Analytics – What To Always Measure and Why

Data and analytics are your foundation if you want to see real success online. You may have a beautiful website with great images and professional sales videos, but these will amount to nothing if you don’t understand the numbers. It’s the numbers that count, allowing us to see what’s happening and adjust our marketing strategy on-the-fly.  The ideal tool you need to understand your numbers is Google Analytics and here’s some must have metrics and why :

The Number of Site Visitors

One of the vital metrics to check is the number of visitors to the website. This is the starting point in tuning other factors and metrics to increase success and website growth. It is also vital to know the source of this traffic, since not all types of traffic will be beneficial to your website. Crazy right? Well, for instance, you want to have a good amount of real, organic traffic as opposed to lots of bot traffic.  With Google Analytics, you get to know the real numbers as well as the origin of that traffic. These metrics are the foundation to build upon.

The Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is such a crucial metric, but sadly, one that’s often ignored by many website owners. The term “bounce rate” simply refers to the number of visitors that go to only one page before they leave the site. A higher bounce rate will mean that people are not spending enough time on the webpages and this could signify they are having a poor user experience or they don’t find what they had hoped to find on those particular pages. An important point to take note of with the bounce rate is the specific exit pages.  Identify what’s not working or is causing the bounce and change it up.  A thorough understanding of the bounce rate will enable you understand your visitors and optimize your content better so that it becomes more valuable to them.

The Click-Through Rate

Also known as CTR, the click-through rate is another metric you must focus on in your Google Analytics. Click-through rates will tell you how well the site visitors are responding to your call to actions on the web pages. The CTR given by Google Analytics will let you know if your call to actions are effective or if they need tweaking so that the bulk of the visitors can click-through them. It is also a vital metric for split testing (running two versions of the same CTA to compare) for better optimization of the site.

Conversion Rate

If you run an e-commerce site, then this is a metric you already are familiar with. However, depending on your industry, there are many different types of conversions you can track using Google Analytics. They include email conversion rates, landing page conversion rates, lead-to-customer conversion rate, visitor to lead conversion rate and much more. This metric is important because you need to know what is converting and how they are converting.

Goal Progress

Whether you are using Google Analytic or any other analytics program, you should always have well-defined project goals. In addition to helping you understand whether you are on the right track, having goals will help you track the right metrics and make it easy for you to make good decisions about the campaigns. With all the tracking capabilities of Google Analytics, checking your goal progress is easier, since you have all the key metrics at your fingertips.

 

Isn’t there a Video for this?

If you look up analytics on YouTube, there’s no end of lengthy, drawn out videos.  These are great for the real techy types out there but most business owners will never watch them.  The points we’ve laid out above are important and if you track nothing elses in your metrics reporting, these are the ones that matter for most.  We hope they help :)

Thanks for reading!