What Should I Be Measuring?

When it comes to understanding and explaining performance of digital channels, what […]

What should I be measuring?

When it comes to understanding and explaining performance of digital channels, what should I measure and how? We get asked this question a lot.

Google Analytics spits out a lot of data and it can be overwhelming.

 

What should I be measuring?

 

Metrics should always be focused on business outcomes or factors that drive business outcomes. For example, unless you’re in the publishing business are you really bothered how many page impressions your website had last month? Or would you be more interested in the number of sales leads or value of transactions processed?

It sounds simple but this outcome based approach can often be scuppered by enthusiastic board members or other senior stakeholders who’s first question is often “what’s the website bounce rate this month Gerald”…

The answer to this question is almost always “who gives a f……flip”.

Ok, so I’m being flippant, you might actually find bounce rate useful if you work in the content or digital team, my point is that you’ll often need to steer senior stakeholders towards the metrics that matter.

Try to focus your reporting to the wider business on outcomes such as:

  1. How many leads did you acquire this month?
  2. How many and what value of products (or if you’re working for a charity – donations) came through your website?
  3. How many customers chose to download a product information sheet/brochure?
  4. Number of telephone calls from the website (see our earlier article on call tracking for more details)

You can measure all of this data from within Google Analytics and if you’re sending the results on to senior management you could even pull together a nice dashboard using Google Data Studio.

If you’re the person responsible for delivering the results you’ll obviously want to pay attention to a more detailed set of metrics. Some of our favourites are:

  1. Top landing pages
  2. Conversion rate by landing page (split by leads/sales)
  3. Conversion rate/volume by traffic source
  4. Top site search terms and associated conversion rates

What no bounce rate?!

No, but you might want to use bounce rate in conjunction with other metrics to understand relative performance of various pieces of content. Does that page with an above average bounce rate have a high scroll depth/time on page indicating that people are still engaging with the content on the page?

All of the metrics listed above are core when it comes to understanding and optimising performance across digital content and campaigns, start digging into them now to get some real actionable insight.

Get in touch using the comments section below if you’d like more information on any of the above metrics.