Measuring the effectiveness of Your nline Marketing

So, if these metrics are not the way to measure marketing effectively, what should you be measuring? Try these more actionable metrics to get a better picture of how marketing is driving revenue:

the new waYof MeaSuring SucceSS

conversions

why this works better:conversions tie back to your actual business goals and are much more indicative of visitor action.

how to measure:use goals in google analytics to measure conversions on your website, such as purchases, downloads, or registrations. if you have a marketing automation system, this will also help you determine conversions.

conversion rate

why this works better:Knowing the rate at which visitors are converting for a certain action on your site will help inform and optimize your online strategies, including user experience, landing page design, ad copy, and content pieces.

how to measure:using goals in google analytics, you can easily see what your conversion rates are.

tiMe to Purchase

why this works better:if you have an ecommerce website, knowing Time to Purchase will help you determine the purchasing habits of your customers by telling you the average time it takes (in days) for a customer to buy.

how to measure:Time to Purchase is included in google analytics’ ecommerce Module.

traffic sources

why this works better:Knowing where your visitors are coming from (especially combined with conversions) will help you determine where to concentrate your marketing efforts.

how to measure:google analytics has a set of reports called Traffic Sources. it’s also important to ensure your campaign urLs are tagged with source, medium, and campaign so you can get a more detailed picture of what campaigns are working.

attributionwhy this works better:one of the biggest challenges of marketing measurement is determining which campaign or traffic source should be credited with a conversion, such as a sale. attribution can show you what traffic source your customers interacted with first, second, third and fourth before eventually converting.

how to measure:Some marketing automation systems have tools that show attribution and a customer’s content path before converting. google analytics also has an attribution Modeling tool for looking specifically at traffic sources.

the old waYof MeaSuring SucceSS

Pageviews/unique Pageviews

what it measures:How many total times pages on a website were viewed, regardless of visitor or type. unique Pageviews measures this by each unique visitor.

why it’s not effective to measure:only tells you that a page was served, but doesn’t really indicate visitor action.

visitors/unique visitors

what it measures:How many total visitors came to the website, including repeat visits by one person. unique Visitors is each unique person visiting your website, and does not count repeat visits.

why it’s not effective to measure:Just a traffic stat that doesn’t measure visitor value or action. also could include employee visits.

tiMe on site

what it measures:How long a visitor, on average, stays on a website.

why it’s not effective to measure:Tabbed browsing and server timeouts make this difficult to measure with accuracy. Visitors could open your site in a tab, then leave it open for later reading – meaning they’re not necessarily engaged the whole time.

bounce rate

what it measures:Percentage of visitors who immediately leave your website upon clicking through to a page – without looking at any other pages on your site.

why it’s not effective to measure:as with Time on Site, tabbed browsing and server timeouts have also made bounce rate difficult to measure with accuracy.

Pages Per visit

what it measures:How many pages, on average, a visitor looked at on your website.

why it’s not effective to measure:it’s not necessarily indicative of your true buyer personas’ behavior, and does not measure any particular visitor value.

new visits

what it measures:Percentage of visitors to your website who have never been to your site before.

why it’s not effective to measure:This metric is highly susceptible to cookie deletion – which means that many of a site’s previous visitors could be measured as new visitors.

according to the State of Marketing Measurement report from ifbyphone, how marketing is measured is being scrutinized more and more by ceos. They’re being asked to measure a wider range of metrics with a greater focus on how marketing is driving revenue.

Because of this growing trend towards revenue- and action-driven metrics, it’s important to understand why some of the metrics that have traditionally been important, may not be relevant anymore.

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what metrics really matter?

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