Online marketing has soared over the past years, and almost every marketer now wants a piece of what it has to offer. In fact, almost every successful business has implemented an authentic online marketing plan. 

While all concerned marketers are on the cusp of all effective advertising angles and trends, most of them forget to measure the success of their strategies, especially if the business is doing exceptionally well.

Measuring your marketing metrics will not only help you identify weaknesses and strong points, but it will also help you stay on top of your game. 

There are tons of marketing metrics that every marketer should converse themselves with, but here is a quick overview of the top 10 metrics that every online business should be measuring;

Website Visits

While there are different locations where traffic is often directed, your website is the main destination for customers. 

This metric cannot be overlooked, because the number of visitors on your website helps determine your outreach efforts throughout the campaign. 

If the number keeps on increasing, then it shows that your campaign is an effective one, but shrinking numbers are an indicator that the campaign needs tweaking and re-planning.

Traffic by Channels

In addition to tracking traffic numbers, it is equally important to monitor your sources of traffic in order to identify where most of the visitors are flowing from. 

Ideally, there are four different channels of traffic. The first is direct traffic, where visitors directly access your website by typing the website URL in their browsers.

Second, we have the organic traffic, also known as the search traffic, who through search queries, are able to access your website. 

For example, let’s say your website sells weight loss solutions. Someone types ‘5 meals to help with weight loss’ and your website appears first in the SERP. If he/she clicks on your website, then that is referred to as organic traffic.

Thirdly, there is the referral traffic that accesses your website through external links from other websites, and finally is social media traffic, which accesses your website via your social platforms. 

Keeping track of these four sources of traffic helps determine which channel is contributing to the most success of the campaign.

Conversions

In its basic form, a conversion is any profitable action on your website carried out by a visitor. This could be through subscribing to the mailing list, purchasing your product/service, downloading your e-book, booking a webinar session, or even filling out a form.

These actions help to engage your visitors more and influence immediate and future purchases. 

While declining conversions are a sign of problems on your side, e.g. poor website design, tracking this metric is the ultimate measure of your success as it reflects on how profitable the campaign is.

Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are explained as the number of times new visitors access your website and then exit without doing anything. 

If your website has been experiencing high bounce rates, then it could be because of these reasons; lack of authentic sources of traffic, poor niche targeting, and an abysmal landing page. 

High bounce rates translate to low conversions because none of your visitors are clicking on CTAs or doing anything to convert.

Bounces can also occur in email marketing. Here, there are two types of bounces; hard bounce and soft bounce. 

A hard bounce occurs when the domain name or the recipient’s email address is invalid. It can also occur if email delivery is blocked by the recipient’s email server. Hard bounces are permanent and the best way to deal with them is to rid all those bounced addresses.

A soft bounce also occurs due to a few reasons which are temporary, unlike hard bounces. A soft bounce could be a result of a full mailbox, a large message, or an offline recipient email server.

New VS Returning Traffic Ratio

This is an important metric as it points to how your website is fairing. For instance, your new traffic may be shooting over the roof while the return traffic remains constant or decreases. 

This could be an indication that your strategies to generate traffic are working but your content is not good enough to keep them coming back.

Another scenario is when your return traffic continues to rise while simultaneously experiencing shrinking new traffic. This points out the fact that your website is captivating enough, or what is often referred to as a ‘sticky’ website. 

On the downside, this may mean that your outreach efforts are weak. Tracking this metric can help you properly direct your efforts in order to strike a reasonable balance between your new and recurring traffic.

Cost per Conversion

It is also referred to as cost per click and it is defined as the costs incurred to convert leads into sales. You can calculate this by dividing your marketing costs by the number of conversions (total number of people in your sales funnel). When implementing your conversion strategies, you ought to know that a high CPC is bad for business.

A high cost per conversion can take a toll on your net income even when the conversion rate is high, turning it to zero or below. This makes it an important metric to keep track of, as it also affects your ROI.

Lead to Close Ratio

With lead to close ratio, you need to ask yourself a simple question; how many of my leads have actually converted? To measure your conversion success, you will need to calculate your lead-to-close ratio. 

This can be done by dividing the number of conversions by the number of your leads. When doing so, you want to get a low lead-to-close ratio as it points out to a successful marketing strategy. Also, your lead-to-close ratio helps to arrive at better ROI projections.

Click-through Rate

Click-through rate is the number of times visitors click on other links on your website, email, social media ads, and PPC marketing, either leading to other pages on your website, landing page, white paper, blog, or even ads.

If your visitors are not clicking on your links then your click-through rate is going to suffer. Re-word your anchor text(linked word or phrase) and also make sure that your content is sticky and compelling enough to make visitors click through your links.

Interactions per Visit

Every visit to your website may not yield a conversion but may be interactive. This is to your advantage because you have the power to manipulate these interactions into sales. 

By monitoring what and how visitors interact with your website, you get to know not only how much time they spend there but what they spend it doing. 

With this knowledge, you can improve your website to persuade conversions from these meaningful engagements.

ROI

This is the ultimate metric for your whole marketing campaign efforts. It pinpoints if all your marketing strategies were successful as it is the highest measure of your business’s profitability. 

To calculate this, divide your cost per lead with the lead-to-close ratio and if the figure falls below that of your average customer value, then your business is generating profits.

Take Away…

Tracking these metrics is as important as keeping your business afloat. You are able to identify what is working for your business and improve on what isn’t.

In the long run, you will be able to up your marketing game by polishing what you are already good at and learning a few more strategies to build on your knowledge.