Analytics are a necessity in the marketing world. What you are measuring is just as important as understanding the results. In order to maximize your marketing, you need to understand inbound marketing analytics. Analytics enable you to see different trends and optimize your marketing strategies to get a leg up on the competition. Here are some helpful ways to interpret inbound marketing analytics and boost your sales.
The One Site to Rule Them All
Not only is your website the epicenter of your business, it can also provide a wealth of information to you, not just your customers. How you may ask? Analytics. Measuring unique visitors—the number of people who visit your site, not counting repeats—is essential and critical. Looking at traffic sources is also important: where are leads coming from and is your SEO working? Page performance helps you to know which specific pages on your site get the most traffic. The more you know, the better you can reach your target audience. For example, if you spend 30 hours a week working on your social media but no one is linking to your site via Facebook or Twitter, it’s time to take a fresh look.
Landing in the Right Spot
Landing page measurements let you know how you are attracting people to your site, and hopefully, help you convert them to customers. Your landing page can help you learn where the best leads are coming from and which offers are attracting the best leads. Be sure to measure and analyze the result over time; look for changes, growth, and trends. Compare page views and submission rates. Furthermore, once you know what is working, you can expand your reach in those areas. And, whatever is not working allows you the opportunity to get creative and try new things.
The More You Know
We have discussed some great metrics to help you get started with, but once you have an understanding of metrics, there are several ways that you can delve deeper.
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Time spent on your site. OK, you know people are going there, but how long do they stay? You want to aim for a high crawl rate.
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How many people actually click your CTA and complete the task.
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Inbound links. This can be tough and tricky, but worth the work. Get help with this
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Engagement was discussed above but let’s reiterate its importance—you must engage with your audience, especially on social media.
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Unsubscribe rate. This one makes us all sad, but you need to know how many people are unsubscribing and why. Once you know why you can amend the situation.
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Return on investment (ROI) is the classic metric of how you are doing. Learn it, use it, respect it. It will illuminate things and help clarify your path.
So, for beginning marketers, measuring and interpreting analytics can be confusing, but it is a necessity in today’s business environment. Without knowing what is or is not working you are essentially shooting in the dark—you have no way of assessing the effectiveness of your time and efforts. Plus, it’s a great way to waste your money since you don’t know if you are getting a good ROI or not. The more you work on analytics, the better you will understand their value and the better you will grow your business.
Since SEO is a critical analytic, learn more about how to optimize your SEO when you are redesigning your website.
