Top Metrics To Monitor

Businesses invest in web development to create an online space. Digital marketing has transformed those spaces into virtual stores and hubs for information. Your website is the launchpad for marketing campaigns and houses multiple forms of content.

What happens when your site is up and running? How do you know how much traffic is coming from Google and various social media sites?

Google Analytics is the answer. The best website analytics come from Google because Google tracks user behavior from multiple vantage points, unlike your website or social media analytics that has a narrow focus.

It's essential for users to understand the importance of website metrics for conversions. It's one thing to know people are coming to your website. The question you want to be answered is what visitors are doing once they are on the website.

Website performance drives your marketing strategy. Keep reading to learn the website metrics to monitor when using Google Analytics.

Why Google Analytics Website Metrics?

Google is the ruler of the internet, or so it seems. Because most interactions on the internet involve Google in some way, they have the ability to collect a countless amount of data to measure site metrics.

Device functionality

Online content

User behavior

User experience

...and more

The best feature of Google Analytics is its cost. Google offers this valuable information for free. Couple this with its integration on some site builder apps, and its value increases.

When we look at the top B2B metrics, it's important to understand that each business has its requirements. All data brings value to your marketing strategy. For some businesses, certain information is vital, while other data is useless in measuring how your website is performing.

Knowing what is available is vital for users to decide which metrics are necessary to get them from point A to point B. In the end, the goal is to have as much information at your disposal to make the right decisions to monitor your website's overall performance.

Average Session Duration

The clock begins to time as soon as they land on a page and continues until they exit. The timer will stop if a person is inactive for an extended period of time. The average session duration site metric is the amount of time site visitors are on your website.

Duration includes time spent on each page. For example, if a user enters via a landing page link and is on that page for ten minutes before exiting, that's a session. The same user could leave the landing page and browse your eCommerce shop for five minutes. Now the session has increased to fifteen minutes.

There are downsides to average session duration metrics. Using our example above, the site visitor could have stepped away from the landing page to take a call. In reality, he was only on the page for two minutes.

Google Analytics mediates extended inactivity by stopping the session at 30 minutes. In these instances, the session time reverts to zero. Therefore, you could use session times when the person was engaged with the site.

When sessions are no longer counted, they drop into the Bounce column.

Bounce rate

When it comes to marketing for your website, bounce rates can tell you all there is to know about the campaign's effectiveness. Imagine running a social media campaign and including a link to a landing page. Two days later, you check your Google Analytics and find a 100 percent bounce rate.

Before firing your marketing team, you'll want to investigate. There could be an issue with the link or the page itself.

The bounce rate is simple. If someone clicks on a link to your website and nothing happens, it's considered a bounce. The user didn't click on the call-to-action button or another link on your site.

Not every site visitor will answer your CTA. When a high rate of sessions ends without any engagement, the marketing needs to be tweaked.

Channels

Channels is the term used in Google Analytics to segment the different traffic sources to your website. Traffic is then separated into different sectors to help site owners drill deeper into their website metrics. Here are the channels to watch.

1. Direct

Direct traffic accounts for site visits that came from your website's URL. It includes someone typing the web address into Google's search bar. Or when Google provides the link in their search results.

Direct traffic can also come from link clicks from someone sharing your web address in an email or text.

2. Email

Hopefully, your company is using email marketing. It's still a valuable tool and one that Google Analytics can help measure.

The email channel differs from someone clicking on your link from an email sent by a colleague and a link embedded in a marketing email. With this metric, Google is focused on traffic from an email campaign.

It's important to set up your email marketing to include share buttons to maintain the integrity of your embedded links. You may also want to utilize campaign tags to improve your analytics.

3. Organic Search

Organic search is a good sign you're doing an excellent job with your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The data tracks how people find your website. In this field, you'll better understand your organic reach.

Improve your organic reach, improve keywords, links, and write content in an authoritative voice.

4. Paid Search

Paid search is traffic from paid advertising. The primary source is advertising using Google's ad-buying tool, Google Ads. You can also include traffic from ads on social media by incorporating a UTM tag.

Keywords are a big portion of SEO. It's essential to the success of paid advertising campaigns. You want to understand your traffic costs when reviewing paid search results. The traffic costs entail evaluating your keyword rankings.

