Digital marketing drives action. What success looks like will depend on the activity you’re running and the audience to whom you’re reaching out. If you don’t monitor your activity’s performance, you can’t quantify whether what you’re doing makes a difference, and why. Here are three types of website statistics that help you understand whether your activity is working for you.
Visitors to Your Website
Performance marketing leader and entrepreneur, Eyal Gutentag, is emphatic on the importance of results-based marketing. Daily website visitor numbers is a vital metric in measuring whether your digital marketing is driving people to your site. But it’s not enough to know the overall figure. You need to ask other questions too. Are they new or repeat? What drove them to your site? Does day of week or time of day matter? Knowing your website’s performance inside and out is the only way you’ll know what’s successful.
Conversion
High visitor numbers are no use if your potential customers do nothing once they’re there. Everything you do should convert; what that conversion is depends upon what you deem important at the time. Some activity may be sales driven, counting only those interactions that involve a monetary transaction. Others may focus on growing your database through newsletter sign-ups. If you don’t measure conversion, you risk seeing high numbers of people responding to marketing activity and assuming it’s doing well when it’s not.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website after having viewed only one page. You can test sending people to different pages and tracking how behavior changes depending upon the page they see, for example, home page versus a dedicated landing page. This only works, however, if you know what the bounce rate is for every page. The same page may perform dreadfully for one campaign but convert well for another, simply because the content was more relevant.
If you don’t measure performance, you could throw away budget on activity that generates nothing. Don’t rely on guesswork. Implement robust measures of success and use them to make well-informed decisions.