One of the most important facets of any marketing campaign is reviewing analytics. Digital marketing analytics provide actionable data points that marketers can use to make smarter decisions and to optimize their strategies. When leveraged correctly, analytics can lead to greater efficiency and improved return on investment (ROI).

The problem that marketers face isn’t a paucity of data, but rather, an analytic avalanche. Simply put, there’s a lot of information to sift through, including comprehensive reports provided by Google, by your email marketing platform, and by various marketing automation platforms.

It’s unrealistic for a small business to incorporate every single metric or data point into their strategies. That raises a critical question: Which marketing analytics are most foundational for ensuring marketing success?

Analytics Every Marketer Should Track

Of course, there’s really no cookie-cutter answer here. Different marketers may track different analytics based on the particular objectives of their campaign. With that said, there are a few analytics that we find to be useful across the board. Here’s a quick rundown.

Traffic Source

Every business wants to attract plenty of traffic to its website. As such, marketers invest in SEM, social media, SEO, video campaigns, content development, and other tools to draw visitors. Knowing which traffic sources actually bring people to the site (and which don’t) can be a critical way of optimizing marketing spend. In other words, it ensures that marketers are allocating their resources to the channels that actually make a difference.

There are plenty of tools that can provide this information, and if you’re not sure where to start, Google Analytics is pretty helpful (and free).

Pageviews

This metric tells you a couple of things. First, it tells you how many times users load pages on your website. And two, it helps you to see which pages attract the most attention.

These are both fairly broad indicators, but they can be helpful when planning content development or fine-tuning your approach to SEO. And, knowing which pages attract the most attention can be useful for knowing where to double-up on CTAs and clickable links.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate reveals the frequency with which people visit just one page of your website and then navigate away more or less immediately, without spending any time processing your content.

This information can reveal much about your website and content strategy. If you have a relatively low bounce rate, that’s a good sign that your content is engaging, your website is easy to navigate, and the user experience is positive overall. By contrast, if one page has an especially high bounce rate, that could be a clue that you need to do some troubleshooting, refurbishing your content, improving the design, or maybe axing the page altogether. However, it’s not always that black-and-white so be sure to dive deeper than just the bounce rate metric, or any one metric for that matter, before drawing any conclusions.

Session Duration

Another important analytic to monitor is average session duration. In a way, this is the flipside of bounce rate, revealing the amount of time people tend to spend on your website. Naturally, you want to see a higher average session duration, as that means people are spending more time learning about your brand, products, and services. Also note that higher average session duration is almost always connected with higher conversion rates.

Exit Rate

Here’s another analytic that’s very closely linked with bounce rate. Exit rate tells you the frequency with which people close one specific page of your website.

Tracking exit rate through your entire website can help you identify the point in the consumer journey when people tend to lose interest and head elsewhere. In other words, being attentive to your exit rate can help you identify bottlenecks in your sales funnel and vulnerabilities in your content strategy.

Conversion Rate

Finally, we recommend that marketing professionals keep an eye on their conversion rates. This analytic indicates the number of people who take a specific action on your website: Clicking a “contact us” link, signing up for your email newsletter, completing a lead form, or making a purchase from your ecommerce shop.

As you try to determine which marketing efforts are most successful and effective, conversion rate is one of the most salient analytics to monitor. Simply put, conversion rate provides a clear way to evaluate what aspects of your strategy are yielding results and which ones are falling flat.

Using Analytics Effectively

In sum, we think it’s crucial for any marketing team to keep tabs on these core analytics. Using this data, marketers can:

• Monitor the progress of their campaign.
• Better understand customer behavior.
• Build strategies to optimize ROI.
• Reduce ineffective spending.
• Make data-driven decisions about website design and content generation.

At enCOMPASS, we use advanced analytics to guide all of our decisions and provide a wealth of actionable reports to our clients. We’d love to tell you more about our commitment to data-driven marketing. Reach out any time you’d like to have a conversation.