Each marketer’s challenge is always to attract and grow a loyal group of followers to your company brand and product. In a website’s perspective, there are many different ways to increase retention and conversions. But before you jump into tracking every single interaction on the site, let’s focus on monitoring the metrics that you would like to improve.
Here are some metrics that we think that are relatively important for most webmasters:
Traffic Sources
It is important to have a diverse number of sources for incoming traffic. The three primary source categories are:
Direct visitors - users that visit your site by directly typing your URL in their browser address bar.
Search visitors - users that visit your site based on query through search engines.
Referral visitors - users that visit your site through another blog or site.
All three sources are important but have varying levels of conversion, so you should calculate how much each traffic source is converting and deal with them individually.
New and Return Visitors
The way a first-time visitor interacts with your site is very different from how a returning visitor interacts.
As such, it is important to track the behavior of new and returning visitors on their visit behavior and conversion pattern.
For first time users, there should be more emphasis to look at at the general usability of the site. Information like bounce rate will be a more crucial metric to monitor.
For returning visitors, there should be more emphasis to think about why the user did not convert the earlier round and decided to come back. The key focus here will be figuring out how to increase conversion numbers for returning visitors.
Interactions Per Visit
Even if your visitors don’t convert, it is important to monitor their behavior on the site.
Information on what users are doing on the site and how you can influence the existing behavior into conversion will be a huge score.
Each interaction on the site is important and the goal should not stop at just increasing interaction (eg. Increase time spent on the site). It is crucial to figure out how to leverage on the increased interaction into increased conversion.
For conversions, it might mean to have an increased number of subscribers, downloads, purchases, etc.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the rate at which visitors enters your site and click away without doing anything else. A high bounce rate can be a signal of irrelevant sources of traffic, poor landing pages design or high load times that frustrate a potentially interested user.
Bounce rate in e-commerce sites are also called abandonment rates, meaning the rate which people decide to exit the site without completing the purchase decision. The common issue could be due to complicated checkout process, invalid or expired deals, forced to add product into the cart to check the actual price, etc.
Cost Per Conversion
One of the most important and yet challenging metrics to monitor will be cost per conversion. This means the cost that you need to incur to generate an additional lead or referral.
Calculating this value accurately is challenging because there are many intangible costs involved that create value that is hard to define.
The most direct cost to monitor will be your online advertisement platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Adwords Campaign.
However there are other intangible costs involved that could have helped to swing the visitors into a conversion.
For instance, your blog articles may not have per-click costs as compared to Adwords. However the user may decide to convert because your team has written an article that has helped to address their concerns. With that, the cost of writing that article may or may not be factored into the total cost per conversion depending on your business strategy.
While trying to increase conversion numbers, it is also crucial to keep your cost in check so that your overall margin remains healthy.