Digital marketing has transformed from simple email blasts to more complex methods to drive traffic to your website.
But simply developing strategies for digital marketing will prove meaningless if you don’t find ways to measure how much traffic you’re getting and whether this traffic is eventually converting into sales for your business.
Here are some traffic metrics to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy:
Number of visits to your website
The number of people visiting your website should be tracked and monitored to give you a better understanding of how effective digital marketing campaigns are when it comes to driving traffic. Consider the following:
- Number of site visits should ideally increase after a big-burst campaign or ad post.
- Website visits should continue to grow over a period, especially as you boost your digital marketing efforts.
- Bounce rate of your website indicating people leaving without performing any action.
- Pages people are leaving your website from to help you establish drop-off points during the process of conversion.
Once you’re able to determine how many website visits you’re getting based on a particular campaign or on a monthly basis, you’ll be in a better position to understand how effective your digital marketing strategy is with your target audience.
Sources of website traffic
According to Clickmatix understanding where your traffic is coming from is useful for charting out digital marketing campaigns in the future because you will know what channel is most effective. Here are some sources to help you better understand where your web traffic is coming from:
- Visitors coming to your website directly – they simply type your website URL into the browser and enter your website
- Visitors on your website via an organic search – they visit your site after searching for relevant keywords in Google
- Visitors referred to your website – they come via an inbound link from another article, blog or website
- Visitors on your website via social media – they arrive at your website from social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
This is a more detailed way to analyse your web traffic – giving you greater insight into how your traffic has been sourced.
Mobile traffic directed to your website
With mobile becoming the dominant force behind website interactions, it’s important for you to track the amount of traffic you get from this source. If you don’t track mobile traffic, you could be making some massive mistakes that will cost you big in the long run. Consider the following to help you better understand the way your target audience behaves on mobile:
- How much of your traffic comes from mobile as compared to other sources?
- What browsers are used on mobiles to direct to your website?
- What sources are directing mobile traffic to your website?
- What content is most popular with mobile traffic?
- How quickly are mobile visitors moving between pages on your website?
Mobile traffic is key when it comes to improving conversions to your business so make sure you keep track of how this is working for you.
Ways in which visitors interact with your website
The way visitors interact with your website can also help you measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. Consider the following:
- How many pages on your website does a single user visit? The more pages visited, the more interactive the user.
- How much time is spent on each web page? The more time spent, the more useful your content is to users.
- What action is performed on each page? A purchase, a download, a subscription, a review? The more actions performed, the more you are interacting with users.
Analysing how users are interacting with every page on your website allows you to discover what is working and what isn’t – so you can make changes to improve the overall user experience in the long run.
Depending on how you run your digital marketing strategy, you may need to tweak a few of your traffic metrics. But ensuring you have a robust tracking strategy will give you an accurate picture of your performance. This helps you better understand what you’re doing right and where you need to improve to ensure better website traffic.