Creating a popular and engaging website is only half the battle in the traffic and conversion game. Staying on top of your search metrics helps your website continually evolve to meet the changing whims of your audience.
As a business owner, your time is precious. Learning to maximize the metrics you track can make you a more efficient marketer while you continue to serve your existing customers. When you know the basics of search metric tracking, you can also delegate these tasks with confidence.
Our friends at Romain Berg built their full-service digital marketing agency on results, not hype. They will diligently track search engine metrics for you. So, you can be sure their customized marketing strategy builds your audience and converts more site visitors to customers.
Contact them today to generate relevant and useful search metrics tracking protocol for your business website.
From general to specific: total traffic and precise markers
If you open up a Google Analytics account for your site, you’ll gain access to a world of data that just about anyone can read and interpret. Plus, if you ever decide to outsource your data tracking, you’ll have the platform ready for your collaborators with Google.
Once you have your account established, you’ll want to become familiar with several markers. They include:
- Traffic
- Traffic sources
- Conversion rate
- Best conversions by traffic source
- Top performing pages
- Bounce rate
- Overall customer value
Traffic and their sources
Your total traffic helps you discover how often users click to your site. Total traffic only tells half the story, though. When you break down your traffic stats into categories, you can further pinpoint where your marketing efforts are most effective.
Tallying your clicks from
- referrals,
- organic social media,
- pay-per-click, or
- other paid ads
gives you valuable feedback about where your marketing resources are gaining the most ROI.
Direct traffic (when people type your website url into the search bar) is an essential metric for local businesses as well. These are the people who’ve seen or heard your name on social media, other channels, or their friends, and now have searched your website for your location, directions, or what’s on your menu.
Conversion rate: the Holy Grail of search metrics
The best indicator of your marketing strategy performance is its conversion rate. These stats tell us how well our intro offers, seasonal specials, new product launches, and other calls to action land with users.
If you don’t know your conversion rates and where they originate, you might as well throw on a blindfold and shoot your marketing dollars at the wall as if they were darts.
Conversions aren’t restricted to purchases, although increased sales are the ultimate goal for almost every company. Building your audience through email list subscriptions, appointment setting, and social media engagements all work together to compile your customer base.
You’ll want to dive deeper into your conversion rates to see if they derive from your social media posts, PPC, direct traffic, referrals, or other channels.
Calculating your conversion rate means dividing your total unique users by the total number of conversions for your site in a given time period. Most businesses track this data monthly, quarterly, or seasonally.
You can use the same equation to track your conversion rates by source. When you know which of your traffic sources yield the highest conversion rates, you can do several things:
- Allocate more marketing resources to the channels that deliver more conversions.
- Tweak your lower-performing channels to enhance user experience, change your offers or calls to action.
- Change up your content to engage more of your audience.
What should my conversion rate be?
Once you have your Google Analytics account set up, you can start tracking these stats, and then adjusting your marketing tactics to influence your conversion rate.
Increasing your conversion rate by even 1% could equal a significant sales revenue gain. So, it’s imperative to keep tweaking your site for relevant content, calls to action, and overall user experience.
Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to try out a variety of customer specials, different vocabulary, and varying calls to action on each of your marketing channels. You’ll want to track your search metrics precisely after each change you make to your marketing approach, so you can see which tactics get you closest to your conversion rate goals.
Other metrics that add to your success (or failure)
The last website stats on your “to learn about” list include:
- Top pages: How each page of your website performs for visits and bounce rate
- Bounce rate: How long a user hangs out on your website. This metric correlates directly to user experience. A low bounce rate might mean a slow page load, an error, or content that fails to grab your audience and hold them in place. A high bounce rate means your audience members may engage more deeply with your content, services, or products. Added bonus: a high bounce rate can positively influence your search rank as well.
- Lifetime customer value: Once a customer, always a customer? For your sake, we hope so. It’s true that first-time customers often stick around and buy more stuff if they’ve had a good experience. When you can calculate the likelihood of future purchases or customer loyalty (like with membership or a long-term contract), you can allocate a higher percentage of resources to the marketing campaigns that successfully attract those new customers and keep them interested in your company.
Avoid the metric rabbit hole and outsource your tracking
So, we could go on all day about the many fascinating details of website search metrics. If you’re nerdy that way too, we’ll happily talk your ear off about numbers and percentages and how to improve them.
However, we suspect you probably have other demands on your time, like creating new products, services, or other operational essentials. When your eyes cross from looking at your Google Analytics data, it’s time to outsource your search metric tracking.
Our friends at Romain Berg live and breathe data, so hit their website to get started on data collection and tracking. They’ll also help you create the right strategy to keep your metrics going up and to the right for as long as you collaborate.
