Many experts claim that marketers and entrepreneurs should be tracking many different metrics and KPIs, resulting in an overwhelming list.
However, we are willing to bet that most of the metrics on your list are vanity metrics and won’t REALLY provide your business much insight or value.
If gaining market share and propelling profit in today’s economy is a goal for your business, then this article is for you. In this article, we will review the top 10 metrics that matter most for your business.
1. Website Traffic
Let’s say your website gets around 1,100 visitors per month. That’s great and all, but do you know which pages they visit? Where are your visitors spending the most time on your website? What exact words are they reading on each page? Where are they clicking and what are they clicking on? This is where a heat map comes in handy.
A heat map records (via a video) cursor clicks and all mouse movements, and it also shows you the “scroll depth” of all visitors, which tells you the overall effectiveness of your website design. See the screenshot below, which looks like a weather map. The yellow and red spots are where your visitors are scrolling and clicking most.
- Average time spent on site
- Bounce rate (which is how many visitors DO NOT visit a second page on your website)
- % of mobile users (knowing this is critical for businesses with an unfriendly mobile site)
- Top pages viewed on your website
- Total number of inquiries (phone calls, form fill-outs, live chats, and wishlist submissions)
Perhaps one of the most important on this list is the number of inquiries, which refers to the number of calls, form fill-outs, and chats initiated from your website. Are you currently tracking these from your website?!
After reviewing the number of inquiries, your team should then export this list into a spreadsheet for each of our customers. This way, every inquiry acts as a ‘line item’ on a spreadsheet/CRM. (See screenshot below.) This way, you’ll be able to accurately create an ‘inquiry pie’ so that you can calculate cost-per-lead, per channel via the web (i.e., CPL).If your company isn’t running more efficiently and transparently with this granular-level reporting each month, then there is likely something happening on a MUCH larger scale.
3. What is The “Source” For Each Inquiry? “Source” indicates how a visitor found and arrived on your website. In most cases, this is a Google (or search engine) search or a live ad that you’ve placed on Google through the Google AdWords platform. The third type is “direct” in Column F, which means a visitor typed in your website domain directly into the search bar on their browser. This also means the visitor didn’t visit any other source before landing on your site (i.e., they already knew of you).
At this point, just know every visitor on your website can be put into a pile. After you put every visitor into their appropriate “pile,” you can then see what source is bringing you the most inquiries (because you’re tracking calls, forms, live chats, wishlist submissions, and so on) and what business development initiatives are bringing in clients, and at what cost per each acquired!
4. Average Time Spent on SiteThe average time on site refers to all visitors. In this case, approximately 1,100 visitors spent an average of one minute and 14 seconds on your site. Obviously, the more time spent on your site, the better. This is a good indication that your visitors are actually reading and engaging with your content and that your website design is effectively giving visitors what they want.
However, if you’re looking to yield a 3:1, 5:1, 10:1+ return on investment form the online channel, the number of inquiries you’ve received from the 1,100 web visitors who reached your site is much more impactful than knowing how much time they spent on your site.
5. Bounce Rate
This refers to how many people “bounce” off your site. This typically means that visitors only visit one page after landing on your site and then leave. This also means that they don’t click on any other pages.
Don’t let this metric fool you. If a website is providing people what they’re looking for, a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, you can only prove this to be the case if you are tracking every inquiry that comes from the site, especially phone calls.
6. % of Mobile Users
This means out of all the visitors that land on your site, 43 percent (in this example) is the portion that accesses your site using a mobile device. This metric is important if your website design isn’t “responsive”, or displaying optimally on all devices and if you are running paid advertising that shows for mobile searches and bringing ideal buyers back to a non-mobile-friendly website. Other than that, it is always a good idea to maximize the mobile experience on your website for visitors. Your website performance...
7. Top ChannelsThe top channel is displayed as a pie chart, which shows the top sources or channels that visitors used to find your site. In the example below, the bulk of the traffic came from a paid source, such as a live ad campaign like Google AdWords, Bing ads, Houzz Ads, or other directory sites. Organic traffic makes up approximately 15 percent of the total website traffic in this example. We also see several direct searches, some social media, and a referral. A referral might be visitors who come in from a third-party directory or review site, for example.
You can also click on “Top Pages Viewed” to see which pages your visitors viewed and spent the most time on. One thing to keep in mind is this metric captures the total page views. This means that one visitor may visit a page five times. This is why the number of page views is often higher than the number of visitors. Finally, if your contact page has many views in comparison to how many people have inquired, then you may want to look at optimizing that page because just visiting the contact page alone shows a high intent to buy or reach out to your company to get questions answered.
9. Top Keywords
Keywords are the most powerful thing to reference when creating content like blogs, videos, e-newsletter copy, press releases, or Google ad campaigns. This list shows the top 10 keywords that brought visitors from Google to this company’s website. To reference an earlier portion of this post; you may want to look at heatmaps from visitors to your site from just these words.
By understanding your high-performing keywords you can further optimize your advertising copy, website content, and messaging during your follow-up efforts as well as what to do during the sales process that will generate revenue faster and in a more systematic fashion!
Again, this list can fluctuate due to seasonality, inventory availability, and other market trends. So, it is important to monitor this list periodically and ensure that your mix of keywords makes sense to what it is that you want to transact on the most at your business.
10. Zip Codes Website Visitors & People Clicking Ads Come From Finally, here is a chart that shows the distribution of calls. The green block indicates the number of people who called from an ad (that never even visited your website). The blue indicates they called after clicking on one of your ads, visiting your site, and then decided to reach out.
If you found any of the information contained in this blog post beneficial, or if you would like a complementary video analysis to learn more about how your company is positioned in today’s economy, please reach out to John Gosselin and he’ll work with his award-winning team take action on getting your company the best game-plan for “winning” more business, gaining more market-share and being more high-tech and high-tech on the internet immediately!
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