So you’ve taken the jump and hired someone to handle the marketing of the lil’ ole website.
Mazel Tov, you’ll go far…………………into debt unless you know how to keep a reign on your spending.
When it comes to online marketing, everything comes down to testing (and if you come across anyone who says it isn’t, kick their sorry asses out of your office).
And testing means one thing…………SPENDING MONEY. So you need to know if what you are spending money on is worth continuing to spend money on. And the only way to do this is with metrics, but not just any old metric with do. They need to be linked with your business objectives and desired outcomes.
Conversion Rate
This is what it all comes down to. How often do you site visitors do what you are hoping for them to do. Do you know what you want people to do on your site? What is your industry’s average conversion? What is your average conversion? Did you know what a conversion was before you read this?
Average Order Value
Pretty self explanatory. If you sell something, on average, how much of “it” do you sell to your customers
Time to Purchase – In terms of Days & Visits
How much time someone spends on your site or how many pages they look at are irrelevant if you don’t relate it to some business objective, like, well, sales…..If you have a long sales cycle, it is important to know exactly how long it is….you may have to augment this with offline data as well
Visitor Loyalty & Visitor Recency
Basically you want to find out how much love you get from your customers. How often do they come back and when was the last time they did so. If you don’t actually sell anything on your website other than thoughts, these are how you are going to tell if readers are buyin’ what youse be a sellin’.
So what happens if you don’t use these metrics to develop your KPIs……
You never know if your marketing spend is effective………..and I think you can figure out the rest of the story from there