After you've established trends in the basic inbound marketing analytics, use these 5 advanced analytic scores to measure improvements to your marketing:
1) New vs. Repeat visitors - Not only should you look at the total number of visitors, but also look at the portion of your visitors that are repeat visitors. Is your site "sticky"? Are people coming back more frequently and in higher numbers? If more of your visitors are repeat visitors, it means they found something compelling on your site and return to find more good stuff.
The balance here is you need a healthy ratio of new visitors too. If too many of your visitors are repeat, you're not growing your business. Most websites get the vast majority of traffic from new visitors, perhaps 5% are repeat visitors. A better indication that your content is interesting is 15% of visits are repeat visitors. If repeats trend toward 25 - 30% you are probably not growing your business as rapidly as you could.
2) Referring sources - Where is your traffic coming from? One of my favorite things to look at is the sources of traffic. Was there a new link from a big website? Is your traffic from SEO or organic search increasing? Most websites get about 20% of their traffic from search engines, but most of that is based on searches for your company name and not the customer problems (keywords) you're solving. A healthy site gets 40% or more of traffic from organic search, and that extra 20% comes from words that are not your company name. Understanding your sources of traffic is important so you can decide how much to prioritize SEO.
3) Conversion rate - How many visitors are becoming a lead (or customer)? Monitoring the overall rate at which your website visitors complete your desired outcome (buying something or filling out a lead form) is really important. After all, that's the whole reason you have a website! Review this data weekly, and compare it to what marketing events you've been running and my major sources of traffic for the week. It can give you a great sense of whether the traffic from PC Magazine or the Wall Street Journal Online convert better into leads and gives you a basis for making informed choices in future PR and advertising.
4) Page popularity - What is the most popular content on your site? knowing what people like to look at on your site can help you produce more content that people enjoy and find engaging and remove the content they do not enjoy. Spotting trends and creating more content that people find interesting will help increase traffic and stickiness.
5) Traffic by keywords - This can refer to a number of different metrics, but what you are trying to understand is what terms and phrases people are searching on to find your site, and how much traffic you are generating from organic search. Look at these metrics to gain an appreciation for the power of your keywords:
- First, the number of people coming to my site using search keywords.
- Second, this portion of my traffic as a percentage of my total traffic.
Finally, review all of the search terms that people have used to find your website. This isn't really a "metric", but you can improve your ability to think like your prospects by reviewing this information and typically find some new keywords that can give your marketing a real boost.
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