When was the last time you looked at your site’s performance metrics?
If you recently scaled back your digital marketing budget — with inflation and ongoing global supply chain chaos, many companies have — then you may have noticed some changes in your site’s core metrics.
Obviously, downward trends in traffic or conversions are not what you want, but even an upward trend in isolation could be concerning, especially if it’s unexplained. It’s hard to capitalize on gains if you don’t know what’s causing them. Here’s what to look for and how to interpret the numbers.
Metrics to Review
Page Views and Pages Per Session
Page views are closely correlated with your search optimization, paid advertising, or social campaigns. Fewer page views are often related to declining visibility, such as dropping in your ranking on targeted keywords. If you notice your pages per session dropping, this is usually due to on-site factors such as your internal linking strategy, user interface, or headline copy.
Conversion Rate
This is likely your most important statistic. High traffic doesn’t earn you revenue unless those visitors convert. If your rates are dropping, you’re overdue for a conversion rate optimization (CRO) analysis. Make sure you have a coherent, compelling sales funnel to guide visitors toward purchasing pages and deploy it sitewide. Check that your CTAs are strong, well-worded, and situated effectively in copy.
Traffic Sources and Social Media Referrals
Where is your traffic coming from? What is your backlink strategy? Are you utilizing A/B testing on email blasts and social media posts? A careful analysis of your referral sources can help you understand if your content is connecting well with audiences on other platforms.
New Visitor Sessions
It’s important to separate this metric from site sessions as a whole. It’s excellent if you have returning traffic, but are you reaching new audiences as well? Is your site design intuitive, accessible, and welcoming? On the flipside, an unusually high number of new visitors on a new webpage could mean that your SEO strategy is targeting the wrong audience.
Average Session Duration
This is most closely tied to site navigation, load and scroll speed, and visual factors that contribute to a positive user experience (UX). If this is on a downward trend, it may be time for a UX audit. It can be an indicator that visitors are not engaged with the site.
Average Time on Page
Quality content is a factor here, but average time on page is more closely related to your keyword strategy. Do your keywords match the user’s intent? If not, they’ll bounce sooner. Slight refreshes to content often help with this. People like to see dynamic sites offering more engaging information.
Bounce Rate
Taken in isolation, a high bounce rate by itself isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes a bounce just means that a user found what they were looking for. Look at which pages are seeing the most exits and how bounce rates change over time. If the site’s bounce rate is increasing, you likely have some UX issues to address. Your exit rate should be high on final pages in the conversion funnel (such as a check-out confirmation) or informational pages such as blogs. If you have product or category pages as your top exit pages, something is wrong. Sometimes third-party content (such as advertisements) or external links opening in new tabs can contribute to higher bounce rates.
Returning Visitor Sessions
A strong ad retargeting strategy or a successful email campaign can help boost these numbers. If you see a slow decline here, it may be due to your promotion and customer engagement efforts more than your SEO strategy.
No Overnight Results: Digital Marketing Is Like a Garden
Here’s the most important point to remember about SEO: It can take between 3 to 6 months for early SEO improvements to begin showing clear results, and this timeline can vary based on a wide variety of factors. In other words, an increase in page views in January is likely due to the work you put in during the late summer or fall months. Digital marketing is a lot like a garden: It needs ongoing care and management (i.e., a strong and always evolving strategy), or it will fall short of its potential.
If you work with a marketing agency for a few months and don’t see much in the way of results, you may wonder, “Why am I not earning more sales?” That’s a fair question, but it’s not the correct way to look at it. If you plant tomatoes on April 15, you won’t be eating them on May 1, but this doesn’t mean they’re not coming. You need to give your strategy the appropriate amount of time to see results.
What About PPC?
Unlike SEO work that builds organic search traffic and referrals, a good PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaign actually can drive traffic to your site immediately. The problem is that if your site isn’t delivering on those people’s expectations, they’ll bounce. That’s money wasted.
To get the most value out of your PPC spending, you need a good website UX prepared for those visitors.
Don’t think of PPC as an alternative to SEO. Different businesses have different needs, but generally speaking, you need both of these. We offer PPC services for exactly that reason. It’s the same reason we offer web design services. It’s all part of the bigger whole of an effective digital marketing strategy.
SEO work is about so much more than just getting keywords on the page. It’s about creating and deploying clear, compelling digital content that targets the right people in the right way.
A Good Strategy Follows the Data
A good question to ask is: “What is the data saying?” That is, what are your site metrics showing? What’s stagnant and what’s changing? Which pages are ranking, and is their page authority rising?
At Coalition Technologies, we build and refine our digital marketing strategies, forecasts, and timelines for clients by using good data and lots of it. Our clients pay for top-quality data analysis and strategic interpretation of website performance, as well as the creative and technical skills to apply the lessons learned from the data in an effort to see top results.
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COLLEEN MCALEAVEY
Kratora
Director of CRM
Roku, IncGet a Free Site Performance Evaluation
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