I’m not a numbers person – not at all!
As an English major with a background in journalism, numbers scare me.
And yet when it comes to online marketing, I am very closely focused on numbers….. Specifically, the metrics of our website, and all the campaigns we run, both for our clients and ourselves.
But when it comes to online marketing decisions, all too often I’ve seen business owners take completely unnecessary gambles because it “feels right” – when in reality, the numbers are there for them to make informed judgements.
As a result, they put their money in the wrong place, have no idea how their marketing is performing, and put time and effort into campaigns which are clearly not working.
So what numbers do you need to know about your online marketing, in order to really understand how it’s doing?
Here are the three basic ones. See if you know them, without going back to check…..!
1. What is your website traffic?
It might sound blindingly obvious, but all too many businesses rarely check how many unique visitors they get each month.
As a result, they can’t tell whether their website is attracting enough people to make it a viable source of leads. Your business is never going to grow seriously online, when website visits are low.
If they do attract leads or sales, they still have no idea whether their website is performing well! 500 enquiries from 5,000 visits is quite different to 500 enquiries from 50,000 visits.
Because your website is the heart of your online presence, much of your marketing activities will be geared around attracting traffic to your website. If you don’t know your visitor numbers, you will also have a poor grasp on how well the rest of your marketing is doing.
2. What is your conversion rate?
Businesses can define ‘conversion’ differently – for some it means downloading a resource so that they have captured a lead’s email address, for others it is a real enquiry or sale. Essentially, it is whatever action they deem significant on the road to turning a lead into a customer.
The question is, however your business defines a ‘conversion’, what percentage your website visitors or email subscribers take this action?
This is easily the most important metric for you to measure.
If you don’t know what % of your visitors and subscribers are taking the actions you want them to, you can’t tell how well your marketing is working.
3. How much do your conversions cost you?
You need to consider carefully how much money you are spending to acquire a lead or gain a customer.
If you are spending £120 to acquire a customer who will be worth £10,000, that’s obviously worth it. The other way? Not so much….
Of course, once you know how much each lead or customer costs you, you can also work hard to get those costs down.
Do you know these numbers for your business? What numbers do you think are important to measure? Let us know in the comments….
