Traditional key metrics are designed to help business leaders get a better idea as to the overall health of their online marketing campaigns; but is it possible that these metrics are giving you a false idea of your online success?
The Key to KPIs
It’s important to point out that while traditional marketing metrics often include key elements such as increase in total visits, unique visitors, bounce rate, and time on site, these metrics fail to give business leaders the critical information they need: the size of their bottom line. After all, you could have the healthiest bounce rate in the industry – but unless your visitors are buying, you may find it a struggle to keep your business afloat.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the 10 reasons why you should redefine your key metrics:
- These key metrics make it difficult to measure customer loyalty. While bounce rates and total visits can give you a better idea of how much traffic is staying on – or leaving – your site, it can’t tell you why your customers are choosing your business over others.
- Traditional metrics make it hard to pinpoint problems you might be having with generating pre-qualified traffic.
- These metrics can also make it difficult to understand why your conversion rates are not where they should be. If you’re having problems turning your traffic into customers, you need to know why this is happening.
- If you’re still measuring your marketing campaign’s success in terms of “hits,” it’s time to redefine this outdated metric. You don’t want to measure how popular your website is; rather, you want to understand the user’s experience when he or she visits your website.
- Meaningful metrics should include conversion rates based on your entire website. For example, it’s critical to know your conversion rates for your product pages, your email forms, your newsletter sign-ups, and other pages where you’re asking prospects to interact with you.
- These key metrics should also include conversion rates based on touch points. This simply means that your business keeps track of how your prospects are reaching out to you. Direct touch points include when you ask prospects to click a link or fill out a form, as you’re asking the person to have a direct experience with your business.
- Another meaningful metric that you should include in your business is the ability to measure the increase in total leads. It’s important to understand who your prospects are, why they signed up to receive company emails or newsletters, and why they connect with your business.
- Business leaders should also redefine traditional metrics in favor of understanding how much of your traffic is made up of new visitors vs. returning visitors. This can help give you a better idea of your customer retention and acquisition rates, which is critical to understanding your company’s bottom line.
- Another key metric that business leaders should prioritize is the goal conversion, which is a metric that helps you measure how many leads downloaded your e-book or signed up for an e-book. This can be linked to the increase in total leads, as it can help you better understand what your prospects are more excited about.
- Finally, business leaders should measure e commerce conversions, which outlines how many transactions your business makes. This is a basic yet critical metric that many business leaders should track, as it helps you understand what products are responsible for building your company’s bottom line.
Bounce rates, total hits, and time spent on webpages don’t give you the information you need to understand how to build your bottom line. By incorporating the key metrics in this article in your marketing campaign, you can get a better idea of what’s dragging your bottom line down – and how to build it back up.
