Beyond the Clicks: How to Get More from Your Website Metrics
When you measure website traffic, you probably measure clicks. That is, how many people are visiting key pages on your website and how they are getting there. Or, maybe, you’re looking at the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) costs of your online advertising. Either way, you’re right to measure these things because they can tell you about traffic to your website. But are these website metrics enough?
Probably not. Especially when a deep dive into Google Analytics and other tools can reveal:
- Who is engaging with your site and how – through commenting and sharing, enlarging photos and watching videos
- How multiple social media and advertising channels do – and do not – attract site visitors
- Which social, organic search, paid search and other online touchpoints drive first visits, engaged visits and conversions on your website
- How these insights should be interpreted to optimize marketing efforts
That’s a lot of detailed information – and it isn’t readily available to most individual marketing directors, consultants, strategists and creatives. Rather, it’s available – but only if you have the knowledge, skill, experience and time necessary to mine and model the data for it, following user paths and touchpoints for different date ranges and activities. In other words – there are good reasons why finding those stats is the bread-and-butter work of digital marketing strategists (full disclosure: that’s part of my job at Relish Marketing).
Acquiring the expertise necessary to do a meaningful, deep data dive demands a long, steep learning curve – especially as analytics software and capabilities evolve. The good news, however, is that you can – and should – expand your understanding of what today’s analytics can reveal about your website performance. Armed with website metrics and perspective, you can better evaluate your marketing agency’s ability to help you get the most out of your company’s digital experiences.
For instance, you should expect your marketing agency to be able to answer the kinds of questions that can help you make your online presence more productive for your business, such as:
- How much of a role does each of my marketing initiatives/channels play in converting site visits to leads?
- What are my top three user paths to conversion? When visits do not convert, where are we losing them? What is the last place users visit on our site before leaving?
- What optimizations and strategies can help us convert leads that are falling off?
These questions can be complicated. So, if you get answers that you don’t fully understand, don’t be afraid to dig a little deeper. Challenge your agency to help you think outside the box, partnering with you to strengthen your lead funnel. Digging deep into your digital data will be well worth the effort. And, it should help you drive better, more efficient results when you roll out new marketing campaigns and promotions.