Using website and social media metrics to improve your marketing efforts
Regularly analysing your performance across your website and social media channels is an imperative step to understanding the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts, enabling you to make data-driven decisions that will positively impact your business moving forward.
Through careful consideration of various performance and engagement metrics, you can create a marketing strategy that leverages your marketing activity alongside your overarching business objectives, generating meaningful insights for targeted growth and success.
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Using website and social media metrics to inform your marketing strategy
An essential aspect of running a successful business, a marketing strategy is a detailed long-term plan that covers who your customers are, how your business is going to reach these customers through your marketing efforts and the main reasoning behind this.
By implementing a carefully considered marketing strategy across your business, you stand the best chance of reaching your intended audience and converting them into loyal customers.
Creating your marketing goals
The first stage of creating an effective marketing strategy is understanding your marketing goals. Although your main focus should be on the long term, you can also use short-term goals as benchmarks to keep track of your progress as your business evolves.
When defining your marketing goals, you should be specific to your business while keeping it simple. Remember, different marketing goals can be tied to different stages of the customer journey and these goals will likely change over time as your business grows and evolves.
To give an example, if you want to start converting leads into customers; it would make perfect sense to alter your marketing goals to accommodate this and start doing activities that support lead nurturing.
Do you need help understanding your marketing goals? Our marketing team would be happy to help chat and strategise!
Keeping track of your progress
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essentially the metrics that you use to keep track of your progress in line with your marketing goals, these metrics help you to gain an improved understanding of just how well your marketing strategy is performing.
Once you’ve identified your main marketing goals, you can then decide on your KPIs, delving deeper into which website and social media metrics you want to track and creating targets for each of these. At this stage, it’s important to consider that to work effectively, these KPIs should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Here are some examples of different marketing goals and how you can convert these goals into measurable website and social media KPIs:
Goal 1: Increasing brand awareness
Brand awareness is important for almost every business. You might have an amazing product or service, but without any sort of awareness amongst your intended audience, you aren’t going to make many sales or generate any leads.
Although brand awareness can be quite hard to quantify, we can measure this using website and social media metrics like website traffic, time on site, post reach, sessions per user, search volume and organic impressions.
Seeing an increase across these metrics would suggest that your marketing activities are effectively increasing brand awareness.
Goal 2: Boosting engagement
Having an engaged audience indicates your content is being enjoyed, highlighting a strong connection between your customers and your business.
An effective way to analyse engagement is to study engagement metrics like website session duration, interactions, social post engagement, and referrals. If you set out with the marketing goal of boosting engagement and these metrics are increasing, your strategy is working.
Goal 3: Generating high-quality leads
Here at JUMP, we’re strong believers in quality over quantity when it comes to lead generation! After all, you’d rather have 10 high-quality leads than 100 leads that are unlikely to convert!
In order to generate quality leads, your marketing needs to be tailored towards you target audience. Let’s assume you're running a paid advertisement that is driving traffic to your website, but all of your leads don’t quite fit your target audience and you’re not seeing an increase in conversions. Then you may want to consider the quality of the leads that your advertisement is producing.
Remember, for your marketing to be effective you need to reach the correct people, with content and messaging that has the best chance of making these customers take action.
To track a marketing goal like this in detail, you could set your KPI to be an increase in a conversion metric like customer acquisitions per ad or marketing campaign.
If you are unsure what KPIs you should be tracking, our marketing team can support in creating a bespoke marketing strategy for your business
Understanding website and social media metrics
Website and social media metrics are an important element of marketing strategy, enabling you to effectively track and analyse the impact of your marketing efforts and make informed, data-driven decisions to inform your marketing activity moving forward.
With so much data now available at the click of a button, it’s important to understand that not all metrics available can be used as a stand-alone measure of success; this really boils down to your specific marketing goals and objectives.
Of course, it’s easy to get drawn into shiny metrics that look good but don’t really add any value; but we’ll get into vanity metrics a little later.
Awareness metrics
As previously touched upon, brand awareness is essentially how familiar your audience is with your business. This can be measured using awareness metrics like reach, views and impressions.
Awareness metrics are especially prevalent on social media, as these are one of the biggest awareness channels. Social media awareness metrics enable us to look at the overall viewership of our content and understand how effectively we are getting our business in front of the intended audience across our social media, informing our content as we move forward.
Although awareness metrics are a lot more difficult than something simple like website sales to effectively quantify, this doesn’t make them any less important. Elevating brand awareness enhances your audience's ability to recognise and recall your business or product, propelling them from the initial engagement phase towards those desired conversions.
Here are several metrics that you can use to measure brand awareness across your website and social media:
Users to website
New users
New followers
Engaged posts
Non-follower engagement
Organic search traffic
Traffic acquisition
Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics exist to paint a picture of exactly how well your audience is engaging with your content across your website and social media channels. They are a strong tool to aid your strategic decision making; guiding the development of your marketing strategy and helping to grow your business.
Let’s assume that you have an e-commerce website that sells jewellery. We can use these engagement metrics to answer key questions like “Which pages did the customer view?” “How long did the customer spend on our website or specific page?” and “How did they arrive on our site?” - empowering us to gain a better understanding of the customer journey, informing our decision-making moving forward.
This is also true for your social media! By studying various engagement metrics across your content and profile, you can assess how well your content is performing and begin to decipher why this might be.
