Simon Turner

Measure what matters in 2010

One of the best things about digital marketing is how easy it is to measure pretty much everything. Using simple, and free analytics packages (most people use Google Analytics) it’s possible to track how many visitors you get, how they found your site and what they do when they get there (amongst countless other stats).

So when you can measure pretty much everything, what should you focus on?

1) Conversion rate

This is, without a doubt, the number one stat every web master should be measuring. If you don’t look at your conversion rates, every other stat is meaningless. What’s the use of a huge visitor increase if none of them take a positive action? Whats the point in reducing bounce rate if visitors then leave never to return?

Identify what you want visitors to do on your site. It might be to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter or to provide your sales team with a lead. Whatever it is, set it up as a goal in your analytics package, and see how successful you are at converting visitors into customers/members/subscribers. Once you know this you can then optimise your site to funnel people towards this goal, and measure the results.

Measuring conversion rates is not just a site wide process however - you should be analysing it on every aspect of your website.

Look at which channels provide the best quality visitors. You might find Google organic search gives the best quality traffic; or it may be that visitors coming from Twitter are more useful to you. Whatever you find, you will have a better idea of where to focus your energy. You can also drill down on a keyword level to get an accurate idea of the benefits of your SEO efforts. If your top keywords convert well then great; if they don’t, you might want to research keywords which will provide you with more of a benefit. Look for keywords you don’t rank highly for that have led to a conversion, and focus on boosting those rankings.

2) Measure figures against the same month last year.

An easy trap to fall in is to measure against the previous month, but in most industries seasonal trends have a big impact on visitor numbers, conversion, AOV and most other stats you can think of. If you measure against the same month from the previous year you will get an accurate picture of how much you have grown.

3) ROI

If you’re spending money on your marketing you must measure how much it returns. There are a few methods out there, so find the one most appropriate to your business. For ecommerce sites I generally recommend measuring ROI based on profit. I advocate a measurement called ERS (effective revenue share). This is Marketing Cost divided by Revenue X 100. This tells you what percentage of revenue is absorbed by your marketing spend. As long as you know your gross margin you can then easily work out what an acceptable ROI is for a given channel or campaign.

What not to measure in 2010?

1) Page Rank

Google has come out and said that page rank doesn’t mean much nowadays. Not only is it not updated regularly but Google ‘Say’ it is a less significant factor in ranking than ever before. Sometimes you have to take what Google says on SEO with a pinch of salt, but more and more I see sites with a low page rank out ranking those with the higher PR.

2) Blindly measuring visitor numbers

Visitors are great. We all want more and more visitors to come to our site, but you must always be asking what have I/we achieved by attracting those visitors. For ecommerce sites this is obvious – have they bought anything?  But for bloggers it is more difficult. Maybe it’s “have they left a comment?” “Have they retweeted my post?” or “have they signed up to my mailing list?”

3) Twitter Followers

With the increase of auto followers and spammers on twitter follower numbers don’t mean a great deal. Anyone can get thousands of followers by using auto follow technology, but those followers will be of little to no use. Twitter is all about influence and authority. You want to look at stats like how may people follow a link you’ve tweeted, or how many people retweet. This interaction in social media is far more valuable than sheer numbers.