Claire oversees the operational side of the agency. She has over 15 years project management, sales and marketing experience and holds an MSc in Marketing from Cass Business School.
Claire oversees the operational side of the agency. She has over 15 years project management, sales and marketing experience and holds an MSc in Marketing from Cass Business School.
Measuring your online marketing enables you to see what you’re doing well and what you need to improve.
By monitoring specific metrics, you’ll gain insights that will help you grow your business and maximise your return on investment.
Google Analytics does an incredible job of providing you with data about your website and its visitors, all for free. Additionally, there is a range of paid tools out there that can help take your analyses one step further.
In this post, we outline the metrics and tools that will provide you with the most holistic overview of your efforts.
Website sessions
Previously known in Google Analytics as ‘visits’, website sessions show you how many unique IP addresses (non-returning visitors from the same address) visit your website and how long their sessions last for.
This metric is useful because it provides you with an overview of how many ‘hits’ your website receives on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It’s probably the single most effective indicator of how well your website is performing as a result of your digital marketing.
For example, if you make changes to the structure or content of your website, your sessions will provide you with a solid indication of how your site is affected in terms of traffic (both good and bad).
To track your website sessions, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard:
Your organic traffic tells you how many people arrived at your website through search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo as a result of unpaid searches.
This metric is particularly useful for providing you with data on what search terms people are using to find your website. With this information, you can then adjust your content to improve its rankings in search and create new content based on the type of information that people want to read.
Organic traffic is the main metric that companies measure when implementing an SEO campaign. For example, when we at Moove were working on a new website for Qube Global Software, we monitored the site’s organic traffic to show that we increased their overall visits by 12%.
To measure your organic traffic:
Go to the Acquisition report section
Go to All Traffic > Channels
Click Organic Search in the Channel Grouping column
Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page. From a marketing perspective, you should aim for as low a bounce rate as possible to ensure that people engage with your offerings.
The bounce rate metric is useful for analysing how engaging your website design and content is to visitors. It can also provide you with an early indication of how likely your visitors are to convert to paying customers.
A high bounce rate would typically indicate that people aren’t engaged with your website. It could be for a number of reasons, including poor navigation, bad web design, or thin or misleading content.
To check your bounce rate:
Go to the Audience report section
Go to Overview
Look at the Bounce Rate column
You can also check the bounce rate of specific pages on your website through Behavior > Site Content > All Pages > Bounce Rate column.
Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who carry out a specific action on your site. For example, your conversion rate might be the percentage of visitors who buy something from you.
It’s important to track your conversion rate so that you know how effective your sales funnel is, i.e. the steps you put in place for visitors to buy from you. If you have a particularly low conversion rate, then you may want to look at your sales pages and the content surrounding your products or services.
Google Analytics provides some great insights into your customer behaviour that can help you adjust your sales funnels.
In online marketing, a ‘referrer’ is a website that sends you traffic via a backlink. Referrals can come from a variety of sources, including social media platforms, forums and written content.
Referrals can either be organic, whereby you didn’t spend any money on them, or paid, through sponsored content or social media posts.
If you pay for referrals, this metric will show you whether you’re getting a good return on your investment. For those that you’ve acquired ‘organically’, you then have the opportunity to reach out to the referring website and build a relationship for future marketing campaigns.
To identify your top referrers in Google Analytics:
Go to Acquisition
Select All Traffic > Referrals
Select the referrer you want to view under the Source column
When it comes to measuring your digital marketing, you don’t need to spend a fortune on paid tools. Google Analytics offers some fantastic insights into your marketing metrics and for most companies, this is the only tool you’ll need.
However, if you need to dig deeper into your marketing and you have the budget, there are a host of paid tools out there that will help you measure your marketing even more accurately.
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