How to Measure Your Customers’ Online Behaviors
The only way to effectively measure your customers’ online behaviors is to understand what to look for in the first place. Though every marketing campaign includes a mountain of metrics to measure success, some are more trouble to stay on top of than they’re worth. Others, however, do wonders in telling you about how your audience is engaging with your advertisements and website, giving you holistic information about the overall success of your campaign. By knowing which metrics best measure your customers’ online behaviors, you’ll have what you need to successfully build meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with them. That’s why we’ve created a shortlist of some of the most useful metrics available to you. When equipped with these, you’ll have the measuring tools you need to successfully work toward long-term success.
Cost Per Click
What it is: Referred to as CPC among those of us who discuss it on a near-daily basis, cost per click is pretty self-explanatory: it tells you how much you’re paying for one person to click on your digital advertisements. When setting up your ads on search engines like Google and Bing, you can set a maximum CPC to ensure that you never pay more than a certain amount per click.
What it means: CPC is an essential tool in measuring whether you’re getting a return on your investment in advertisements. If the cost of getting leads to click on your ads is higher than the revenue you’re incurring from these ads, then you’re not seeing a favorable ROI (return on investment).
Click-through Rate
What it is: The click-through rate, or CTR, tells you what percentage of your viewers are actually clicking on the links and calls to action you’re giving them in content like blog posts and emails.
What it means: CTR is an excellent way to measure, in real time, what aspects of your content work and which don’t. For example, if an email you’ve sent out has an open rate of 20% but a click-through rate of 2%, you can infer that your subject heading is compelling but that the body of the email itself is falling short. CTR allows you to pinpoint what elements of your initiative need pivoting or editing in order to more effectively resonate with your audience.
Conversion Rate
What is is: Conversion rate tells you what percentage of your website’s visitors are actually completing the action you intend them to take.
What it means: Conversion rate is an extremely useful way to measure your customers’ online behaviors because it literally tells you whether your content is successfully incentivizing them to do what you want them to. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean signing up or making a purchase; conversion rates can measure any action, including downloading a piece of content, filling out a form, or navigating to another page on your site.
Cost Per Conversion
What it is: Cost per conversion tells you how much you’re spending in order to get your website’s visitors to take the actions you want them to take online.
What it does: If cost per click is useful in measuring ROI, then cost per conversion is absolutely essential. When compared to the revenue you expect to take in from each lead, it’s an extremely useful way to directly tell whether you have room to invest more money in attracting leads – or whether you’re spending too much.
In order to not only accurately measure your customers’ online behaviors, but to leverage this information as a tool for business growth, it’s important to take the four metrics listed above into consideration. These will give you useful insights into not only what your viewers are doing, but how you can revamp your content and strategy to more effectively reach them (and how much money is reasonable to invest into doing so). To get more information about using metrics to make the most of your marketing strategy, feel free to contact us.
Read Kelly’s full article, Are Digital Metrics Driving You Crazy? Here’s What You Need to Know, on MarTechAdvisor.com