Web analytics like PageRank, ‘number of visitors’ and ‘top 30 rankings’ are some of the most commonly used methods to monitor online marketing, there are other metrics which can be just as crucial. To really get an idea of how well your website is doing, monitoring conversion rates, number of backlinks collected and how engaged your visitors are, gives you a real picture of your success. Three metrics not to miss out on are:
1. Tracking Conversion Rates: develop a method to get a sense of what you’re getting in return. This may be measured as increased online sales, educating a reader about some topic or even signing up for a newsletter. You have to make sure that the people visiting your website are in turn giving you the desired results. The best tool is Google Analytics. It can track all your results from online sales to whitepaper download. KISS metrics is another option which can track metrics across e-commerce, mobile apps and social networking sites.
2. Backlink Portfolio (Reputation Profile): you have to keep track of the links that lead up to your website because the quality of your backlinks matters unless you want to be penalized by search engines. A service such as Majestic SEO can help you understand the composition of this profile. The things to look out for are any bad links pointing to pornographic, gambling and other dubious sites. Minimizing the number of keyword based anchor texts is also a good idea. These indicate over optimization to search engines which may result in a penalty. Lastly, make sure that your links do not solely come from sites for SEO purposes as they may be perceived as manipulation. This should be an ongoing process and you should check in at least once a month.
3. Visitor Engagement: The amount of time visitors spend on your site and the value they place on your content is a good indicator of the potential business you may gain from providing them with an engaging on-site experience. There are many ways to measure this and if you find that your values are not strong enough, you should put in some effort to find the weaker areas and improve upon them. While it may be tedious, the resulting increase in conversion is well worth it.
(Image Credit / Source: Flickr / DavidErickson)
