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Content may be king, but it’s far less valuable without understanding the data behind it.
Whether you’re preparing to launch a digital marketing campaign or you simply want to better understand your audience, there are a few key digital marketing metrics that all business owners and marketers should pay attention to.
For any business, your website is the foundation for everything you do. All campaigns, ads, and content under the brand are created in an effort to lead people to your website and convert them into loyal customers or followers. So before you can get started with any type of digital marketing campaign, it’s crucial to get insights into what your current website traffic looks like so you can better understand what to track in the future.
Overall traffic
First and foremost, it’s important to understand how much traffic your website is getting overall. When you use tools like Google Analytics, all of your website’s traffic data is available for you to track. The overall traffic is the first metric to take note of. You can break down your traffic by day, week, month, or any other time frame that you want to measure. Getting an idea of how much traffic your website sees on any given day or week is the first step in understanding how your website is doing or where it could improve.
Traffic source
The source of your website traffic is another crucial metric to track. Traffic sources include organic, direct, referral, and social. Taking note of where your website visitors are coming from can help you figure out which channels are working well and which ones aren’t driving as much traffic.
For example, if you notice that your organic traffic is low, then that tells you that you need to improve your website’s SEO in order to increase its visibility in search engine results. If you want to increase your social traffic, then you would need to broaden your reach on social media by creating more engaging content.
Typically, direct and organic should be your biggest drivers of traffic. But in order to build a well-rounded digital marketing strategy, it’s wise to take all channels into account.
Most visited pages
In order to understand what type of content your audience is drawn to, it’s important to track your website’s page views. While you can track the broad number of page views your website gets by day, week, or month, a specific metric to pay attention to is the most visited pages. The homepage of a website is often the page with the most traffic, because it’s the first page visitors see. But the other top-ranking pages listed will give you insight into where your website visitors go after leaving the homepage. The most visited pages may shift if you’re measuring week to week, depending on if you’re running a campaign, recently published a blog post, or launched a new product. But if you look at your all-time top performing pages, then you should have a better understanding of what has done well overall on your website. Having this type of knowledge can help you shape your website content going forward.
Reach
Social media reach is determined by the number of people who saw your content. This applies to Instagram posts, Facebook posts, a tweet, etc. Keep in mind that reach does not include engagements. It only takes into account the number of people who saw your post in their feed.
It’s most important to measure your social media reach whenever you’re running a campaign and want to reach a lot of people. Understanding your organic reach can help you determine if you need to put money behind your posts to reach a larger audience.
Engagement
Engagement is determined by the interactions people had with your post. Understanding which social media posts are getting the most engagement from followers tells you what type of content performs well with your audience.
It’s important to measure engagement for both organic and paid social content. You can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on social media ads or promoted content in order to increase your reach, but that money doesn’t guarantee that you’ll increase the level of engagement. In order to see high levels of engagement, the content needs to be relevant, timely, and have a call to action.
About Sam Lauron: Sam is a freelance lifestyle writer and a copywriter at Swyft, which has been listed as one of the best PR firms in Austin and a top digital marketing agency in Denver since its founding in 2011. Swyft has satellite offices where it offers PR in San Francisco and Houston.
