The 5 Metrics That Really Matter

Since its inception, digital has been perceived as being the most measurable media. But most of that measurement has been meaningless. It’s time digital marketers stopped talking about clicks and impressions and instead focused on what’s important to marketers — business results. This is pretty easy if you have an e-commerce site and can track direct online sales. But what do you do if you’re part of the 84% of retail commerce that occurs offline?

We all know that consumers’ purchase decisions are greatly influenced by digital. They might be trying to decide where to go to dinner on their smartphone, on the web looking up reviews for a car they are considering purchasing, or surfing the web on their tablet after seeing your TV commercial.

Can’t track that impact? Sure you can. You just need to look at things a little differently.

Overall site traffic trends

I’m often surprised to see that most companies aren’t paying attention to this simple metric, which is offered by pretty much every analytics package out there. Most business owners have a pretty good idea of how their business is doing based on customers walking through their doors, but they don’t seem to pay any attention to web traffic.

Site visits can be a great monitor to determine the impact of your marketing efforts. For example, when I was reviewing site traffic over the past year for one of my clients, I saw that there were two significant increases in traffic to the site that directly correlated to when the client was running TV campaigns. (Yes, that’s right — digital can provide insights into your offline efforts as well). When we probed a little deeper, we also saw an increase in web contact page visits, and the client acknowledged that the phone had rung a bit more during those months.

Overall traffic trends are also greatly affected by online efforts as well. We all know that click-through rates stink; with an industry average response rate under 1 percent, it’s amazing we still even talk about them. But when you look a little deeper, you can often see increases in site traffic when banners are running. No, prospects aren’t clicking your ad; instead, they are coming to your site directly or searching for you and coming in that way.

Time and time again, I’ve been able to identify correlations to increased traffic caused by banners — not from clicks, but from overall traffic to the site from a variety of sources. Digital marketers often tend to down play traditional media because there’s no click path, but the reality is there isn’t really a click path from most banner campaigns either. They do the same job of other advertising vehicles by increasing awareness and purchase intent, and the way consumers respond today is to do research and learn more online. The data is there, but you have to look for it.

Branded search volume

Search is another great indicator of marketing impact. Most people look at search traffic as a whole (e.g., I get 43 percent of my site traffic from search). But at the top level, overall search traffic can be fairly meaningless.

Search gets interesting when you start looking at it more granularly and segmenting it into branded and non-branded search. Many people are surprised at how much branded search traffic (i.e., people typing a company or product name into a search engine) they receive. This traffic is almost always discounted in a client’s mind; after all, these are prospects that are already aware of its brand.

2020 update…wow – it’s been a long time since google reported on keywords. Shortly after this article was originally published, Google started blocking visibility into keyword data (you can see the dramatic growth in “Not Provided” traffic below. However, there are still some great ways to see this activity (linking Search Console with Analytics is a good first step) – and it’s still just as important as ever. 

That said, understanding how people become aware is important — and often overlooked. As I mentioned in the last section, branded search traffic is often affected by advertising. I encourage all of you to take a closer look at your search traffic. Highlight your brand terms and look at the volume the month before, the month during, and the month after your last campaign (be it online, offline, or both). I bet you’ll see a difference.

A couple of years ago, I was on a panel at OMMA during which we discussed the commerce impact that Google has and how many sales are directly related to Google searches. I agreed that search does provide that last step to purchase, but it was advertising that made people search for “Snuggie” instead of “blanket with sleeves.”

Conversions

People who take a desired action on your site are usually the key to finding business online. So the first step is to identify the desired action. If you have an e-commerce site, conversions are easy to define. But what if you have a B2B or local retail site?

There are a lot of other metrics that can be considered conversions. Email newsletter sign-ups and contact form submissions are some pretty obvious indicators, but there are a lot more things you can consider. For example, a visit to your contact or directions page is probably a pretty good indicator that a person is down the funnel into purchase intent. You can also look at visits to product information pages and sell-sheet downloads to help identify someone as more than just a casual passer-through.

While the industry had evolved significantly over the years, it’s amazing how many people are still relying on basic conversion data. In today’s world form submissions are just the tip of the iceberg – you want to be looking at what those submissions really are and asking questions about the quality of the submissions. Are they spam submissions, or do they meet the criteria for “Marketing Qualified” or even better “Sales Qualified” leads. 

Most businesses spend a lot of time understanding their sales processes — what makes a customer a cool prospect vs. a hot prospect? Apply those same rules to your website, and you’ll start to see how your online content can help move people through the sales process.

Converter traffic

Now that you’ve got your conversions identified, you’ve got a great opportunity to understand that audience better. Take a filtered look at your converter web habits, and you’ll start to see some interesting trends. For example, take a look at your keyword phrases for all visitors to your website. Then take a look at the same report, but only looking at people who visited your contact page — you’re going to see a different set of phrases.

You might find there’s a huge opportunity to grow traffic from prospects searching on terms you’re not focused on. Depending on your business, you might also want to take a look at geography reports. Again, you’ll likely see different patterns for people who have “converted” compared with your average visitors.

Referrer data

How do people get to your website? Referring site data not only lets you know where your prospects come from, but it can also provide some interesting insights about your audience. Take a deeper look at some of those sites. Many will be exactly what you’re expecting, but some of the referring sites might have a different audience than you usually target.

By digging into the referring site list, you’ll start to see some indicators of new audiences you might want to pursue. In addition, referring site data can help you understand how your latest online marketing efforts did. Track your referring sites week by week, and it’s pretty easy to spot traffic coming in from a social post on Twitter or Facebook, responses to a blog you posted on another site, and even traffic generated by that new site sponsorship you launched.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more ways to look at digital data that not only provide business trends but also provide insights into your prospects and opportunities.

Clicks are a nice easy metric for measuring response — but they don’t tell you the real story. So stop looking at the wrong things. The right data is there. You just need to look a little harder.

Originally published in iMediaConnection.com