Website Metrics

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

SMART goals

Consider what types of goals you should be setting.

They need to be SMART:

• Specific: The goal needs to be as specific as possible so everyone is on the same page about what you expect. So it shouldn't be, "Get more website traffic." It should be, "Get 10% more website visitors to product pages by the end of this quarter."
• Measurable: It needs to have something that has a concrete number attached to it, so 10%, this many dollars, a certain revenue amount. So make something that's a specific number that you can then track.
• Achievable: This is something that isn't impossible to achieve because nobody likes, you know, chasing an impossible goal. They want something that they can actually attain. So something like $1 million in 12 months when you only have, you know, revenue of $10,000 probably isn't achievable. You want to make something that is realistic and could actually be achieved in the timeframe that you're setting.
• Relevant and results-focused: You want your goal to be on-task and on-topic of what you're trying to achieve. It needs to be related to actually what you're trying to change. Something like increase in-store visits might not be relevant to your website if it's not tied to get users in the door.
• Time-bound: You finally want to be time-bound. So you want to have a specific end date. You don't want to be something like, "Get 10% more website visitors," you want it to be, "Get 10% more website visitors by September," something that has an end date so people know what to work towards.

The most useful metrics for your website

Here are some recommended metrics to track for your website. This is going to vary by your audience and industry, and depending on what your specific goals are, and what your conversions are. It depends on what you're going to count as a conversion because it might not be a sale. It might be something else. 

• Conversion rate: That's the percentage of your overall traffic, and over that, how many people actually converted. So, downloaded an eBook of yours, made a purchase, anything like that is your conversion rate, and you want to make sure that that is steadily increasing if possible.
• Your return rate: That's how many of your overall website viewers are coming back for another time. So, either they like what they saw, or maybe they want to purchase something else, that's always good to track because then you know that your content and your website experience is making an impact on your audience and they're coming back to experience it again.
• Referral sources: These are also a really great way to see where your marketing team is doing really well and how that can tie back into your website. So if you have a lot of referrals from social media, then that might be something you want to put more efforts in versus if you're not getting a lot of referrals from your paid search ads or your email marketing. That might be something you want to drop or something that needs to improve if you want to keep it. It's a good way of seeing where your efforts are being put to use the best.
• Cart abandonment rate: This is a really good one for e-commerce sites. So that is the percentage of users that leave and don't complete a purchase, but they put something in their cart. So you want to look at that and look at the specific pages that they left so you can determine what you need to test and tweak to decrease that abandonment rate to get more sales.
• Time on site: This is really important. Usually, there's a correlation between the time a user spends on site and the likelihood that they'll convert or make a purchase.
• Bounce rate: That's the percentage of how many users leave a page after that page. So if I was on your About page and I closed out, that would be the bounce rate percentage of the About page.