Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking (If you Aren’t Already)

Updated January 11, 2023

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Unlocking the Key Metrics

Digital Marketing is all about metrics. Numbers of clicks, impressions, open rates and views take up your days. An increase, or decrease, in any of these metrics, can turn a good month into a bad month. As the power of online marketing grows it is becoming possible to track more and more data. So now you also have to decide where to give your attention before you drown in spreadsheets of irrelevant metrics. So take a look at the key metrics we think you should be tracking.

General Wellbeing

These are some go-to metrics that you need to be tracking if you’re trying to get business through your website. If you’re not tracking these metrics then something’s wrong.

• Overall Traffic – You can monitor this in your Google Analytics. How many people are coming to your site, where are they coming from and how long do they stay when they do.
• Conversion rate – How many of your website visitors turn into customers. As simple as it sounds.

Email Marketing

If Email marketing is a part of your marketing funnel (and it should be) then these are the key things you need to be checking on regularly.

• How big is your marketing list – How many subscribers do you have? Is that list growing or increasing?
• Open, Click and Conversion rates – of those you email, how many open your emails, click on them and in turn convert. You can check industry-specific benchmarks here with mailchimp.com.
• Compare stats to your @gmail.com stats – If you use Gmail to power your work emails you can also check your email statistics with Gmail. This can help identify if you have a specific issue in sending emails to Gmail accounts.

Reviews

Is your company listed on any review websites? Are you on Yelp, or do you have a GoogleMyBusiness page with reviews on it? If you do, then you should be tracking your ratings.

• Rating on each platform – Have you dropped a star recently? Tracking it over time will show how you’re performing.
• Average rating across all platforms – This can help give a more accurate read as sometimes you may neglect one platform for a while resulting in negative reviews.
• The number of reviews – how many do you have? Do you need to drive more? Have they dried up recently? Ideally, you should have a steady flow of reviews.
• Review distribution – do you have 100s on Yelp but none on GoogleMyBusiness? Try to encourage your reviewers to share their comments around on different platforms to keep them all looking active.

Calls & Texts

If you drive business to your phone, either from your site or PPC/ social media advertising, you need to be recording the phone calls you receive. We use an application called CallRail to help track calls. But other solutions are available.

• Call recording – this is qualitative data so not strictly speaking a metric, but it is important to categorize the calls you receive as a business. Some may be from suppliers, some sales or some customer service. You either need to do this as you screen calls or after the fact if you’ve recorded them.
• The number of calls – how many are you getting per day.
• Time of calls – do you have a peak time of the day when you could use more people on the phone?
• Text messages – do you receive them? If you do, how many and how often.

These key metrics will help you get a handle on what’s happening with people who visit your site and get in touch with you. Once you’re recording them all you should be able to work out where to spend your money to make the best impact going forward.

Photo credit – Top: Pixabay
Photo credit – Bottom: JISC