Onsharp

One of the most helpful features of websites and online marketing is the ability to measure nearly everything regarding performance. Basic website analytics can tell you how many visitors have come to your website, how many are first time visitors, how long they were on the site and in which city they are located. You can find out how many people clicked through to your website from one of your online advertisements. Even if your site stats tell you you're getting thousands of ad clicks and visits, I'll ask "so what?" 

Please don't misunderstand; many metrics are key indicators that shouldn't be ignored. For instance, if you suddenly lose a significant number of Facebook fans for your business, you may have made a change your customers don't like, which could lead to a decrease in retention. I'm calling "so what" on metrics that do not directly measure success. 

A comparative example is weight loss. You might track calories consumed, minutes spent on the treadmill, numbers of ab crunches, and so on. But the real success metric is total weight lost. While the other metrics (calories, cardio and crunches) can be possible leading indicators, they're meaningless on their own. Below are three examples showing how website stats on their own can be meaningless because they don't really track success.

Meaningless Website Stat: Total number of Visitors

Track this instead: total number of sales or leads.

It's great that 10,000 people visited your site, but how many filled out a form or subscribed to your email newsletter? If you had a physical store, you probably wouldn't say you had a successful day if 15 people stopped to look at your window, but didn't come inside. You want your website visitors to do something when they visit. If you sell products on your website, you should track the average number of items purchased per visit. If part of your online strategy is offering free white paper downloads to those who register, you should track the average number of downloads per visit. Whatever your strategy, you should track actions that definitively prove your efforts were successful. In both examples, the number of visitors alone is meaningless unless you view it as a first step to a product sale or download registration. 

Meaningless Website Stat: Rank on SERP (search engine results page)

Track this instead: organic conversion rate.

It's cool if your website ranks on the first search engine results page for 10 industry-specific keywords, but is it bringing in more business? To find out, you should calculate the conversion rate of those who come to your website via a search engine. You can figure this out by looking at your traffic sources. If you have more sophisticated analytics like those offered by HubSpot it will be fairly easy to determine the percentage of visitors who come from a search engine and then convert to a lead or sale. The formula is number of conversions/number of search engine visitors x 100 = conversion rate.

Meaningless Website Stat: Fans or Followers

Track this instead: Engagement.

You might think having a lot of "likes" on your Facebook fan page or followers on Twitter is important. But, what if they're mostly college buddies and the ladies in your mom's bridge club? It's nice that they're paying attention and rallying to support you, but it doesn't mean your social media efforts are successful. To measure that, you need to know if you're reaching people who might purchase your products. That's why you should track engagement, which is determined by the number of followers who mention you, retweet or share your posts, or somehow reference you or your business on social networking sites. The higher your engagement, the more your name is exposed to friends and followers of your friends and followers. The power of social media in business is the ability to reach people through several levels of connectivity. When your friends and followers talk about you and your products online, your messages are reaching exponentially more people than through any other channel of communication. 

Moving From Meaningless to Meaningful

I shared just three examples of commonly-used indicators and their success-proving counterparts. It's really nice when you get a boost in visits or Facebook fans, but is that what proves your business strategies are yielding the results you want? A successful business is one that is profitable; metrics like conversion rates and ROI are far more helpful in measuring profitability than are numbers of visitors or clicks. Remember to take that extra step by going being metrics that just sound good to metrics that really prove success. 

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