example of illustrating session duration. Youtube, for instance, strives in various ways to keep users engaged with features including related videos, personalized feed, recommendations, etc.
To enhance the value of your website or app, consider incorporating diverse styles and forms of content such as videos, blog posts, landing pages, and content guides. This will offer multiple avenues for communicating the benefits of your product or service.
It's essential to establish a baseline for the average session duration and strive for better user engagement by providing relevant media and content. Monitor the session duration regularly as a key metric and analyze how it contributes to your overall success.
You may have noticed that I didn't mention Bounce Rate. That's because Google Analytics 4 has replaced it with a new metric called Engagement Rate.
Engagement Rate is the percentage of engaged sessions (Engaged sessions divided by Sessions). According to Google Analytics 4, engaged sessions are those that last for at least 10 seconds or more, have one or more conversion events, or involve two or more page or screen views. This new metric provides insights into how users interact and how long they stay on your site/app rather than just measuring their existence.
How to Track User Engagement.
Analyzing user engagement can be done through the use of Google Analytics' Audience Overview report. Alternatively, you can also utilize tools such as Crazy Egg or Hotjar to track user behavior and clicks. Here's a snapshot of the Audience Overview report on Google Analytics.
4. Errors.
If you decide to update your website by transferring content from one CMS to another, performing server maintenance, or upgrading website technology, you may encounter web page errors. These errors can leave your users feeling bewildered and may cause them to leave your site, which can give them a negative impression of your service quality.
How to Track Errors.
Utilizing the complimentary resources of Google Search Console and Google Analytics allows for effortless monitoring of any site malfunctions as they occur. By regularly addressing and resolving these issues in your daily content management routine, you can maintain a low error rate and ensure continued satisfaction for your audience. Observe the example below to see what the Index Coverage report from Google Search Console appears like.
5. Onsite Search Terms.
In today's business landscape, integrating a search function into any high-level product or service has become standard practice. This tool empowers users to locate exactly what they need without navigating an extensive menu structure. Once implemented, this feature enables the tracking of on-site searches, revealing the most popular search terms entered by users.
By producing content related to these search terms, you can both enhance the customer experience and boost product conversions. By providing pertinent content in an accessible manner, you may also see a decrease in the overall conversion time. To activate site search tracking, simply enable the feature in Google Analytics' View Settings.
6. Site Speed.
In the past, a website that loaded quickly was a bonus, but now it is essential. Slow site speed causes users to leave and find other options. To avoid this, it is important to establish a baseline for site speed and strive to improve it. This will not only make your content easily accessible to users, but it will also improve your content's organic ranking on Google.
A few metrics to take into account with respect to site speed:
- The duration of page interaction gauges the speed at which users can engage with a webpage even as background content, media, and scripts continue to load.
- Page load time is the mean duration it takes for a webpage to fully load. This metric relies on data gathered from tracking tools such as Google Analytics.
How to Track Site Speed.
Various online instruments like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse are at your disposal to assess your site's speed and obtain valuable feedback on how to enhance your page loading time. Regularly performing speed tests on your website and making site speed a top priority are highly recommended practices.
Below is a report from PageSpeed Insights.
Our team at Portent conducts regular page speed audits for our clients. If you're interested in learning more about how we do it, don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Wrap Up.
These six metrics hold great significance in shedding light on your digital marketing campaigns, offering valuable insights. They serve as a solid foundation and it is intriguing to anticipate the emergence of additional metrics. These six metrics are intended to assist you in making informed and rational decisions regarding your marketing strategies.