Here are some examples of different engagement metrics that you can use within your marketing strategy:
Website session duration
Number of engaged sessions
Average engagement time
Post engagement rate
Video watch time
Conversion metrics
Conversion is often considered the most important stage of the customer journey, however, it can’t happen without both awareness and engagement. Conversion metrics essentially tell you when your online audience completes a desired action, enabling you to analyse just how well your overall marketing strategy is performing.
But what exactly is a conversion?
Let's say you run an e-commerce business, you may set up a desired conversion on your website that relates to revenue like a sale. For social media, a conversion could be a click on an advert you are running or a sign-up to your LinkedIn newsletter.
Some examples of conversion metrics include:
Click-through rate (CTR)
Conversion rate
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Email sign-ups
Email open rate
Why are website and social media metrics so important?
Metrics give audience insights such as user behaviour and engagement
Understanding your audience in detail is a fundamental component of marketing your business. By analysing key metrics across user engagement and behaviour, your business can create content that is more likely to be consumed and enjoyed by your intended audience.
Through regular analysis of audience data, you can develop actionable insights that will inform your marketing strategy moving forward and assist you in achieving your marketing goals.
Analysis and metrics enable us to keep track of our performance
Regular reporting on your performance across your marketing activities will allow your business to develop an increased understanding of just how well your marketing strategy is performing in line with your marketing goals.
Through careful analysis of various website and social media metrics, you can make data-driven decisions, identify areas to improve and more importantly, stay competitive.
Social media metrics help us to identify trends in the market
Knowing what is happening within the marketplace and identifying opportunities and trends as they emerge will help your business in getting an upper hand on your competitors.
When it comes to opportunities and threats relating to your business, its pivotal that you can adapt your marketing strategy in accordance. By utilising various data and insights from your website and social media, you can make informed business decisions and stay ahead of the game.
Analytics and metrics allow us to compare our performance to our competitors
Comparing your performance to your competitors is a brilliant way to understand how well your marketing activities are performing compared to the wider industry.
If you have an aspirational competitor; or one with a very similar target audience, you can benchmark yourself against them across a range of website and social media metrics, studying the key differences in your content and marketing activities and using this to inform your strategy.
Avoiding vanity metrics
With so much data available, it’s easy to get drawn into vanity metrics that don’t prove anything. While it can be easy to report on website and social media metrics that look good at the surface level, it's vital to consider whether or not these metrics actually provide any value. After all, you should be using your analytics to provide actionable insights that allow us to progress.
Studying vanity metrics like ‘social media likes’ in isolation may be interesting, but what do they tell us about our campaign performance? In some instances, these vanity metrics can provide value; however, using them as a stand-alone measure of success is inevitably going to confuse things.
How you can use website and social media metrics across your business
Utilising website and social media metrics is a critical part of running a successful business, offering valuable audience insights that you can use to inform important business decisions.
Here are some of the ways that you can convert your data and analytics into actions:
Use audience insights to improve the overall user experience
Harnessing data-driven audience insights to guide your decision-making in crafting a compelling user experience is a fantastic strategy for ensuring resonance with your intended audience.
Audience insights help you to improve your understanding of our audience's behaviour and preferences when it comes to both your website and social media.
On your website, you can use data related to your audience to improve the overall user experience. For example, if you can see from your website data that a user journey often ends at a specific page, you can deep dive into why this might be; optimising this page with improved content, buttons and features to keep users engaged.
With a significant portion of website traffic now coming from mobile devices, you might notice that a lot of your users are now opting for mobile over desktop. This insight presents an opportunity to enhance the overall user experience by tailoring your website towards mobile users.
Use website and social media metrics to focus on and improve your content
Ensuring your content evolves dynamically across your website and social media channels is pivotal in maximising its impact and helping drive towards your overarching business objectives. Through regular analysis of your content, you can gain an elevated understanding of your audience and which content truly resonates with them.
By understanding what makes your audience tick, you can strategically create content that you’re certain is going to be a hit before you put it out.
Improve your SEO and website visibility
A website that is optimised for search engines like Google is a must for any modern business operating online. It’s not enough to simply have a great product range or a visually appealing website, your business also needs to be seen and heard online when your target audience searches for it.
You can increase your website’s visibility through search engine optimisation; producing content relevant to your audience, what they are actively searching for and linking this back to your products or services.
Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can assist you in researching exactly what users are actively searching for, how competitive these keywords are and how well they are performing in relation to other keywords. By using this, you can strategically produce content that’s relevant to what your audience is looking for, improving you SEO and generating high-quality website traffic.
Using website and social media metrics to drive business growth
At a surface level, website and social media metrics remove the guesswork and give you the facts, enabling you to make business decisions backed up by real data.
Careful analysis of website and social media metrics should form the backbone of your digital marketing strategy. Through regular analysis and creating actionable insights, your business can develop a deeper understanding of your audience, their values, pain points and exactly what they want to see; empowering you to streamline your content across your website and social media channels.
However, it’s important to understand this data on a deeper level, incorrect analysis can do more harm than good. When looking at data and analytics across your website and social media, it's always a good idea to think about the specific website metrics that you want to focus on and how they align with your marketing goals.
Is your business getting the most out of your website and social media metrics?
Knowing how to properly digest and respond to all of the available website and social media metrics is undoubtedly one of the most crucial parts of marketing your business.
At JUMP, we’re experts in delivering data-driven marketing solutions that help businesses thrive. Through considered analysis of suitable website and social media metrics, we specialise in creating and acting upon insights to inspire growth within your business.
Get in touch today to find out more about how we can turn your website and social media channels into finely oiled machines.