Besides your basic metrics, Visitors/Revenue/Conversions/AOV
and some of your mid level basics, Revenue by Source, Cart Abandonment, etc.,
the below metrics should be on your radar to track monthly or quarterly. You
may be missing opportunities in your marketing plan in 2012 if you don’t add
these to your list.
1. Mobile
Visits and Revenues – Mobile analytics are available on Google, Omniture,
Coremetrics and all the major web analytics platforms at this point.
Ensuring you undestand the % of total traffic and total sales can bring to
light the need to go mobile if you haven’t already. If you have gone
mobile, be sure you are getting your money’s worth by evaluating revenues
and conversions and what products people are buying.
2. Search
Visits and Revenues – Search data is again available on all website
analytics platforms and rarely utilized. Talk about easy and low hanging
fruit to find searches that occur yet don’t convert. I have found this to
be one of the most underutilized pieces of data available and yet when
utilized, the steps to improve search are easy and highly actionable.
3. Top Visited and Exited Pages – Do you know where your customers really are in
your website and where they exit? Knowing this allows you to optimize
pages that matter not just overall aggregate changes that you hope will
bring the whole shebang of revenue up. You can do those too but given you
can find your hottest pages by views and exits (and bounce rate too), you
can evaluate it’s index value or revenue allocated to that page and review
a heat map of that report (if you can’t, get CrazyEgg now), there’s no
reason not to make immediate impact on the top line with this information.
4. Checkout
(Not Cart) Abandonments – you might know how many people abandoned an item
in the cart but do you know how many people actually abandon your site
from the checkout page? Knowing this data point and seeing if there have
been improvements or declines in the last 12 to 24 months can be a strong
indicator of making changes on those checkout pages. Having reporting
tapping into where errors are made on these pages as well as where people
stop in the process are great metrics to have. However there’s excellent
information out there on best practices for checkout pages so start with
those, ensure you have a guest checkout method (unless you are up there
with Amazon), and don’t require information from a customer that isn’t
pertinent to the sale itself. You can always get that information later.
Support returning customers and new customers and don’t ever force a
customer a direction they don’t want to go. For example, returning
customers might want to save their data by creating an account or they may
want to use guest checkout each and every time they come to your site.
Paypal and other payment method users don’t want to waste their time
entering information on your site when they already have it on Paypal –
ensure they don’t need to waste time because if you don’t, they will.
5. Product Cart Added Versus Ordered Rates – You may know how many Widget A, B and Cs
have sold but do you know how many were added to the cart and then sold.
There’s a two step process here and if you break it down just right, you
can pinpoint better factors in either strong order rates or weak order
rates. If you know a customer added a product to their cart but didn’t
order, you can narrow that down to a shipping, promotion code, checkout
error or some sort of external uncontrollable reason. If you know that a
product has a low add to cart rate but a high conversion rate, you know
that this product might be tough to find in the process of shopping, price
is too high or the content isn’t clear. Break this two step product
conversion process down and you’re on your way to making the right
changes.
6. Social Traffic & Revenues – Odds are you are tracking
your likes/followers but you aren’t tracking visitors and revenues from facebook
and twitter. You might not think Facebook/Twitter should be utilized as a direct
marketing channel but you are among the few at this point. Soft selling is key
but selling is an absolute must. New Products, Discounts, Exclusive Offers and Sweepstakes
are all opportunities to get your facebook and twitter followers to the site and
create some revenue. Be sure to add tracking to your links and track these channels
often. Track these channels daily or weekly to tie posts and marketing efforts
to revenues.
As always, I'm available at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail.
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