You can also get B2B metrics that rank your keywords. This way you can determine which keywords have value and which ones you can replace.

By monitoring the traffic costs you can determine the ROI on your paid advertising.

5. Referral

Referral traffic can come in several forms. One is traffic from a search engine other than Google. It's also likely that the referral came from another website using link-building techniques in their SEO strategy.

When other sites use your links, it is often a positive sign that they see your site as a reputable source.

You want to keep track of your referral data because you don't want unauthorized use of your links used negatively. The site analytics provide an opportunity for you to research the sites using your URLs.

6. Social 

Social metrics come from the traffic that originates from social media sites. Make good use of your social media accounts by sharing pages from your website using the page's URL. This method is the best way to track engagement.

Your social metrics are a driving force when it comes to measuring the success of your social media marketing. In addition to running ads on social sites, you also have the ability to create versions of campaigns to address different audiences.

Your audience on Facebook may not receive information the same way as someone on Twitter. Or you may do a live presentation on YouTube and stream it to your audience on Facebook and Instagram.

You can track the analytics from social media campaigns using the site's metrics. You can also expand your data using Google Analytics. The next step is to compare all metrics to get a better understanding of your overall reach.

7. Other Advertising

Google's "other" bucket is a catchall for anything Google can't drop in the other six buckets. Be intentional about checking this category to see if marketing campaigns are being optimized correctly. Your goal is to gather as much data as possible to make the best decisions.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rates are calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of interactions. If your latest email marketing campaign had 1,000 opens and 50 people clicked on a link to your website, the conversion rate would be 5%.

Five percent may seem like a meager conversion rate. This is a good number according to marketing specialists as the average is around 3.5%. Also, take into consideration that conversion rates vary by industry.

There are always opportunities to increase your conversion rates. Knowing the site metrics gives your marketing team food for thought to improve your marketing content.

Cost Per Conversion

Cost per Conversion (CPC) is a moving target. Several variables go into this B2B metric. At its core, the CPC is the total amount paid for advertising divided by the number of conversions.

For example, if you paid $1,000 in advertising to market an eBook and 200 people made a purchase, the CPC is $5.

Your teams will have to decide if the conversions align with your goals based on the data. If the goal was to sell books, then you reached your goal. If the goal was to profit from the sales, you didn't reach your goal.

The next step is to couple this data with other metrics to see where there's room for improvement. No one metric can tell a complete story.

Demographics

Google probably knows more the demographics of online users than any other entity on the web. In marketing 101, we learn the value of understanding our target audience. To do this, we must first understand who is in our audience.

Demographics guide target marketing. It defines our brand and sets the price point for products sold on eCommerce sites.

With Google Analytics, you can access a treasure trove of free information. Age, gender, race, and interests can call get used to improve marketing.

Direct Traffic

How are you sharing your website address? Are you using business cards, digital marketing, posting it on print marketing material, or sharing it in a QrCode?

Google Analytics allows you to see how many people accessed your website by typing the URL directly into the browser.

Sometimes we get caught up in the ability to insert links into digital formats. We forget some users still access websites using a company's web address. Measuring this site metric can drive your decision to invest in traditional marketing that showcases your company website.

Exit Pages

After viewing the information on your campaign landing pages, are users interested in learning more about your product or service? The fastest way to find out is site metrics for exit pages.

Exit pages are data showing what page a user was on when they exited your website. If most exits came from the landing page, this is a sign that you need to revisit the content and call to action.

Not only did the site visitor not engage with the content, but they also weren't interested enough to learn more about your business. The lack of interest could directly correlate to your overall website performance.

Exit Rate

Exit rate takes all pages visited after the landing page and measures the last page visited. This information can have no significance, or it can raise a red flag if more than 50% of exits are from the same page regardless of the order of the pages viewed.

Goal Conversions

Businesses need to set goals. One of your website performance metrics should include tracking goal conversions.

Under conversions in Google Analytics is a list of goal conversions. Choose the ones that are important for your website performance.

You can also set smart goals to track Google ad performance.

Once you start converting goals, you can track your results. The results are based on your goal. For example, if purchases completed are a goal, you would take the number of purchases divided by visits and multiplied by 100.

Landing Page Views

Email marketing and paid advertising are only as strong as the page the user is directed to when they click on a call to action or other links. These pages are called landing pages. They are the welcome mat to your website.

