James Spillane
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What does it mean when your marketing strategy is “working”? In general, it means that your efforts are supporting your marketing and business goals.
Unfortunately, marketing is a complex field, and there’s not just one type of analytics to track. If you’re sending out newsletters regularly, you need to keep track of total email opens, total clicks, and other such elements. If your website contains any signup forms, tracking conversion rate is critical. And of course, there’s also social media marketing, which goes from analyzing audience growth rate, clicks, post views, likes, shares, and conversion rate if you’re advertising your content.
In any way, the amount of information can be overwhelming. If you’re struggling to determine just how efficient your marketing efforts have been thus far, we’ve outlined the top analytics you should keep an eye on.
Email Marketing
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1. Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the first metric to track when it comes to email marketing, as it gives you direct insight into how many subscribers are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about your company, product, or offer. The more clicks you have, the higher the CTR is — and the better your emails are performing.
2. Conversion Rate
Every email you send should have a goal, whether it’s filling a form, downloading an eBook, or making a purchase. Conversion rate is essentially the number of people who converted (took action) against the total number of people who had this opportunity (generally, the total number of subscribers on your list). If you send an email about a 50% discount on a product, you’ll want to track the conversion rate — in other words, how many people have actually taken advantage of the opportunity and placed an order.
3. List Growth Rate
Every marketer should aim to grow their subscriber list and keep it at a healthy state. The more new subscribers you have, the more you can extend your reach, expand your audience, and boost your conversion rate.
Website Visits
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1. Total Visits
Total visits equal the amount of traffic your website gets every day. Tracking total website visits is critical if you’re A/B testing a new website design, or if you’ve started a new marketing campaign, as this communicates the effectiveness of your efforts.
2. New Visits
This metric is a comparison of your unique visitors, versus those who are repeat customers. Your rate of new visits should be quite low, otherwise it’s pretty clear that your content isn’t sticky enough to make people come back. If the rate goes above 30%, it’s time to change your marketing efforts and highlight your most valuable content to make visitors return. Around 15% of your total visits should be from repeat customers!
3. Traffic Sources by Segment
Knowing where your traffic comes from is equally important. Keep track of traffic sources by segment:
- Direct traffic: Visitors that access your website directly through your URL, either by typing it into the URL bar or by clicking on a bookmark.
- Organic traffic: Visitors from unpaid search engine listings.
- Referral traffic: Visitors that access your site through a link on another website.
Landing Pages and Signup Forms
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1. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your website immediately after accessing it versus the total number of people who access it every day. E.g. If your total number of daily visitors is 1,000, and 100 of them click the back button immediately, then your bounce rate is 10%. Keep it as low as possible, otherwise it means that your visitors aren’t getting what they’re looking for.
2. Time on Page
The time spent by every visitor on your landing page is critical to deciding if people engage with your content. Obviously, the more time they spend on your landing page, the better it is. If they spend just a few seconds and then click away, your content probably isn’t sticky enough, the information isn’t what they’re looking for, or your CTA isn’t enticing enough.
3. Conversion Rate
If there’s a form that people need to complete on your website, you’ll want to track how many completed forms are sent through every day. That’s your conversion rate — one of the most critical metrics of any marketing campaign.
Social Media
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1. Referring Traffic
How many traffic do you get from social media? This metric is important as it helps you determine how effective your posts or ads are, and whether or not people are interested in learning more about your brand or product.
2. Share of Voice
Share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company against the number of conversations about your competitors/market. Tracking SOV can reveal opportunities of improvement, so make sure to keep an eye on this metric.
3. Audience Growth Rate
Is your number of followers or page likes increasing or decreasing? Audience growth rate lets you evaluate the success of your marketing efforts over time, and gives you insight into what makes people engage with your brand on social channels.
4. Engagement Rate
Are people liking or sharing your posts? Engagement rate is one last metric you should track to determine if your social media marketing campaign is working. Generally, engagement rate compares your posts’ engagement with your overall follower base — so the higher this metric, the more people in your follower base engage with your brand.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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I have read few articles related to this but this one nails it. It is detailed and complete and covers every aspect one should consider analyzing their online traffic. One thing I am always interested in is unique user count and gostats does one heck of a job in displaying it on dashboard directly, coupled with GA I am rest assured I am capturing every visitor.