Playing parlor games, like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey can be fun, but trying to track internet marketing performance based on analytic KPIs without clear examination could lead to errors. Gaining a solid perspective on internet marketing performance isn’t a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game.
Let’s start with the basics: the usual of internet marketing performance metrics that businesses should monitor, and the associated KPIs.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a combination of online presence, visibility, and authority, and as such is an integral facet of internet marketing and branding. If you want to track how your brand is doing, you can start with these KPI:
Photo courtesy of Daa Nell(CC No Derivatives)
New visits – The most obvious metric to keep an eye on when it comes to brand awareness is the number of new visits. The week-to-week or month-to-month increase or decrease of new visits is an established indicator of how effective your search engine optimization practices are, among other things. Sometimes, some many businesses get stuck on new visits, giving it more importance than is due.
Keywords (including long-tail variations) – You should check keyword hits hand-in-hand with new visits as a way to determine which keywords are bringing organic traffic to your website. Through analytic data on high performance keywords, you can double check if you’re targeting the right ones, and which ones are bringing not just new visits but also the sort of traffic that stays and reads more, maybe even converts.
Referring domains – There are much more efficient ways to check natural backlinks to your domains, but only through analytics would you be able to track which external domains are bringing traffic to your site. These domains can become effective beachheads to be used in future marketing campaigns, given how they not only provide unsolicited backlinks, but are also funneling targeted referral traffic.
Measuring Engagement
You turn organic visits into leads by engaging with them – it’s sort of like lead nurturing except they aren’t solid leads yet. That said, it’s evidently essential to an organic, automated internet marketing strategy. Check these metrics:
Return visits – People who come back to your website a few times are obviously engaged enough to come back for more. New visits shows brand discovery and return visits reflect engagement, or at least relevance of subject matter, which is a good starting point.
Time spent – The time spent on a webpage is a primary indicator that the visitor actually read the contents of the page. Usually, organic visitors skim and search. If they stay and read, you know you’re engaging them enough to make them consider really delving into your content. Next, you’ll notice that they read more material from other places in your domain, which leads us to:
Page depth – Page depth refers to the number of a single user visits within your domain. This metric is even more telling when you figure out an average page depth before an organic visit (new or returning) turns into a lead. That way, you have an average number to assign engagement-to-conversion percentages.
Measuring Conversion
Conversion – the most practical and some would argue important metric of all.
Visits to conversion ratio – Cross-reference your new and returning visits to your conversion and you get a rough estimate of how well your internet marketing is working. You might want to take it a step farther: take a high performing keyword (brand awareness) and track the page depth of user who use said keyword (engagement) to see how many of them convert. That will give you a bigger picture of how well your internet marketing works, at least for that keyword and that consumer path.
Take your internet marketing to the next level. Measuring the right metrics and using the right KPIs will provide you with accurate information to generate new leads and move your business forward.
