The Importance of Marketing Analytics
John Wanamaker is dubbed the pioneer in marketing and is famously attributed with the quote:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
In today’s information enriched climate, that statement no longer applies! Through analytics, marketers can measure, manage and analyze your business’s digital marketing performance. The beauty of being in tune with your marketing performance is that businesses can pinpoint areas of success or in need of improvement in order to maximize effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).
In this article, we will discuss 5 metrics you should be tracking to understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and provide insight into how your audience is responding to the content.
1. Denounce The Bounce
A bounce rate is exactly how it sounds. Users on your site are bouncing from page to page without spending the time to read or engage with your content, or clicking off the website entirely. This is especially troublesome for areas such as your Home Page, because it shows people are not interested in finding more information. Bounce rate statistics can also be telling if you have a lot of ‘bots’ or fake traffic to your website. A bot will have a bounce rate of 0 because the spam virus just goes from site to site without interacting until reaching a stopping point (such as the Are You A Robot prompt).
On the other hand, there are some cases where a high bounce rate is acceptable. For pages such as Contact Us, or perhaps a user clicks off on an informative blog can mean the reader got the information they needed. Therefore, it is important to track not only your bounce rate percentage, but also on which pages it is occurring on.
2. EXTRA, EXTRA! Click all about it!
Click through rates (CTR) also expose important statistics about your site. An author from an analytics software company described CTR as “the ratio of clicks on calls-to-action (CTA) to the number of users who only view the page, email, or advertisement”. Tracking your CTR is especially important when assessing the effectiveness of your CTAs. If CTRs are low as users are not compelled by your prompts to ‘find out more’, you can begin to reveal problems such as the wording of the call to action, or where it is placed within the website. It could be as simply as not enough people are seing the CTA or don’t understand what clicking can provide from them.
3. Class is now in Session
Session time simply the amount of time a user spends on your site. This is a very simple and straightforward method to gain insight if your audience is interested in staying on the website. Doesn’t get much more cut and dry than that- class dismissed!
4. Strong engagement on your website has a nice ‘ring’ to it
Strong engagement metrics reveal how your site is performing against the test of time. Search engines favour websites that constantly update interesting and fresh content, which will also keep your audience coming back for more. By tracking engagement on a regular basis, you can examine what content is working, what pages are causing your customers to drop off or exit, and provides a snapshot of the overall success of your marketing efforts online.
5. Seal the deal
The last metric we recommend checking is your company’s online conversion rate. On the surface, this statistic can be seen as the most telling because a conversion rates represents how many customers complete a goal on your site, like create an account or make a purchase, out of the total number of customers who visit your site.
We suggest businesses dedicate 1 hour a week to checking in on these top 5 metrics to give an overall snapshot of their online marketing success. It can sound like a daunting task to analyze and give context to a jumble of numbers, but we are here to help! At TSquared Marketing we assume the responsibility of marketing analytics to ensure your website and online marketing strategy is optimized every step of the way.
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