It’s a question any organization should be able to answer, but often it’s one of the hardest questions to answer.
Some organizations spend marketing dollars without a clear metric they’d like to measure. They just want marketing.
But you can’t measure success unless you know what that success is.
So, when it comes to your online marketing efforts, what are you trying to achieve, and what’s the most important metric to measure?
Every situation is different, so here are some examples of metrics that are important to our clients.
Generally, clients care about pageviews, visits and traffic sources. However, the most important conversion metric for one of our clients is how often a video is viewed – how often the play button is pressed. For that one metric, we use Google Analytics to examine traffic sources, search keywords, etc. That metric is the center of our reporting and it is how the client measures the success of their marketing efforts.
Another client wants Facebook fans. Pageviews, time on site, etc. are less important to them. They just want a large audience, all of whom have opted-in for marketing promotions.
Some small businesses that I’ve worked with want their websites to work as a lead generation tool. They are less concerned with raw traffic and more concerned with completed contact forms and how many of those inquiries turn into new business for them.
For many organizations, though, it comes down to one metric: Unique Visitors. This number drives advertising sales, brand awareness and authority. But it’s not the be-all end-all. You can have a website with 2 million visits a month but if your visitors aren’t doing what you want them to do – if they’re not converting – then what’s the value in 2 million visits?
For successful online marketing in any organization of any size, ask: What is the most important metric? Build from there.
