Marketing Analytics Metrics to Watch

I was asked recently asked to contribute to a discussion on the most important metrics for marketers to watch.  Since a lot of my work involves tracking website usage and helping clients optimize their websites to meet their goals, I chose to focus on important site usage metrics for marketers to watch.  To follow the rest of the discussion, and to learn about some important metrics to watch in E-mail marketing, check out this post by Lisa Cramer.

As I thought about which metrics were the most important to focus on, the answer was almost always “it depends.”  The most important metrics to watch in how people are using your site are pieces of information you can act on. The most important question in web analytics is “So what?”  The most important metrics in marketing analytics can answer this question.  They are the indicators that let you know how an ad campaign you’ve started is performing and how you should focus it, or tell you where you need to reorganize or update your site. 

One metric on its own can rarely do this, which is why the ability to segment and combine information in Google Analytics is so helpful.  For example, is a high time on site important?  Well that depends.  You need to compare it to other metrics to get a full story.  If your visitors are spending a long time on your e-commerce site, but your analytics tells you they’re not buying anything, this could be your clue that they can’t find the product or information on your site that they’re looking for.  These two metrics are a signal that you need to dig deeper to find out what’s really going on.  One way to do this would be to look at how they were finding your site.  Were they search engine visitors?  What keywords were they looking for?  Were there some keywords that had a higher time on site?  Did those keywords have a higher or lower number of sales than others?  Or they could be spending a lot of time researching your product and may visit the site multiple times before they decide to buy it.  Look at your average number of visits to purchase and average days to purchase to see how long visitors tend to spend considering their options before making a purchase.

That said, one metric I would point out for marketers to pay particular attention to is individual goals you can set up within analytics that can be customized for each client.  Google Analytics allows you to define up to 20 individual goals.  These goals are particular actions you want visitors to take on your website, and can be anything from looking at a particular page to signing up for a newsletter.  Many companies have trouble defining  and setting up helpful Analytics goals, so a marketer should spend some time talking to clients about what they hope visitors will do/look at/or take away from their website and helping them to set up Analytics goals that will accurately track these actions.  Once you have those set up, don’t just look at their overall conversion rates. Dig a little deeper.  Identify the traffic sources most likely to complete these goals.  Is it search engine traffic? Facebook traffic? Are visitors from your paid ads completing these goals? (See this post to learn how to find out more about your PPC traffic).  If they are completing goals, maybe it’s time to increase that budget.  If not, it’s definitely time to start looking at how you can refine your ad campaign. 

For a quick summary, when marketers are looking at web analytics, the most important things to look for are large changes in a particular metric like visitors, time on site, or views to a particular page.  For any change in a metric you report on, try to explain why it changed.  Also make sure to focus on metrics the client has expressed interest in.  These are things your client has said are particularly important to them, so they should naturally be important to you in your reporting, as well.  Most importantly, look for metrics you can take action on.  It’s nice to be able to tell your client how people are using their site, but it’s much better if you can make real suggestions about how to improve their customer’s experience on the website.