Landing pages must have strong content. When landing pages don't engage the user, their experience is more likely to end there. Also, you should invest in a clutter-free design that makes it easy for site visitors to understand the CTA.

The page shouldn't be gimmicky. Instead, use informative content, high-resolution images, and a smart design layout. You also want to give the visitor a reason to go further. The landing page could include a special offer for subscribing to your website.

Leads Generated

Lead generation is easy to track in goals conversions. It is an essential tool for B2B metrics to capture where leads originate. Coupled with Funnel Visualization, you can come up with more precise numbers.

Partnering Google Analytics with other software like Customer Relationship Management software can round out your efforts. Instead of looking at what site visitors are doing on your site, you can zero in on viable leads.

Once you make the distinction, your sales teams can work to convert those leads to sales or industry partners.

Mobile Traffic

We often hear about the need for mobile-friendly and mobile responsive versions of business websites. Mobile devices now account for 52% of the total internet traffic. Google Analytics has separate website performance metrics to measure mobile traffic.

Google offers the following primary dimensions:

• Mobile device info
• Mobile device branding
• Service provider
• Operating system
• and others

With these drivers, you'll know if your users are more likely to access your website on Android or iPhone. It'll also show if they're using a tablet or smartphone. Or whether they are searching using Chrome, Edge, IE, or Safari.

Reporting for mobile devices offers the same tools as desktop usage. Where possible, you can use the data to reinforce rules on mobile versions of your marketing campaigns.

Pages Per Session

Earlier, we talked about the average session duration. In this website performance metric, we look at a connecting piece. Pages per session are the site metric that measures how many pages a user visited on your website.

B2B websites often get traffic from marketing landing pages. With the right SEO strategy, you'll see traffic entering through your homepage. This is traffic garnered from search engine results pages.

Websites with a clean user-friendly homepage should see an uptick in people leaving the homepage to check out other content.

It's vital to have each page layout include opportunities for the user to learn more. To do so, they must have  CTA that takes them to another page.

If your metric is registering a 2.0 or higher, it means people are leaving the home or landing page after entering the site. The higher the number, the more engagement you're receiving.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is visitors who found your website organically. They did not find you through paid advertising. They weren't sent by a referral or found you on social media. They most likely entered keywords in a search engine, and your website was among the search results.

It's valuable information to analyze because you want to know what keywords they used. Why were they looking for your product or service, and did they convert to a sale?

Organic Session

You also want to track organic sessions to learn how organic traffic behaved on your website. It's also of value to know if they converted to a buying customer and what products interest them. These organic sessions can also help you devise a customer acquisition strategy.

Time of Purchase

Time of purchase might be a site metric that gets overlooked but has value to your overall website performance. Knowing when users are most likely to shop on your site has benefits.

What if the average product is purchased on Wednesdays between seven and nine pm? You can create emails or SMS alerts that go out on Wednesdays offering a 10% discount during those times.

Unique Purchases

Unique purchases track consumer buying habits. A typical buying behavior might get seen as someone who purchases one or two of the same item. If you see a trend when an item is being purchased in bulk, that's considered a unique purchase.When you see a pattern among your regular customers, you can create a marketing campaign that offers a discount on bulk purchases.

Another example is if you notice customers that buy product A also buy product C. Run a campaign pairing the two items at a 10% discount.

As you can see, paying close attention to product performance can help you improve sales. It shows the buying behavior of your customers and helps drive future advertising.

Unique Site Visitors

Our final metric is unique site visitors. It's great to get a lot of traffic to your website. It's a sign that you're doing things right.

It's equally important to understand who your site visitors are in terms of repeat users and new users. The best indicator is a month-to-month comparison.

You can also track unique users by fluctuations in special event marketing such as holidays or when promoting a conference. You can expect to see a higher unique visitor number during these promotions.

It's Time to Measure Your Marketing ROI

Website metrics are the key to unlocking your digital marketing performance. If you're not converting leads into sales, you're not getting a good return on your investment.

It's time to look at your site metrics and devise a plan to improve your website performance.

If analyzing web metrics is not your strength, don't worry. It's time to create a process of continual web analytics management. This way, you'll never have to worry about what the ROI is for your digital marketing.

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