To understand how your online marketing efforts are performing and how you can improve them, you'll need to regularly track and analyze the metrics from those campaigns. These metrics are to highlight the areas on your website, blog or in your online marketing program. Understanding metrics can help enable you to identify big problems such as poor timing, inconsistent search phrases, incorrect prospect definitions and flawed audiences. Most importantly, it can help avoid wasting time and money due to poorly-executed websites or marketing campaigns. The tricky part knows the different types of metrics and how they affect your business.
Website and Blog Metrics
You can also track visitor activity on a website, blog or landing page. Google Analytics supplies much of this information at no cost. Some of the metrics it follows are:
- ,Total visits: This is the number of first-time and return visitors to your site. "Unique visits" tracks the number of first-time visitors and "return visits" refers to the number of visitors who return to your site.
- Leads: The number of prospects who filled out a form or downloaded an offer.
- Popular Pages: Want to know which pages are resonating best with your visitors? This tells you which ones get the most visits.
- Search Engine Key Phrases: These are the top phrases people used to reach your site or landing page.
- Page rank: A criteria created by Google and one of the determining factors of a web page's strength in search. Good must be to follow.
Google AdWords Metrics
If you are using Google AdWords then you should get familiar with the following terms:
- Click thru rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who clicked on your advertisement. For example, a 5 percent CTR means five out of every 100 people who saw a particular ad clicked on it.
- Average position: This tells you the placement of your ad in search results.
- Impression share: Want to know how many times your ad displays? Then this is the metric you'll want to check. For instance, if your impression share was 50 percent, that would tell you that your ad was displayed half the time. A strong impression share generally is about 80 percent.
- Bounce rate: This tells you the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and went to your landing page, but did not visit a second page.
Email Metrics
For email campaigns, many of the metric names are different. It's useful to uncover what your industry's standard numbers are so that you can compare your own success rate. The terms you'll need to know include:
- Opens: This tells you how many recipients opened your email.
- Clicks: Check this to know how many recipients clicked on your offers.
- Bounces: An email usually gets "bounced" when it's sent to an incorrect email address. If you're receiving a high number of bounces then you'll to verify the emails on your list.