Critical lead generation metricsLead generation sites are focused on getting people to contact them. Examples include real estate agents, attorneys, insurance companies, and web design agencies. Profit per order (total profit / orders): This is just as important for lead generation sites in figuring out the profitability of your SEO campaign. In fact, lead-generation sites typically need a higher profit per order than e-commerce sites to turn a profit because there is a lot more that needs to happen after the lead comes in and before they get the sale. Profit per order is expressed in dollars: 'We averaged $860 in profit per order in September'. Conversions (inquiries and leads): This is an expression of the number of people who are moving toward doing business with you. It's not as definitive a metric for lead generation sites as it is for e-commerce because sales do not necessarily follow inquiries. However, it is a bellwether of future business. If leads are up then your pipeline is fuller and that means more sales in the coming months. It's expressed in a raw number: "We had 50 phone calls from our web site in March' or "We added 50 new leads to our pipeline from our web site in March'. Conversion rate (leads / visits) Measures the value of the traffic that's coming to your site. If 1000 people visit and you get 50 leads then you have a 5% conversion rate on your web site. Continue to track those leads through your internal systems and you'll get to a real conversion rate. Say you made ten sales. That means your effective conversion rate is only 1% (10 sales / 1000 visits). Conversion rate is a percentage: 'The recent redesign increased our web site conversion rate from 4% to 5%'. Web leads are differentWeb leads are not like other leads and there should be different processes in place to sell to them. For example, people who find you online may be earlier in the buying cycle than those that are referred by a friend. In this case, you might put a drip campaign in place for your Web leads to keep in touch with them and help move them through the buying cycle. Critical ad-driven metricsAd-driven sites are a breed apart. They want eyeballs and lots of them. The more people who view their site, the more value it has to an advertiser. Particularly, stats like visitors and pageviews are most important; don't ignore quality of visitors, though. If your advertisers aren't seeing sales then ultimately you're going to have a difficult time generating revenue or you may be forced into receiving a percentage of sales, which is difficult to track. Typical ad-driven sites are content focused news sites, sports, how-to sites, and gossip are all popular. Number of visitors: This is the raw number of unique visitors to your web site. It's a great metric to take to advertisers, especially if your visitors tend to be in a particular niche. But, counting the number of visitors that visit your site is like counting the number of people who walk by the front of a retail store. If they don't engage then you don't have a business. Make sure you track additional metrics like Bounce Rate and Page Views to add some gravitas to your visitors metric. Careful that you don't skew your visitors metric Visitors are one of the easiest metrics to accidentally make a mess of. Some typical examples are that your employees have your web site set as the start page when they open a new browser window; your HR department posted a job on Craigslist so potential hires are checking you out; or your webmaster is updating the site and reloading again and again. All of these will create spikes in your traffic and skew your numbers. Some of them can be addressed with the Google Analytics module by turning off tracking of registered users or admins, but it's nearly impossible to remove all the skewed numbers. Don't rely on the absolute numbers look for trends in the number of visitors. Total pageviews: For ad-driven sites, this is the number. It measures the number of total pages of your site that were viewed. It's a raw number: 'We had 97,000 pageviews last month'. Just like visitors, this metric can be easily misunderstood. A high number of pageviews could be an indicator that your site is popular, or it could mean that it's difficult for visitors to find what they're looking for. It's useful just be sure you investigate what it means. Average pageviews per visit (total pageviews / visits): measures how many pages each visitor sees. If you're an ad-driven site, the easiest way to increase your ad revenue is to increase this statistic. If you can increase it from two average pageviews per visit to three average pageviews per visit, with the same amount of traffic you'd then see 50% more ad revenue. 'Since adding links to related content at the bottom of each node with the Acquia Solr Search module, we've seen our average pageviews per visit go from 3 to 4.5'. You might be also interested in: |
