It happens far too frequently…
A confused, frustrated business owner or CEO calls me to talk about how they want to see marketing success, about how they want to try again, but past experiences have been less than satisfactory. I get it. They spend hours and hours and oodles of money to get known and feel like they are still unseen regardless of how much traffic they get from their efforts.
And that’s why I want every CEO, business owner and entrepreneur to know about the 4 key performance indicators (or KPI). These are the metrics that will reveal what is really happening on a website. The noise of all the data pouring in can be overwhelming. That’s where KPI’s come in. Identifying and measuring KPI’s will make it crystal clear where your greatest return on investment (ROI) is. Roll up your sleeves and let’s apply some FieryFX know-how and get your business’s marketing back on track.
The 4 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Metrics to Gauge Business Success & ROI
These 4 performance indicators are what I recommend you use to make sure that a website is performing. They’re what I use. They are what we use for our clients. And now you can use them too.
1. Forget traffic. Look at your unique visitors…
Sure, traffic is good. But the term “traffic” is so vague that it’s next to useless for measuring much of anything, let alone performance or ROI.
So instead, let’s look at unique visitors. That way, we can see how many different, unique people are actually visiting your website. This metric is way more useful, especially as we evaluate the next 3 performance indicators.
2. Track your business’s page views
Now that we know how many people are visiting your website, we can track what pages they’re visiting. Are they landing on a particular page, then leaving? Are they reading a blog and opting into your list? Do they browse a few pages, check out your eCommerce web store, then close the page? Or are they sticking around, reading everything, and then making a purchase?
Each of those series of actions gives us more information – information we can use to update, upgrade, and improve the website to get those unique visitors to stay longer, get more information from your business, and make the conversion into a paying customer. If you think of your marketing like a bucket gathering water, there’s likely holes in the bucket. Metrics tell us where the holes are and how to fix them.
3. Where are your visitors coming from?
Now that we know who’s visiting your page and where they’re hanging out, it’s time to see where they came from. Because once we know where they’re coming from (or how they’re finding your business), we’ll know how to beef up your marketing campaign to get even more unique visitors to your website.
So not only will this performance indicator help measure the success of an existing marketing campaign, it’ll help you plan future ones as well. In other words, this is definitely a KPI to track, because it’s a clear indicator of where to invest more’.
4. And the most important KPI is…
Conversions. The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign (or your website), right? So let’s track those conversions, too.
Now, the actual type of conversion may vary by business or website or web page purpose… maybe you’ve got a landing page where you want people to download a report. Or perhaps you’re wanting to make a blog post go viral through sharing. The point is, though, that there are lots of actions you could want a unique visitor to take: watching a video, downloading something, signing up for your email list, buying something from your store, signing up for your specialty services, etc.
But no matter what kind of conversion your business needs, we can track it through your website. That way, we can make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your marketing buck.
What metrics really mean
The key is to use those performance indicators to build your website so that it guides unique visitors through the process from eyeballs to action.
Securing those conversions is the whole reason we’re setting up, tracking, and evaluating those KPI’s (key performance indicators). That’s how we can gauge the success of your website, your marketing objectives, or a specific marketing project. KPIs are the secret to making website changes that get results.
