To short
answer to the question is NO. We live in a world where there are
more tools and metrics at our fingertips than ever before, but not all of them
are needed, and some of them can actually cause damage by leading marketers
down unnecessary rabbit holes. In order to choose which metrics are essential
for your business, it is first vital to understand what the goals and objectives
for your website are. For example, are you trying to increase sales?
Increase blog subscriptions? Grow your social following? Each of
these goals will require different measurement tools to define and track
success. Not each metric is a one-size-fits all solution, and not
every metric is necessarily useful—it depends on your goals! As
Kaushik says, “focus on the critical fewand not the insignificant many.
The principle of critical few encourages focus and, more importantly, a focus
on the handful of things that matter”.
Once
you have defined your goals, you can then begin to research which metrics make
the most sense for you to track, and how you can gain access to that
information. Will a free website like Google
Analytics get you what you need? Or do you need to
invest in paid services? If so, how much are you
willing to invest and what will your ROI be? You can pay a ton of
money for not much more than the free stuff, but if that extra sliver of
information will help quantify your objectives, then it might be worth it to
you. Do your research!
Bounce
Rate: this metric
helps identify how many people are either visiting a single page of your website and
leaving, or leaving after five seconds or less. Bounce rates are
important because they can identify weak points on your website and “This will help you understand what percent of yourwebsite
traffic is actually engaging with your site”.
Here is a great infographic from Kissmetrics explaining how bounce rates
work and why they aren’t always a bad thing (for example, blogs can expect high
bounce rates because people usually visit, read the most recent post and, well,
bounce).
Conversion
Rate: This metric
assesses if you are accomplishing your goals and not just engaging visitors,
but converting them to do the task your website was built for (ex: selling,
gaining subscribers, growing loyalty, etc.). “Whether
your goal is increasingonline sales or simply educating website readers about a
certain topic, have amethod for tracking conversion rates -- the ratio of
website visitors whoconvert from visits into desired actions, such as signing
up for a newsletteror making a purchase”. This metric is
calculated by analyzing the “percentageof people who completed a desired action on
that page, such as filling out aform”. Here’s an infographic
outlining how to increase your conversions:
Visitor
Engagement: This metric
will help you understand if your visitors are getting the most out of your
website and therefore more likely to come back, make a
purchase, subscribe, etc. “This
is not just about how many page views you aregenerating, but the level of trust
your customers are starting to put in yourbrand, and how curious they are about
you”. High engagement can
be tracked in a number of ways, including:
• Average time on site, which should
be as high as possible.
• Bounce rate, which measures the number of
visitors who don't navigate beyond the first page of your website that they
land on. It should be lower than 50 percent.
• Average pages per visit, which should
also be as high as possible.
• Number of social media shares, which
should be high in order to demonstrate that visitors find enough value in your
content to share it with friends.
I hope
these basic metrics have given you the building blocks to monitor and analyze
your website and help you achieve your goals and objectives.
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