Now, to help you measure the right metrics (and decipher your results), here are the top six campaign performance and website metrics that matter most.
Attribution
Marketing attribution is the value or credit you assign an action when evaluating which efforts drove a conversion (such as a completed purchase). There are many models you can use to measure marketing attribution.
For example, some organizations assign all credit to the first action a customer took when engaging with your brand (first touch attribution), and others assign all credit to the last action a customer took before converting (last touch attribution).
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is the number of people who have converted on a given campaign, divided by the total number of people who engaged with the campaign within a defined period of time.
You can define a conversion as whatever action makes the most sense to your business. For example, for some organizations, a conversion may be a website form submission, while other organizations only count completed purchases as conversions.
The best way to set a benchmark for your conversion rate is to consider the average for your industry. For example, the average conversion rate within the Google Display Network for e-commerce is 0.59 percent, while the average for the automotive industry is 1.19 percent, according to data shared by Search Engine Journal.
Page View
A page view occurs when a website visitor lands on or reloads a page. You may also see this metric as "page views per session," which is the average number of pages a visitor loaded during one visit. The higher the page views per session, the more the visitors are engaging with your website content.
Session
Also called a visit, this occurs when someone opens your website within their browser. A session or visit only ends when the visitor leaves your website or closes their browser tab or window.
Sources
Your sources are the marketing channels that drive traffic to your website. They include organic channels (e.g. search engine results pages), referrals (e.g. another website that links to your site), social media (e.g. a post on Facebook), emails and more. Sources can help you determine which channels you should focus on in your multichannel marketing strategy.
Tracking URL
A tracking URL is a special type of URL usually affixed with an urchin tracking module (UTM) code, or a string of code that allows you to track a campaign, medium or source. Using tracking URLs enables you to determine where visitors are coming from, and which marketing efforts (such as ad campaigns) are driving visitors to various pages or content on your website.
Understanding the campaign and website metrics that matter most is just the first step. Stay tuned for the third part of this series where we delve into how to identify where you're falling short and what to do to improve performance.
