So much data is generated in the digital marketing world that is underused by most businesses. Google analytics is one such very important tool as it allows you to measure individual campaigns, compare data, and more. Below are some of the important metrics to track in order to ascertain the success of your website or campaigns.
One of the most important metrics to measure is Source. This metric lets you know where your campaign or website traffic is originated from such as search engines or email links. Your traffic sources are located under Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium., and you can see which sources are giving you the most traffic. There are three categories for the primary sources: direct visitors, search visitors, and referral visitors. With this metric, you are able to calculate the traffic conversion of each source and take action based on that.
INTERACTIONS PER VISIT (PAGES/SESSIONS)
When you are able to track exactly what visitors are doing on your website, you are better able to ascertain what you can do to get them to do more of it and influence their behavior into conversions. Interactions allow you to monitor the behavior of viewers and the way they interact with your website. For example, you are able to track the time in which they are on the page, reviews or comments that they make, and the likes. The goal is to transform these engagements into conversions such as purchases and downloads.
The preliminary goal when trying to increase a lot of your most important metrics is to minimize the bounce rate of visitors. Bounce rate refers to the number of times a new visitor visits the site and leaves without completing a task. Typically, this is shown when the visitor spends very little time without interactions on the website. Having a high bounce rate indicates weaknesses such as weak sources of traffic, poor user experience design, high load times, complicated processes, or because visitors only visit to view one thing and then leave. To measure the Bounce rate, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
LEAD GENERATION COSTS (COST PER CONVERSION)
This is simply when your company or brand is not breaking even for what you are paying in order to gain a conversion. This is one of the more important metrics. If the cost per conversion is high, it will not matter if the website is bringing in high conversion rates as the website will be cost-prohibitive, meaning it will be zero or negative.
It is important to research into the exits and find out at what point in the page viewing process are visitors leaving the website. This will allow you to make changes accordingly. If the process becomes complicated or hard to understand visitors might leave feeling like it is not worth the hassle. If a page has a very high exit rate there may be something you can do to retain visitors.
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