Are you measuring the correct key metrics? Key metrics for your website or your incoming new subscribers are very, very important and you should have a bunch of key numbers that you look at on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. Your goals should be based on measuring these metrics.
But have you thought about why you’re measuring them and which ones and what they mean to you? Let me explain.
One of the more popular things to measure for online or web marketing, are the number of visitors or traffic or page views. These are all based on the number of people who come and look at your website.
But, for most, traffic numbers actually means nothing, unless they are taking action.
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The traffic, people coming and looking and reading your content, doesn’t help you in any way unless you convert them into some kind of result, get them onto a list, sell them something.
Those are the numbers you need to be measuring, not the actual visitor numbers. And, as we promote targeted traffic, you should be very, very careful of the type of people that you wish to attract to come and read your website.
You should craft that audience very carefully, and then you get better quality.
Measurements that you should want to know are things like number of sales and the conversion rate. (If for let’s say every 100 visitors to your site, 2 people buy something, that’s a 2% conversion rate.)
That is important because moving that can move the overall needle greatly.
Another good one is average order value. Of course if those two people we mentioned above spend £100, on average, if you could get it up to £150, then that adds a 50% increase to your overall. Very important.
Then there is lifetime value, how often are they going to buy, how long are they going to stay a customer?
If it’s a membership site, what’s the average timespan of the membership? So for example if they join up in month 1 but don’t renew for month 2, perhaps you want to consider offering a deal for a 3 month membership or a 6 or a 12, to encourage them to be there longer.
That way, they learn more of what you’ve got to say and are more likely to fully appreciate what you’ve got to offer and become a more devoted customer.
Other metrics that I see people talking about are number of Twitter followers, or number of Facebook likes. These mean nothing.
Social media platforms are just to get people to promote your content to or to pull them in to read your blog and to take an action.
It’s the action people take that converts into money. That’s what you need to be measuring.
Do not get caught up on numbers. Someone can have 10,000 or 50,000 Twitter followers. If they do nothing, don’t have any engagement, what use is it? People talk about Klout scores but how does that convert into money?
All these things can be manipulated and bought, it is not important. Consider them carefully. Measure the returns on social media carefully.
Friendly Follow
It’s Wednesday, time for a friendly follow; talking of Twitter. And today we’re going to talk about a little craft, beer and food bar in Houston, Texas. Their Twitter handle is HayMerchant, as in the stuff that horses eat.
The reason I like them is not because they’re the world’s greatest as they don’t seem to follow back so many of their customers, so they tend to be talking out, not listening in, which is not always a good thing.
But they put out good information and they use Twitter well. They’re a bar, so they talk about when they’ve got a special new beer on or they’ve got a special new food menu item and they send it out to their followers.
The last time I looked they have around 11,000 followers, so people are listening and people do re-tweet and people do favorite their tweets. They seem to get the engagement.
So, if you’re a restaurant, a bar, something like that then it’s well worth to look at HayMerchant to see how they do it and see if there’s something you can learn from that.
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