In the world of e-commerce, do you know what digital marketing success looks like to achieve brand growth? Most people automatically think leads and sales, right?
Well, leads and sales are definitely metrics that help you determine how successful your business is but to effectively measure your brand growth, you will need to look at other areas of your marketing campaign.
For example, how does your user experience stack up to that of your competitors? How does your content and link profile compare to your competitors. Stellar SEO , a highly praised link building agency, stated that getting mentions on major publications paired with niche relevant links on mid-tier sites is a very effective pairing. Do you have a similar promotion plan setup?
In having your own ecommerce site, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of digital marketing analytics but the real question is how do you know which area is detrimental to the success of your site? The key here would be to get into the mind of your buyer. Think about how someone who has no clue that your company even exists can go from that to becoming a loyal, repeat customer. Your analytics can track that and tie it back to your ROI.
The metrics you need to measure may vary in levels of importance but depending on the type of business you have and your marketing efforts, it may be more beneficial for you to narrow what you’re tracking down to only relevant key performance indicators (KPIs). This is what will show you what success looks like for you and your business on the digital marketing spectrum.
As mentioned earlier, there are a vast number of metrics that you can measure to forecast how successful your business is but all too often, business owners base their success off of one of the biggest deceiving metrics… What metric is that? It’s the Vanity Metric.
What Exactly is a Vanity Metric?
If you’re familiar with what it means to be vain, then you know that vanity is an excessive amount of pride in your appearance or achievements. In the world of digital marketing and metrics, a vanity metric is a number that “looks good” for business but doesn’t actually contribute to the success of your business.
Take social media for example. Instagram… if you have a business page on Instagram and you post a picture of a product and it gets 150K likes, you’re thinking “hey, business is booming!” right? Well, the way this metric is so deceiving is that although your product post received 150K likes, how many of those 150K people actually visited your e-commerce site and bought that particular product? How many people downloaded your app? That 150K likes look good and make you feel like you’ve made a huge accomplishment but those likes don’t mean a thing when they’re not actionable.
Now, that’s not saying that having high numbers on social media isn’t good for metrics because they are. If you have the right social media marketing skills, your business can greatly benefit from a single post but ideally, you want to look at metrics that really matter and actually give you actionable insight on what areas of your marketing efforts are working and which ones are not.
Insights For Professionals state that if you get blindsided by vanity metrics, you can end up wasting a lot of time and effort on improving aspects of your marketing campaign that will bring little to no value to your business. To prevent that from happening, take a look at the top areas of digital marketing analytics that best measure your ecommerce brand growth.
Measure of Traffic
Before “jumping into traffic” (funny pun), it needs to be said that this particular number can come off as a vanity metric but once you actually break down the number, it can be remarkably insightful to your marketing campaign. The two best ways to analyze the traffic to your site is to break it down to how people are getting to your site and how they’re interacting with your site:
How Visitors are Getting to Your Site
- Organic
- Referral
- Social
- Paid
- Direct
How Visitors are Interacting On Your Site
- Total time visitors spend on your site
- Top pages visited and time spent on those pages
- Most popular version used to view your site: mobile or desktop
- Type of visitors to your site: new or returning
This particular metric is not only important for measuring how people are getting to your site and how they’re interacting on your site, but it also sheds a little light on your site in general. How is the appearance of your site? Are the themes boring or enticing? This is something you should have paid close attention to in the beginning when you were first creating your site but if you didn’t, it’s okay.
You don’t have to be stuck with a website that doesn’t work for you. There are tons of e-commerce platforms out there with all kinds of applications and appealing themes that will work for any business. There are plenty of free tools that will help you find a new domain name as well, so if you are suffering from a branding faux paux, it isn’t too late to fix it!
Measure of Conversions
Conversions are an area of metrics where you can measure the actions people take while visiting your website. There are two types of conversions: macro and micro. A macro-conversion would be something like a visitor downloading an ebook from your site; a micro-conversion would be a visitor subscribing to your site.
As far as metrics are concerned, tracking your conversions is a great way for you to get into the mind of your buyer and see their journey (as mentioned earlier). This metric will show you the very actions those visitors took before they converted to becoming a customer. This metric is very important because it helps you understand your customers better.
Once you have a better understanding of your customer, you’ll be able to create content that’s beneficial to their needs as well as provide helpful suggestions and answer common questions. By doing that, you’ll be able to measure the success of your efforts and see what worked and what didn’t.
Measure of Engagement
A common way to measure engagement is through social media analytics. Is this a vanity metric? It technically could be but when this metric is used in the right context, it’s not. Instagram has its own analytics tool called Insights. When measuring engagement, the areas being looked at are the number of likes, shares, or comments a post receives.
Typically, people who engage with your brand are more than already customers, meaning it could potentially lead your business to attract new customers. If you’re getting a decent following from social media, you may need to increase your online presence even more if you want to reach the masses!