Which Marketing Analytics Matter Most to Small Business Owners?
When you open up an account with Google Analytics or host your website on a CMS, you’ll find there is an almost overwhelming amount of information at your disposal. The diversity of the data available to you is one of the advantages of having digital analytics, but it can also make it a bit confusing when deciding which insights are most important for making big decisions. When looking through the data you have available to you, you’ll find some marketing analytics are more important than others.
Web Traffic
When looking for usable data, you don’t just want to pay attention to how many people are visiting your website. While it may be encouraging to see your website getting hits, this alone won’t be of much value to you. What you need to see is how people are getting to your website broken down into categories like social media platforms, search engine page results, and links. These sorts of insights will tell you which areas need improvement and which marketing channels are performing well.
Conversion Rate
When you measure web traffic, you can see how people behave when they are on your website, including which pages they navigate to, how long they stay, and which pages tend to get the most bounces. But what’s even more important is paying attention to how often people convert on a desired action, such as providing contact information, downloading a brochure, or making a purchase. You can track user behavior from certain points in the sales funnel to see which strategies are performing well when it comes to leading to sales.
Site Load Speed
As technology advances and people’s desire for instant gratification grows, this piece of data will only become more important. However, many business owners don’t take this element of their website into consideration. The reality is, if your website takes too long to load, generally more than three seconds, you’re likely losing a significant portion of potential visitors.
Using the free tool, Google PageSpeed Insights, you can get a score on how quickly your website loads. If you find your website is loading too slowly, you can make adjustments to your photo sizes, code, or web host to get your website up to speed. When you do this, you’ll likely start seeing your web traffic grow.
Engagement
Particularly when it comes to social media pages, getting lots of followers and traffic is only beneficial on the surface. The real metric of success when it comes to social media marketing is engagement. Are people commenting? Liking? Sharing? These are the real questions you need to answer instead of just looking at your follower count. People may have followed you early on, but they may not be engaging due to the content you’re currently posting. Take a look at your engagement stats on each social media post to see which kind of content gets lots of likes, comments, and shares, and focus on creating the kinds of posts that get high engagement.
When you focus on the most important analytics and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly, you’ll be able to make the most of your digital presence.