With every aspect of digital marketing, analytics will be an essential tool. Analyzing data from your website and social media pages is the only way to know that your message is reaching your intended audience. However, with all the analytics tools available to marketers today, you might not know what the most important figures are for directing your future marketing efforts. For example, many business owners get hung up on the number of followers their Facebook and Twitter accounts have. Looking at followers alone doesn’t provide an accurate picture of customer engagement on social media. This is an example of vanity metrics at work.
Vanity metrics are numbers you’ll see in your site analytics that seem important but just don’t tell the whole story. If you’re using these figures in isolation, you are likely to focus on the wrong parts of an effective marketing strategy. You won’t really know how to engage existing and potential customers on an ongoing basis; you’ll only know how to capture their attention briefly before they might move on and forget about your brand.
Followers vs. Engagement
Having a lot of followers on social media is great. However, it doesn’t reflect how much those followers are seeing and interacting with your social accounts. Even if you have a growing number of followers, you must look to things like likes, shares, and comments to understand whether followers are reading your posts and how they are reacting to them. Social media insights on Twitter and Facebook also let you see what topics your followers are currently most interested in, so you can stay on top of these trends and continue to be relevant to your followers.
Page Views vs. Bounce Rate
Counting page views is a lot like counting followers. It’s a shallow assessment of your site’s performance. Sure, a lot of people may click over to your website, but how many of them stay on your site and click over to other pages? How many simply leave right away? This is something that your bounce rate can tell you. Another valuable metric to consider alongside page views is social shares. If people are sharing links to your blog on social media, then this is a sign that your content is working for you, not against you.
Subscribers vs. Conversions
As a business owner, you know that first impressions are not everything. After all, a good chunk of your client base is probably returning customers. So, if you’re only looking at the current number of subscribers you have to a newsletter or how many page views you get on your website, you aren’t really understanding how much of that traffic is converting or remaining active. If you have 100 subscribers, but only those who joined recently have visited your site to make a purchase or opened up an email from you, then you need to refocus on return business more than new leads.
When you work with a professional content marketing team, you can rest assured that the full picture of your site metrics will be considered in shaping your content strategy. With Pennington Creative, you can always count on a professional, tested approach that will let your business grow and thrive. Contact us today for a discovery call and site audit.
