The Top 5 Online Marketing Metrics That Will Improve Your Business

Business owners are looking at online marketing metrics to glean more information about who is visiting their sites. When used correctly, analytics, page rankings, SEO rankings, and other performance data channels can help business owners develop a plan to increase ROI and boost sales.

1. Visits
2. Views
3. Page Duration
4. Conversion Rate
5. Bounce Rate

These metrics are popular for a reason: they’re good indicators of how your website is performing. If you want to improve how well your website performs in each of these areas, here’s how:

1. INCREASE VISITS WITH BETTER SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Effective SEO improves your site’s ranking, turns visitors into leads, and ultimately generates more sales. You can increase traffic by using two different marketing mechanisms:

• Organic SEO. With organic SEO, you rank high on search engines with non-paid, search-engine algorithms. According to at least one study, done by Google, 18 percent of organic clicks go to the number-one position, 10 percent of organic clicks go to the number-two position, and seven percent of organic clicks go to the number-three position.
• Strategic Keywords. In all of the content on your site, use keywords that not only relate to the subject that you’re discussing, but that also relate to your industry as a whole. This strategy helps the search-engine bots rank your website and place you in the right searches.

You’ll also need to review the SEO analytics for each page and be willing to do a revamp of content, marketing campaigns, or the overall look of your website, if needed.

2. INCREASE PAGE VIEWS WITH UNIQUE CONTENT

The content you publish is vitally important to the number of page views your site receives. This means that you need to offer engaging content that can’t be found elsewhere. Boring or uninteresting content doesn’t do anything for your prospective customers, and doesn’t compel them to come back.

When people read through content, they want to visualize what they are reading. Use action words that help your prospective buyer make the right decision. Encourage them to subscribe, to make a purchase, and to gain valuable information.

3. INCREASE PAGE DURATION WITH MOBILE METRICS

Many business owners are finding that more prospective buyers are using mobile devices to browse the internet and research their options. Every user should be able to navigate your site equally well on computers, phones, and tablets. If a user is having trouble loading your website or scrolling through pages, this could frustrate potential customers and ultimately decrease page duration.

If your website loads quickly and has easy-to-close pop-ups, it will increase the amount of time mobile users stay on your page. Test your site on multiple mobile devices to see how your web design appears to others.

4. INCREASE CONVERSION RATES BY STUDYING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

The goal of all your advertising, content building, and SEO efforts is to have return visitors take action by purchasing a product or service, subscribing to an email, or attending a future event. Google Analytics provides data to help you hone your advertising and content efforts, so that you can better convert visitors to take action.

The data you’ll want to focus on are the points that tell you the most about who your visitors are, and why they might be interested in your product. Look at demographics, such as age and interests, visitor behavior, such as how many are new users and how many are returning users, and how many page views your site receives. All this information is used to help convert visitors into sales. Additionally, this information helps develop marketing campaigns and content that fit your target market.

5. IMPROVE YOUR BOUNCE RATE BY MEETING THE CUSTOMER’S EXPECTATIONS

Based on your meta descriptions, how would you rate your site’s content? You're probably wondering why that is important for marketing. A high bounce-rate percentage—how many visitors navigated away from your site after viewing only one page—could mean that users were:

• misled by the title, meta description, or landing page from a search engine
• uninterested in the content
• unhappy with web design options

Ideally, you want a bounce rate that is less than 50 percent. If you’re not there yet, try advertising in new places, revamp your meta tags for SEO, and re-strategize your content topics and keywords.

Online marketing metrics can give you a good overall view of how well your marketing strategy is doing. Regularly check these metrics to make sure that you’re not missing the mark in any area. Focused attention to the right places—whether that’s mobile compatibility or better content—can have a big impact on how well you’re appealing to your target market.