What people say about your business matters to you greatly, but what you say about your own business determines how many people will find you! As the third post in a series on internet marketing metrics, today we view the measurements that will allow you to determine how your customers are finding your site and what they think when they get there.
If you missed our three previous posts in this series, you can start with The Importance Of Marketing Metrics and continue with the follow-up posts in order.
- Keywords –These are the specific terms used by a person to search for something on the internet. Great company websites are built around the keywords most likely to bring the type of visitors who will be consumers of the company’s product or services, and as such the keywords report gives the marketing department feedback on the most relevant terms on the company website. This report should be scrutinized on a regular basis to ensure that the keywords bringing in the most traffic are in alignment with the goals of the website. For example, if one of the most highly trafficked keywords coming in to the website is bringing visitors to an incorrect or invalid page for the desired company product or service, it would be prudent to figure out how to change the traffic flow to route these prized visitors to the pages that will most effectively satisfy their needs.
- Bounce Rate – We all want to know how visitors perceive the quality of our websites and by measuring “bounce rate,” we know the percentage of visitors who left our site after only viewing the page that they landed upon. A high bounce rate means that the traffic you are generating is finding your website irrelevant, whereas a low bounce rate means that visitors want to know more after they finish at the landing page.
- Average Time On Site – The average time on site metric tells the web marketer how engaging the content of the site is for the visitors. This measurement should be tracked over time, with a goal of increasing this average each month.
- Pages Per Visit – Another important trend to monitor is the pages viewed per visit over time. Often times, paid advertisements generate a lower pageview rate than does good, organic content marketing.
- Top Pages – Just like good sales managers know who their top producers are, a good internet marketer knows which pages are working the best. These can serve to help the web marketer learn how to better prepare the future pages of the company website. Ideally, the top pages should be drawing customers to the most important product or service of the company.
- New vs. Returning Visitors – Google Analytics does a great job of distinguishing new versus returning visitors. A returning visitor is somebody who has previously visited, but has not been on the company website during the past 24 hours. By measuring the ratio of new to returning visitors, the internet marketer is able to get an idea of (just how valuable) new visitors are finding the site.
The actions of the visitors to a company website will tell the attentive internet marketer everything needed to continually improve the performance of the site. Learning from the customer’s actions ensures that future enhancements are geared towards retention and a higher rate of sales.
The final post in this series on internet marketing metrics will be featured tomorrow, so I hope you come back and increase the “average time on site!”
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