Have you ever wondered what really happens when you hit “send” or “publish” on each marketing campaign? Where does your traffic come from? What’s working and what’s wasting your time?
Marketing analytics provides that insight, but in today’s world of Big Data and information overload, how do you know what to look at and what to ignore?
Analytics are not created equal. Some provide immensely valuable insight while others dilute your research and confuse your efforts. To help you track the right metrics in your business, here is a list of the top seven marketing analytics you shouldn’t ignore.
Email Open Rates
Getting let in to your audience’s inbox is like getting behind the red velvet rope of your top prospects. It’s a privilege that you shouldn’t take for granted. Email open rates show you how your audience responds to what you’re sending. If your email open rates are high, they want more of what you have to say. If they’re low, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Pro tip: Try using different subject lines to see what catches the attention of your audience the best.
Email Click Through Rates
Perhaps more important than open rates is click through rates. This shows you how many people are interested enough in what you’re offering to take the next step and learn more. In layman’s terms, this golden nugget of data divulges just how hot your message is to your audience.
Low click through rates signal lost opportunity. Using an app, such as deliver.me, you can tweak your design in seconds, conduct A/B tests to strengthen your campaigns, and add widgets to make it easier for your recipient to engage with your brand. Watch your click through rates with each tweak to determine what’s working and what’s falling flat.
Pro tip: Change up the position of your links in your emails to monitor where people are clicking the most.
Social Media Intelligence
Many people decline signing up for an email list, and instead “like” or “follow” a company’s social media profile instead. Even though it’s a less personal channel than email, there’s still a wealth of data available.
By using sharing widgets on your content, you gain a better understanding of what content your audience wants to read: the more shares, the more they like it. Better yet, using these widgets and tools makes it easier for your audience to share your best stuff, which only adds fuel to the social media sharing fire.
Pro tip: Get to know your audience better by monitoring what they engage with the most, and then delivering more of it.
Dark Social
Dark social lets you use a custom URL to capture viral content after it goes “dark” from your analytics. With custom URLs, you can see what content gets shared further from social media to other platforms. For example, if one of your Facebook followers found one of your articles interesting, she might send it via email to her colleague. By tracking each specific URL, you can see the true impact of your social media marketing.
This is a newer analytic that gets brushed under the rug out of fear of lengthy setup times and costs. However, with easy-to-use apps like Add Now, that excuse goes out the window and business owners are better equipped to dig deeper into their social media efforts.
Pro tip: Add custom URLs into each blog post publishing plan so you always get the best insight from your content marketing efforts.
Keywords
Ask any savvy SEO and she will tell you that keywords are taking less and less of a focus in content marketing. With that said, there’s still a place for them — especially when it comes to understanding your marketing analytics.
Keyword insights aren’t as readily available from Google any longer. However, other apps, such as Add Now, make it easier to find the most searched keywords used to find your business. This matters because it lets you gauge what your audience wants. If your pages aren’t converting well, you might not be getting the highest quality leads or you might need to revise your copy.
Pro tip: Use the top keywords to develop more content around these terms. Focus on long-tail keywords (keywords that are five to seven words in length) to get the maximum impact on search results.
Top Landing Pages
A landing page is simply the first page where your audience arrives from an outside source, such as a Pay Per Click ad, search result, or social media post. Similar to keywords, top landing pages offer insight into what your audience wants to know from you. This is the content that your audience engages with the most, so it stands to reason that this is the information that needs to shine.
Pro tip: Tweak these top pages and test to see how you can improve conversion rates.
Audience Behavior
When someone lands on your website, what happens next? Do they leave? Do they dig deeper to learn more about your business?
Monitoring audience behavior lets you know where you’re missing opportunities. It shows you where you’re losing your buyers in the sales cycle and where you can improve to keep the interest of your qualified leads.
Pro Tip: Outline the customer’s experience on your website. How can you make it easier for people to buy from your company?
Are You Watching?
Keeping an eye on your statistics is essential to your marketing success. What other marketing analytics do you monitor on a regular basis?