“Tracking your metrics” might sound daunting, but I promise it doesn’t have to be.
It’s just a fancy way of saying you’re monitoring important aspects of your website’s performance.
Your doctor checks your height, weight and blood pressure every time you come in, right? It’s the same for your website; there are a few key measurements you’re going to want to take regularly.
If you manage a website, you probably already have some type of tracking system set up to take these measurements, also known as “analytics.”
Don’t have this? Head to Google Analytics right this minute and get set up! Tracking your metrics is critical to understanding what’s working and what’s not for your business.
So you have your tracking system in place, and you probably pop in every once in a while to check on your traffic numbers, but… what else?
With a system like Google Analytics, there are countless other metrics you can measure in your account. It can be confusing to know where to begin.
Here are the three other metrics I think you need to be tracking BESIDES traffic, and why they’re important.
1. Goals
This is arguably the single most important metric on your website, and one that many businesses aren’t even tracking at all.
10,000 visitors per month means nothing if only 5 of those people are converting into customers (or worse—if you have no idea how many are converting!).
A goal could mean any number of things: an email capture. A purchase. A request for more info. A form fill.
Essentially, it means the visitor completed a “goal” by taking an action other than just visiting your site.
Above, you’re looking at one of my weekly goal completion reports. This goal tracks signups to my free media pitching e-course.
As you can see, it tells me where each and every course signup came from—which I need to know in order to know what’s working.
Recently, I’ve submitted a couple of guest posts to Entrepreneur.com. I thought it would be a great way to build credibility and social proof.
What I didn’t expect was that people would click over from those guest posts and sign up for my course. Last week, clicks from Entrepreneur accounted for 21% of my course signups. Nice!
So, I now have proof that taking the time to write and contribute those posts to Entrepreneur has a positive ROI for me. See how this could make a big impact when you’re tracking goals that reflect sales?
Here’s a how-to for setting up goals on your site.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with back-end site maintenance, I suggest hiring an inexpensive contractor on a site like Upwork to set this up for you. They should be able to do it in an hour or less.
Once you’ve got goals set up, you can find them under Conversions > Goals in your Google Analytics dashboard.
2. Traffic Sources
This is a very straightforward, very powerful metric that tells you exactly where your site traffic is coming from.
It also tells you how visitors from each of your traffic sources are behaving on your site.
You can find this in Google Analytics by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
Why is this so important? Well, when you know where your site’s traffic is coming from, you can double down on those sources (i.e. buying more display ads, posting to Facebook more frequently, etc.).
Likewise, you can also tell which efforts are not paying off.
Here’s an example.
Along the left side, you can see the top 10 sources of this site’s traffic.
We’re getting a ton of organic traffic from Google, which is great. But if you look closely, Twitter is nowhere to be found in the top ten.
This surprised me, because we spend a lot of effort posting to and engaging on Twitter for this website. But, for one reason or another, it’s not converting into much traffic.
Pinterest, on the other hand, has a solid spot in the top ten traffic drivers, ever though we don’t spend nearly as much time on it.
This tells me loud and clear that we should be dedicating more time and energy to Pinterest and less to Twitter. Make sense?
3. Search Queries
This one is probably the trickiest to set up (but you can do it on your own with a little Googling—I did!).
Once it’s set up, you’ll be able to see all of the search engine queries that brought people to your site.
You can find this metric in Google Analytics by going to Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries.
If you or your webmaster have not already set up what’s known as the ‘Search Console’, you’ll get this message:
So, you need to set up Search Console, a free tool from Google that helps you manage how your site performs in search results.
- First, follow these instructions to set up your site’s Search Console.
- Then, follow these instructions to connect your Search Console to your Analytics account.
Seem too complicated? Again, I suggest using Upwork to hire someone to do this for you. An experienced SEO or digital marketing specialist can get you up and running in an hour or two.
Once you’re all set up with Search Console, you’ll be able to see a list of search terms where your site is displayed in the results. In other words, if someone types ‘term X’ into Google, your site comes up as a result.
Here are ten of my top search queries:
As you can see, more than half of my recent queries are closely related to a single topic: Facebook ads (which I’ve written about here and here).
This tells me a few things:
- A lot of people are searching for information on this topic.
- There aren’t a lot of resources out there on this niche topic.
- My site is ranking well for this topic, so it’s probably a great idea to put out even more content on it. If I wanted to, I could even aim to become the authority on the subject.
In this way, your search queries are a super useful tool for figuring out how and why people are arriving at your site via search, and how you might capitalize on it.
Did I mention that search traffic is FREE? Another key reason why you should optimize your site based on this metric.
So, those are my top three metrics to track besides simple traffic numbers. What do you look at when you log on to Google Analytics?
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Tami Brehse
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