The Top 5 Marketing Analytics to Keep Track Of

Collating the analytics of your website, emails and social media pages is important in order to truly understand the results of your marketing efforts. 

Without knowing if your website is getting more or less traffic than the previous month, or if your social media engagement is increasing or decreasing, you’ll never be able to make informed marketing decisions.

So here are the top five analytics that you should take note of in order to keep your business’s online presence moving in the right direction.

1. Traffic

The number of people visiting your website.

Knowing the amount of traffic your website receives will help you to understand when your website is at its most popular (ie. a restaurant’s events page during Christmas party booking season, or the kids menu page during the summer school holiday).

Some website plugins can tell you where your traffic is coming from, what time of day is busiest, and how long they stayed on your website. For example, a ‘bounce’ is the term for a person landing on your website and promptly leaving it. This would be a red flag, and should prompt you to investigate why this is happening. 

It could be anything from a website that isn’t user-friendly, to a misleading title or a technical error. In any case, a website that isn’t functioning properly can easily result in loss of revenue.

These analytics will help to give you a clearer understanding of what your audience wants, and how you can deliver it.

2. Engagement

Rate of people interacting with a social media post ie. like, share, comment or tagging.

The ultimate goal for social media content is to have high engagement. This includes people sharing your content to their followers, tagging their friends or writing in the comment section, and liking or reacting to the post. 

These strong analytics will result in your content reaching more people, which means more potential followers, more customers and a stronger reputation.

The more engagement your posts receive the more likely others will see it too. This is a result of the social media platform’s algorithm. The algorithm favours popular content, by showing it organically to people that the platform thinks will also enjoy your content. Equally, the less engagement you receive, the less likely the algorithm will favour it, resulting in a post that is shown to fewer and fewer people.

Knowing how many people have engaged with your content is a great way to determine what sort of content is more popular, and what content you should change. It might be in something as simple as the phrasing or hashtags you’ve used, the photo or video you’ve chosen, or the topic you’ve mentioned. All of these things are an interesting confirmation on the kind of direction you should take with your business’s page.

3. Reach

How many individual people saw your post.

The number of people you have reached indicates the amount of people your content has been shown to. These analytics mean your content has been shown on x amount of people’s personal feeds.

You may be thinking that the higher the number, the better. This is true to an extent, but only if the engagement rate is increasing along with it. Most marketing professionals agree that an engagement rate of 1% – 5% of the amount of following is respectable. So even if your post’s reach is 100, it’s only really noteworthy if the engagement rate is on track too. If it isn’t, then your post is reaching people, but they’re not sticking around because it’s clearly not something that your audience likes.

Deciphering what content is popular and why will be your next task! Hence why reach is such an important analytic to pay attention to; it helps to paint a picture of what your audience likes. The more they like you and your content, the more loyal they become!

4. Impressions

How many people in total (including multiple views by the same person)
At first glance, you might think that impressions aren’t as valuable as the reach because it’s not the total number of individuals who have seen your content, but the total number overall. 

But here’s the catch; the more times you see a brand, the more likely you’ll remember it. Particularly if it’s interesting or entertaining content. This is referred to as ‘effective frequency’. Every product and industry has a different ‘magic number’ of impressions to result in a conversion, but it’s certainly something to consider.

5. Following

The number of people who follow your social media page

In black and white terms, your following quite obviously needs to be tracking up rather than down. However, to determine this, you must take note of this number monthly. 

A lot of things can affect this number. For example, running competitions that ask participants to follow the page to enter can result in a peak, and followed by a trough when the competition is over (that is unless your content is enjoyable enough to make everyone stick around!). 

These analytics can also give you an insight into what posts caused an increase and decrease in following to understand what your followers are most interested in.

Note: Facebook pages have the ability to ‘like’ the page or ‘follow’ the page. The number of followers is far more valuable to take note of than the ‘likes’ because a person can ‘like’ the page (resulting in that page being listed on their personal page under their ‘likes’), but they may have unfollowed. This means that they won’t see your content on their Facebook feed, which is the ultimate aim.

Even if you’re not much of an analytical person, understanding these five stats will help your marketing strategy enormously. But if you don’t have the time to report on these things, give us a bell and we’ll be happy to help!