The ability to make data measurable is what makes online marketing so appealing. There are whole lists of things that can be measured. But any online marketing company must know the major indicators for performance. Some even end up measuring all the wrong or irrelevant metrics. Well maybe the page rank etc is important, but isn't the number of visitors and checking bounce rate more important? A few key metrics are the true indicators of success and failure. Of this conversion rate, backlinks and visitors are the most important ones. Let us have a look at each of them.
Conversion rate:
What is this conversion rate? How you measure your conversion depends on what goal you have set. Is your goal sales, reaching a specific number of visitors, getting registrations or downloads? Conversion rate is the ratio of the number visitors to your site to the number that actually do the desired action. This is important for all sites but more so for e-commerce sites and online retailers. Google Analytics is by far the most used tool. There are also other tools for the same and all of these will give you information on demographics, geographic location, behavior, source etc.
Backlinks:
Every online marketing company knows that Google’s criterion for ranking in its search engine is your number of backlinks. But with the recent Penguin update, one must also be aware of the quality of backlinks. If this quality parameter is not maintained, you could risk being penalized and take months or even years to recover your site from the same. There are tools like Majestic SEO that help track your backlinks. What must you check to see that your links are of a good quality? Make sure they are not just SEO sites but where the content is relevant to your page too. Do not use link farms or sites with bad content themselves.
Engagement:
For a user to engage with you, your site must firstly be catchy and content must be relevant and appealing. A few factors that can say a user have engaged are time spent on the site which should be high, bounce rate i.e. the number of visitors who don’t visit more than one page which should be low and interaction on social media. Social media is also one of the best drivers of traffic.
These were some of the most important metrics that will show you how you can take the next course of action. It tells you what campaigns are working and which aren’t. This way you would know what content is more appealing to the public and which isn't.