Ultimately, you established an online marketing strategy in order to get positive results for your organisation. But how do you know if your efforts are working? The answer to this question is – analytics. By becoming well-informed about your sales funnel via metrics, you can more easily increase sales and improve results by knowing where to apply your budget, and which areas need improvement.
In digital marketing, specific up-to-date metrics across the spectrum really do matter. For example, if you’re getting plenty of website visitors, but have a lousy conversion rate, then you are practically in the same position as an organisation that has a lot less visitors but a higher conversion rate. If you’re spending money on professional content writing services, you’ll want to ensure the content is bringing results. Metrics allow you to clearly see where issues lie, and take steps to address them.
Here are four key areas where knowing your metrics can make a big difference to the overall success of your digital marketing.
1. Exposure/reach
Exposure and reach relates to the potential audience for your website and social media messages. This can be measured by looking at your web traffic, and total followers. Firstly, when reviewing your analytics platform, you need to ensure that the bounce rate is kept to a minimum. This is important because it means that you’re attracting the right type of people, and are keeping them engaged with relevant website copy.
If you have a high bounce rate on your homepage, you either have to re-assess your SEO marketing, or re-assess your website layout. Perhaps it needs to be more user friendly, and needs a stronger push to encourage potential customers to take further action, submit an enquiry or subscribe to your e-newsletter, for example.
With social media, having a high number of ‘Likes’ or ‘Followers’ helps build brand awareness, and gives your organisation a higher sense of authenticity to new customers. However, the number of ‘shares’ or ‘retweets’ you get for your posts is the key metric. Shares and retweets are the ultimate outcome of your social media marketing efforts, as this leads to a higher level of reach and takes you into a potentially untapped market. How do you make this happen? Make your messages more engaging, such as featuring competitions or funny/motivational/how to videos (Facebook always gives videos a push in news feeds!)
2. Website visitors and where they are coming from
Website traffic is one of the oldest and most important metrics, and it is relevant for the majority of businesses. Reviewing the number of visits per day as well as unique visitors per day on a month-to-month basis will provide you with an indication of which pages are working and which aren’t. This can then influence your future marketing efforts because you’ll know which pages need a bit more TLC.
You should also ensure that your website traffic is coming from regions that you are willing to ship to or do business with. For example, if significant traffic is coming from the United States, but you are focused on Australasia, then you might need to consider changes to the digital marketing strategy.
3. Engagement
Engagement levels refer to how long visitors are staying on your website, and how often they comment or share posts on social media. If you are getting thousands of people to your website every month, it means nothing if they only spend seconds on the homepage or blog. Reviewing the entrance and exit pages of visitors in your analytics platform can help you to determine whether the content and layout of your website is effective, and is taking potential customers down the click-through path that you wish them to take. It might be worthwhile to use a free service like Peek by UserTesting, which provides the opportunity to have a user review of your website and receive feedback via a five-minute video.
As with measuring your social media reach, you can measure engagement on your social media channels by looking at how many people comment on your posts, Like or share them. If your social media is lacking in engagement, perhaps you need to re-assess the types of posts you are uploading. You might try asking more questions or featuring more polls. As mentioned earlier, videos can also do the trick! And if people are clicking links to your blog but not sticking around long enough to read the post, you may need to re-think the type of articles you’re publishing, or seek out a good article writing service to write your blog posts.
4. Conversion rates
The number one goal of any organisation’s website is conversion. Although it’s nice to see a large amount of visits to your website, the conversion rate is by far the biggest indicator of whether your digital marketing efforts are successful.
You can start by looking at the level of enquiries you are receiving. How does this compare to your level of website visits? You can set up goals in Google Analytics, such as submitting enquiries and subscribing to communications or publications, and assess your goal conversion rate. This is a great way to determine if your website is operating effectively, and whether you’re achieving your desired outcome of potential customers taking action!
The next step is turning those enquiries and/or subscriptions into sales. If you have an online store, you can set up e-commerce conversion rates in Google Analytics. Then you can check out the percentage of products sold compared to your website visitors. From an organisational perspective, you can assess the percentage of e-newsletter/e-book subscribers for example, versus the number of sales coming in the door. And if you’re not already asking paying customers how they found out about your products/services, then it’s definitely time to put that process in place!
Having specific, current information at your fingertips can have a big impact on the overall success of your digital marketing strategy and your organisation.
For example, if your key metrics show you have 1,000 visitors a week to your organisation’s website, with a visit to enquiry rate of 1% (10 enquiries) and an enquiry to sale conversion of 20% (two sales), then you know that if you can make improvements to your website that raise the visit to enquiry rate to 2%, you have a chance of also doubling your enquiries and sales.
If you need content agency help to make your digital marketing work for your business, contact Article Writers Australia.
