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Posted by Monish Vora
July 18, 2013
You need to check the KPI or the Key Performance Indicators in order to measure the performance of a campaign with respect to its goals. This article presents the most important KPI’s for a website from the perspective of online marketing and how to monitor the same in Google Analytics.
Reporting, monitoring, data analyzing task is the daily routine for almost all online marketing professionals and webmasters. This helps them in making decisions regarding the optimization of the performance of the websites. A lot of information could be found within the charts, pivots and web metrics, which reveals new ways of optimizing the strategy.
Sometimes, all the metrics, numbers, and statistics may become very confusing. Which ratios need to be taken into account during various analysis? Which should be considered the most important stats? These are the questions that need to be answered while determining the KPI. All these questions will be answered with this post by understanding the goals and which KPI’s to be considered.
Setting up specific and measurable goals is an important stage before defining any Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Depending on the type of website, it could have many varied goals. The most common goal for any e-commerce website would be to increase the number of sales, the number of items in the WishList, the average transaction value, and many more. In the case of websites with content, the common goals would be to increase the number of subscribers, media consumption, online game players, video viewers, and many more.
KPIs are:
• Success Indicators
• Presentable through rates
• Comparison providers
• Dependent on the industry and the kind of the website
1. Conversion Rate: This ratio shows us how many visitors have taken the desired action and have converted into leads or even customers.
2. Goals Conversion Rate: Displays how many visitors have reached, at the least, one of the setup goals with the help of the Google Analytics service.
3. Type of Users (user-defined): This is a variable that helps in defining the specific types of users who have completed a specific action or a goal on the website.
4. Bounce Rate & Time on Site: These are the 2 most useful Key Performance Indicators which indicate whether your website was successful in providing the visitors with what they are looking for or if they have left your site immediately after entering it. These metrics could be found in Google Analytics inside the Visitors section. It is also very useful to focus on various channels/sources of traffic helping you to evaluate all the factors.
5. Type of Sources: This is a complex report which segments the traffic on the basis of specific sources and various mediums such as Referral sites, Search Engines, Direct, E-mail, or some campaigns. The focus is not only on the number of visitors but also on the quality of the traffic.
1. Traffic of Non-branded keywords: This is a common Keywords Traffic report which is filtered to exclude those with brand name combinations.
2. Traffic generated by specific terms: This segmentation helps in evaluating the long or short tail keyword strategy. Commonly, the keywords traffic report from Google Analytics returns the result with too many combinations. These filters help in breaking down the list of keywords and only focus on those which contain specific terms or you could also check 2-3 word phrases or for those terms, which satisfy a specific rule. The regular expressions which are given in the advanced filter will help in generating such a report.
3. Bounce rate per keyword: This could be easily found on the table displaying the keywords traffic report. Focus on the “bounce rate” column, which displays the average bounce rate per keyword.
4. Keyword Ranking: Check out how much traffic you are getting from each keyword ranking at the top and see if you need to make some changes to your SEO strategy by concentrating on more popular or those terms which are targeted by visitors.
5. New Vs Returning Visitors: This metric shows the loyalty of your existing followers and gives you a count of how many new visitors are you attracting to your website. Depending on your industry and the type of your website and various other factors, it is necessary to analyze the behavior of your visitors. This report is available under the Visitors section of Google Analytics.
1. Social Media Interactions: You need to use the event tracking or the virtual pageviews KPI to monitor the number of visitors who interact with the social media profile. The customer could visit the social media profiles by clicking on the buttons provided on your website or they could even like, tweet, or share your pages, and the report of this interaction could prove to be very helpful.
2. Media Consumption: This KPI keeps a check on how the content is consumed by the users on the website. It also focuses on how many of them have read the posts, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and many other indicators. This report is given in the content section. It also requires you to set up some special tracking mechanisms in case of videos or interactive flash animations.
3. Contact/Subscribe: It is extremely useful to know why, when, how, and how many visitors are contacting the website. This could be easily tracked by the use of goal tracking or event tracking in the “thank you” pages.
1. Cost per Transaction: This metric is useful in measuring the cost of promotion per transaction for some specific campaigns such as banners, Ads newsletters, and others. It measures the amount of money to be spent on each campaign to generate a single transaction. This is a very important metric when you want to determine your advertising budget and it proves to be very useful in the decision-making process.
2. Average transaction value: The up-selling and cross-selling efficiency is determined through this KPI. This report could be found in the Ecommerce section of Google Analytics.
3. Conversion Rate per Medium: You may opt for various channels for your conversions. This KPI helps in monitoring the conversion rate of each medium which helps majorly in distinguishing between the various mediums. The report is found in the All Traffic Sources menu when using the option “Medium” view.
1. Transactions distribution per Country: This report provides insights to distinguish between the nationality of the customers. It could be found under the Visitors Section under the Map Overlay Report. This information could be found in the “e-commerce” tab and it shows you the distribution of the transaction by country/territory.
2. Bounce rate distribution per Country: This info is found on the map overlay table and it displays the distribution of bounce rate on the basis of country/territory.
These are the basic Key Performance Indicators that are extremely useful for measuring success and also comparing various data. A serious internet marketer will never make a move without working on these metrics before designing an online marketing campaign.
So, which is your set of Key Performance Indicators? Do let us know.
