Are You Measuring Your Website’s Success?

We know our business objective.  We know how our website will help us accomplish that business objective. How are we going to measure them? This is where we get the power of marketing through our website.

We should be able to measure everything. There are several ways to measure data about our website, but there is no excuse not to have Google Analytics on our sites. It’s easy to set up and is a treasure trove of data. Once you have Google Analytics on your site, you’re not done. You need to connect the thing that your website’s helping you do to achieve your business objective to Google Analytics.

The problem is that there’s a lot of data in there. How do we filter through this? How do we figure out what we should be looking at?

Are You Measuring Your Sales?

If you’re selling something on your site, you must send the e-commerce data into Google Analytics. There are ways to set up your system to send the transaction data and the number of dollars that someone has paid. You want all that data to go into your Google Analytics account because that is the macro goal that you want to accomplish.

Are You Measuring Your Leads?

If you’re trying to get leads, you need to set up a Google Analytics goal. Whenever someone submits a lead from your website, you need it tracked, and Google Analytics will handle that event in a different fashion. I recommend using a lead form on your website. Because if everyone comes to your website, they have to use the form to contact you, and it’s very easy to track a form submission in Google Analytics, especially if we set up the form to go to a confirmation page. All you need to do is say, “Hey, Google Analytics, this is the URL for the confirmation page. Anytime someone visits the confirmation page, the only way they got there is by submitting the form; therefore, I know I got a lead.”

You can use any form plug-ins, but I always recommend a confirmation page. I think it’s a better user experience because it confirms to the user that you did get their lead. Nothing is more frustrating than when I fill out a form on a website and the form resets. Did I waste my time? Did they get it? Then I’m anxious, like, “Yeah, I’m done, I’m out of here.” So, set up your form so it goes to the confirmation page.

Are You Measuring People Coming to Your Business?

If your website tries to get people through the door and that’s your business objective, it’s more challenging, but you can still track it in Google Analytics. What if you have a page on your site with directions to get to your store? Your customers can use Google My Business and have a page on your site. You measure how many people get to that page by saying, “People are interested enough in my business that they want to get directions to my store.” So, now you know you have successfully interested people in coming to your store.

If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can offer a web-only coupon that recipients must give you their email addresses to receive. Now, when they give you that coupon, the only way they got it was by going to your website.

Are You Measuring the Ads Your Visitors Respond to?

If you’re a publisher, you’re informing people, you’re trying to sell affiliate links, or you’re selling advertising on your site to make money, we need to know things like how many pages per visit. The more pages per visit, the more ads people see, and the more you can charge for people advertising on your site.

Some data is primarily connected to what your website does to accomplish a business goal; that’s your primary data. Was a lead collected? Did someone make a purchase? Did someone download the coupon? That’s your primary goal, and you need to make sure you can track that in Google Analytics.

If it’s a piece of data that helps you understand how people are getting there, that’s a secondary piece.

Sometimes SEO clients will ask me, “What do I rank, David?” Who cares? Ranking doesn’t make you money. I can think of dozens of keywords for which you rank number one that don’t bring any traffic to you. So, keyword ranking, if you’re doing organic efforts, really is a secondary metric that leads to traffic. Because you don’t really want to rank, you want a rank that generates traffic.

UPDATE: Measuring your leads from AI systems is essential to an AIO campaign, since rank doesn’t exist in this new world.

But you don’t really want traffic. We could get you traffic for all kinds of crazy phrases. You want traffic that produces a sale. That’s your primary goal. Sales from the secondary goal, traffic, as a result of a tertiary goal, rank.

Consider Facebook. You got a million impressions for your promoted post.  That’s awesome. Did any of those people come to your site? We’ve got a secondary metric called “Impressions” that leads to clicks. Of the clicks, because you’ve installed Google Analytics, now you know how many clicks became traffic (it’s not always the same because they’re calculated differently). More importantly, how much of that traffic from your Facebook ads accomplished your primary goal for your website? This is where Facebook ads become misleading in their data. They give you all this really cool data, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into the bottom line.

However, when we understand our business objective, how our website accomplishes it, and what we’re tracking as far as our business objective goes, it changes how we see this data. We can determine which is a primary metric and which is a secondary metric. Secondary metrics are good: you need impressions of your Facebook ad, if anybody’s gonna click on them. But that’s not an end in itself. If people click on an ad, that’s great, but it’s just an expense to you unless that traffic from clicks becomes traffic. Traffic doesn’t do anything for you unless it accomplishes the primary goal (a lead, a sale, someone in the doorway of your store, or seeing a lot of ads on your side, or whatever your primary metric you’re tracking is).