Analyse your marketing performance

As part of running your business, set aside time on a regular basis to look at the performance of your website, social media channels, paid advertising and other digital marketing activities.

When you regularly monitor and review your digital marketing activities, you can understand what’s working and what can be improved, then make any necessary adjustments.

Know what you want to measure

As you become more familiar with your digital marketing channels and tools, you’ll gain a better understanding of which metrics are most important to your business.

A good starting point is to set realistic goals, such as targets for online sales, social media followers, newsletter sign-ups or website visitors over a specific period. With these targets in mind, you can tailor your activities to give your digital marketing the best chance for success.

Even if you don’t meet your targets at first, you’ll learn a lot about how different digital marketing strategies work and which metrics to use to measure your success.

Here is a guide to the kind of metrics you may want to measure for different aspects of your digital marketing.

Website analytics

The information you can gather from your website can tell you a lot about your target audience and how they interact with your business.

Some website statistics to regularly review include:

• Volume of website traffic
• How long users stay on your website
• Which pages are most popular
• When users visit your website (time and day)
• The sources of traffic, including search engines and social media
• The path users take to reach your website and the devices they use
• Your customer conversion (sales, downloads, blog reads, enquiries etc.)
• Entry pages (the first pages users visit)
• Exit pages (the last pages users visit before leaving)
• Which browsers are used to access your website

These insights can help you learn where your customers are spending time on your site – and understand their journey through your website or sales process. Knowing this can help you make sure your website provides the information they need in a way that’s easy to understand, engage with and take the next steps, such as buying your product or getting in touch for a quote.

Useful website analytics tools

Depending on your website set up and hosting service, you might receive regular reports or be able to access these through their portal as a customer.

Google Analytics is a free tool which can be embedded into most websites to help you gather some useful data.

Google Search Console can give you detailed insights into how your website is performing in Google searches. 

Social media analytics

Most social media platforms provide built in analytics reporting that you can access, especially if your account is set up as a dedicated business account. Some statistics to regularly review include:

• Number of followers
• Reach of your posts
• Engagement (likes, comments, shares and saves)
• Click through rates from social media posts to your website

While effective social media marketing involves more than just amassing large numbers of followers or likes, these insights can help you work out what kind of content is most engaging for your followers and most likely to drive sales.

Digital marketing analytics

If you are using search engine marketing or other paid activities, you really want to make sure your investment is paying off. Some statistics to regularly review include:

• Ad reach (how many people see your ads)
• Ad engagement (such as click through rates to your website or sales platform)
• Conversions (such as sales or customer enquiries)

These analytics will be available through the platform you’re using for your paid advertising. Use these to learn more about how your target audience engages with your advertising, then you can hone your approach and try different keywords or phrases.

Email marketing analytics

It’s not enough to simply send emails to your customers and hope for the best. For best results, you need to measure how your email marketing is performing. Some of the most important data around your email marketing will include:

• List growth rate (how quickly your subscriber list is growing)
• Click through rate (how many people click links in your email)
• Open rate (how many people open your email)
• Bounce rate (emails that couldn’t be delivered)
• Unsubscribe rate (how many people opt out of your emails)

Once you start exploring different elements of your email marketing, you can experiment with different approaches. For example, you could try different subject lines for the same email to different customer groups to see which style of subject line leads to higher open rates.