You’ve got your social media strategy and tactics in place. You’re measuring everything you can: tweets, retweets, followers, friends, shares, visits, bounce rate, etc. But what do all these numbers tell you about how successful your strategy and tactics are? What if you’re measuring the wrong things? What’s the impact to your social media strategy?
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Aug
16
2010
Choosing the Right KPIs for Your Business
I’m often asked what KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important for understanding how a business is doing online. My answer is always “It depends.” There’s not a set of KPIs that works for every business. Choosing the right KPIs for your business means understanding your business, your goals and what you’re trying to do online. KPIs are the metrics which tell you whether you’re moving closer towards your goal and objectives (see KPIs vs Metrics for more details).
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Aug
12
2010
Is Exit Rate a Useful Metric?
Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages. The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point. What if they came, bought something and then left? That’s what you want them to do. Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave. While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful? Yes and no. Let’s look at it in more detail…
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Oct
15
2009
More Than ROI – Measuring Social Media Success
A lot of business people may have trouble with the basic metrics for their websites: pageviews, visits, unique visits, etc. (hits usually get thrown around), but when you talk about how to measure social media success, they look a little scared. Social media (when used well) is a great tool for connecting directly to customers in a way that’s never been affordable for most of us. We can have conversations, we can get our ideas out there and we can see what people are saying about us. So how to measure all that?
Feb
02
2009
Are You Measuring the Right Metrics?
Avinash Kaushik had a great post this morning about the different types of keywords visitors use to reach your site, what their intentions are, and how to measure keyword effectiveness based on where customers are in the sales funnel. This got me thinking about metrics in general. I often hear people complain that they are not getting enough hits to their website (which is a very outdated metric in any case). But when you ask them what goal/objective they are trying to measure, they usually cannot tie the two together.
From both a business and sanity point of view, it is imperative that you use metrics that will give you the information you need. For example, if you are trying to measure whether or not your website is giving you leads, the number of hits isn’t the right number. You need a way to collect leads from your website, or some way to tell if people were there (an offer unique to the website) to measure lead generation from your website.
So before you start pouring over your web and advertising statistics, take a moment to figure out exactly what it is that you’re trying to find out. Then decide what metric will help you answer that question. Matching up metrics and goals/questions/objectives will give you much more reliable informaton – saving time and resources and allowing you to focus on efforts that are actually working for your business.
(photo by aussiegall @ Flickr CC)
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