Looking In All The Wrong Places: The Marketing Metrics You Just Can’t Trust
Your online marketing campaign is the backbone of your digital presence and what drives potential leads to you in droves. Online visibility is wonderful, but sometimes entrepreneurs face a common frustration. The metrics look great, with thousands of clicks coming in on a daily basis. People are clearly engaging with your content… So why are your profits so low?
Often small businesses will begin to notice a disparity between what their engagement metrics are telling them and the cold, hard truth that is their turnover. If your metrics are telling you one thing and your bottom line is whistling a very different tune then perhaps it’s time to rethink some of your metrics.
Firstly, some notes on good practice
Whether you’re an online store that’s heavily reliant on passing ecommerce, a physical store that’s looking to generate leads through online engagement or a blogger seeking to monetize their passion, then there’s no doubt that an effective online marketing campaign can benefit you and your business. The difference between great online marketing and poor online marketing is a matter of strategy. Many newbies start their own campaign with a Pay Per Click Blitzkrieg that generates initial interest but fails due to lack of follow through. It’s always while to invest in consultancy with an SEO company to help you to plan a long-term strategy to facilitate your growth.
Which metrics are important to YOU?
Understanding your key metrics is of vital important to any website or online store. These can vary wildly depending on the intended function of your online presence. Let’s skip ahead a little and visit an important metric, the amount of time a user spends on a page. For a blogger, time spent on page is a useful metric as it can indicate that a user is engaging with their content. It’s not the most meaningful measure of engagement (more on that later) but it can be encouraging. An online store, however, can look at a long time spent on page as a red flag because it can mean that a customer is spending a lot of time looking at a product without buying, and they’ll want to know why.
Most businesses, however, will have some important metrics in common.
3 common metrics that can’t be trusted (and what you should be looking at instead).
Reach– This basically means your ‘hit count’. If it’s high yet isn’t generating results then you shouldn’t be too surprised. Reach is really a vanity statistic with no measure for quality of engagement. We live in the area of clickbait and the use of “click farms” in Turkey and Asia, which has massively skewed the usefulness of reach as a statistic. Instead, try creating a compelling call to action, like a newsletter sign up or a WordPress plugin to facilitate opt ins for push notifications, giving you a much more useful metric… Conversions!
Time on page– Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing whether a user has lovingly read all of the content or the page and shared it with everyone they know, or just popped out for a sandwich. Hence, scroll depth or consumption rate may be of much more use.
Shares– Sharing your content on social media can be a great sign that people are engaging with your content, but it can also be misleading. Lots of people share content without actually engaging with it so instead keep an eye out for comments or emojis, these will give you some much more useful qualitative data.
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