Four Tips to Effectively Measure Digital Marketing

by Scott Carpenter, CME | October 12, 2021

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for analyzing your marketing efforts by monitoring traffic on your website. While the data gives you detailed information about who is visiting your site, what they are looking for, and how they are getting to your site, Google Analytics is also one of the most underused tools.

Why is that? Often during my one-on-one marketing-related meetings with clients, I often ask how they track their digital marketing results. In many cases, clients indicate that because there is so much information, they don’t understand what to look for when reviewing their analytics. Page views, user acquisition, demographics, conversions… so much data but which ones are the most important to get better results?

With the above thoughts in place, here are my top four digital marketing metrics to measure and how you can improve each one. Yes, there are many more metrics, but these are the four most important to get right… right now!

1. Organic traffic

Tip: If your results are low, it usually means the keywords in your search engine optimization (SEO) aren’t truly effective. This means searches are not leading to your business being found in a Google search. Review your meta data, page titles and site content to ensure that the keywords you believe people are searching for to find your product/service are on your site and are searchable by the Google bots.

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

Tip: If your CTR is low, it may mean your title, headline or meta description is not engaging, or the content isn’t relevant to what the user is looking for. Try using a number in the title of your ad, site page or meta info. For instance, instead having a title that reads, “Learn Effective Ways to Lose Weight,” try a numbered approach such as “5 Hacks to Drop 15 Pounds Like Lightning.”

3. Exit rate

Tip: If you see that a large chunk of your traffic leaves after they visit a specific page, it probably means that page needs work (unless this page is the actual conversion point on your website). Keep visitors engaged in your site by adding internal hyperlinks from the weakest pages to other pages on your site. Another tip is to simply provide better quality content on the page in the form of visuals, videos and tips.

4. Pages per session

Tip: If this metric is low, your content isn’t engaging or relevant enough for visitors to check out other pages. Pages per session can depend on a lot of variables, such as the type of company you have, the industry you are, and the number of products and/or services offered. Use tip #3 to improve this metric.

Ok, those are the four key metrics you should be monitoring and how to improve each one. I hope it can help your digital marketing effort gain better results. Analytics are a wealth of information for small business owners. They can give you real insight into whether your website is helping or harming your business, but it’s easy for them to be overwhelming to the untrained eye. Focus on these four and grow from there.