If you ask us to explain the importance of marketing analytics in one short sentence, it would be: “Measure or die”. Literarily, in the world of digital marketing companies which are not measuring key marketing metrics are doomed for oblivion. They just won’t survive regardless of what they sell or how big they are. It means that if you have any kind of online presence you have to measure it. Companies conducting marketing analytics and those who don’t can be compared to snipers using the latest military tech and prehistoric hunters who tried to hit a bird with a stone. It’s up to you to decide which community you want to join, but we would advise you to go for the “snipers” one and we have at least ten reasons to persuade you.

1. Most/viewed exited pages

This metric helps you identify the strong and weak pages of your website. You need to know which pages users visit the most often and where they spend more time. At the same time, the least popular pages can be optimized or even deleted. In any case, this metric will allow you to improve the UX and thus conversion.

2. Organic search traffic

Shows how much traffic is driven to your website directly through the search engines. Depending on your target on users’ attraction, it helps to see whether your website should be optimized in terms of applied keywords.

3. Bounce rate

This metric helps to see how many users left your website after visiting just one page. With the help of this metric, you can easily identify the most problematic pages and adjust them accordingly depending on whether the bounce is related to design, the content of the page or the time of its loading.

4. Click-through-rate

It shows the correlation between the number of users who clicked on the banner advertising and the number of demonstrations of this ad. This metric helps to evaluate the ROI of your banner advertising and notifies you when the discrepancy between the two increases.   

5. Traffic by source  

This metric shows where your visitors come from. It demonstrates the percentage of every used source (social media, direct search, etc.) in the overall traffic of the website. A very effective indicator to measure the conversion rate.

6. New visitors and returning visitors

A very important indicator especially when you want to measure the reach of your marketing campaign. This indicator helps you see how many visitors were attracted to your website after a certain marketing activity. You can also track how often certain visitors return to your website and which content attracts them the most.

7. Average session duration

That’s the indicator for tracking the average time visitors spend on your website. If they leave to early it means that you have to work on the content and/or design of your web page in order to ensure better retention of customers’ attention.

8. Conversion rate

You can measure the quality of conversion by using this indicator. How many visitors bounced at the stage of leads, how many subscribed for your newsletter, downloaded a piece of content from your website, used the online chat to communicate with your employees, made a purchase, etc. – all these can be tracked with the help of this indicator.

9. Social reach

This metric tells you how many people saw your content online. It’s a crucial part of engagement rate evaluation which demonstrates the quality of your content, as well as the relevance of used channels for its dissemination.

10. Cost per conversion

This marketing indicator shows how much money on average you spent per one user in order to convert him into a customer.

The application of marketing analytics is of utmost importance for a reasonable business manager. By analyzing all aforementioned metrics you’ll be able to count the overall ROI of your marketing efforts. Narrowing down social media reaches to cost per conversion you can precisely evaluate your investment into each customer. Identify the bottlenecks of your marketing strategy and adopt a well-informed decision on its improvement.