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The Metrics

Posted by SMstudy® on August 26, 2016 | Digital Marketing (DM)

Keywords: Metrics, digital marketing, website metrics

The Metrics

As consumers have found multiple ways of searching, learning about, and purchasing various products and services, so have businesses found multiple ways to reach their target audience. With the evolution of channels, the metrics for performance measurement have also evolved from simple circulation numbers to page views, click-through rate, bounce rate etc. With so many metrics to choose from it is critical to identify the right metrics to track a channel or campaign performance.

While selecting metrics it is advisable to select and prioritize a few important metrics that can appropriately determine the success or failure of the objectives outlined for a channel. If unnecessarily large number of metrics are defined, then a substantial amount of time may be wasted on collecting and analyzing data produced by too many metrics, which may not add value to the final analysis. Essentially, it is preferable to have a few key metrics which are clearly defined and aligned to channel objectives.  For example, if one wants to track the performance of a website one can look at the following metrics:

  • Visits—This metric provides information on a website’s effectiveness in reaching out to the target audience. This shows how many times in total a particular website has been viewed.

 

  • Page Views—The number of page views helps to monitor the website content and provides information on popular pages and engagement of the visitors.

 

  • Traffic Sources—This metric provides an overview of various sources that generate traffic to the website. Most of the analytics tools categorize the traffic sources into— Direct Traffic, Search Traffic Including Paid and Organic, Referral Sites, and Others.

 

  • Bounce Rate—Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who visit the website and then exit the website without going to any other page. This information helps to understand if the right audience is visiting the website, and if the information provided on the website meets their expectations.

 

  • Exit Pages—These pages refer to the last page a customer visits before leaving the website. Knowing this helps to identify the pages where visitors decide to leave or drop off the site.

 

Another important aspect of identifying appropriate metrics is that one should be able to measure and analyze the underlying data. There are some metrics that a business may want to measure but obtaining underlying data for the metric may prove to be difficult or expensive. In such cases, it may be preferable to replace the metrics with ones that are available and measureable.

Selected metrics should also be relevant to the channel. One should not select a common set of metrics for all channels just for the sake of simplified data collection and analysis. Even if the overall objective is the same, each channel is unique and should be assessed using appropriate metrics. Hence, metrics will change if the channel changes. For example, for tracking a social media campaign one can use the following metrics instead of the ones defined above for tracking website performance:

 

  • Potential Reach— This refers to the potential target size a given activity (e.g. post, tweet, etc.) can reach within the company’s social media network.
  • Number of mentions—This refers to the number of times a company or its products have been mentioned on social networking sites. This metric needs to be qualified with information regarding the type of mentions being received.
  • Number of Shares/Retweets—This metric represents the number of times content provided by the company is shared by its subscribers or followers.
  • Number of Replies and Comments—This metric represents the number of replies and comments that the company’s content has generated.

 

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