Top digital metrics for your business
In this article, you will learn about:
The role of digital metrics
The most important digital metrics for your business
Digital metric platforms to help boost your business
The role of digital metrics
Most companies have a website or use social media platforms, which are effective ways to market their products and services. However, these tools aren’t very useful if business owners don’t keep track of whether they are achieving their purpose: are they attracting visitors, for example, and are these visitors engaging with the content?
Digital metrics have a role to play here, because they measure how users interact with a business online. If these show that a company’s online presence isn’t successful, it’s possible to correct the problem. In this way, digital metrics are useful tools for guiding an online strategy and, ultimately, helping a business function more effectively.
The most important digital metrics for your business
Website traffic: This is one of the most important metrics, because it shows how many people visit your website. Similar to a physical store, the more prospective customers that enter your online store, the more opportunities you have to make a sale.
Traffic by channel: This metric tells you where your visitors come from, whether they have clicked on to your site from an ad, or whether they used a search engine, like Google or Bing, to find it. By understanding how most visitors ‘find’ you online, you can make it easier for them to do so.
Page views: This is the number of times someone loads your web page in a browser. It acts as a guide to what type of information people find useful. E.g. If you sell products online, you would want customers to see more of your catalogue. An increase in page views would be a positive indicator that your products are appealing to your store visitors.
Most visited pages: This metric helps you track the areas on your site that users are most likely to visit. This can give you more information about what they need from your company.
Device: This metric lets you know if users are accessing your website from a mobile phone, computer or other device. Once you have this information, you can structure your website to be more appealing.
Engagement rate: This gives information about how long a visitor spends on your website. Depending on the nature of your business, a longer engagement time on your website could be a positive indicator.
Digital metric platforms to help boost your business
Google Analytics can create reports on your business by gathering information from your website. It does this by using a JavaScript measurement code which acts like a tracking device, then packages this information in an easy to understand format. While this may sound intimidating, enabling Google Analytics 4 on your website is a fairly straightforward task.
Cyfe can consolidate a number of metrics on a single dashboard.
Quintly lets you track the growth of your pages.
Buffer is a good tool for analysing social media activity.
Adobe Analytics lets you improve your customer experience by collecting data from all points on the online customer journey.
A final thought
Metrics are sometimes confused with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), but the two are very different. A metric is the basic building block of data: it shows how many people visit a website, for example, or how long they spend there. On the other hand, KPIs show how successful a project is: if a company has launched an email marketing campaign, KPIs tell you how many people have clicked on it and how many more have converted to actual sales.
What can you do now?
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Key Takeouts
Digital metrics platforms can collect and analyse data from your online touchpoints, like websites and social media platforms, to help you make better business decisions.
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