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Technology
Measuring Metrics
A look at the importance of understanding the analytics behind the web.
By Ben Smithee
The old saying goes, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Traditionally in the jewelry industry, key business measurements center around carat weight and cost per ounce. But the digitalization of today’s marketing efforts, communications and sales brings about new challenges, which often leaves business owners with a feeling of uncertainty about measuring their digital efforts. It is essential to determine the key metrics, starting with web analytics. Google Analytics is one of many applications that can be used. Web analytics is not a catchall solution, but for most business owners, it provides the basics to monitor and evaluate their digital efforts.
Acquisition: Key metrics include traffic sources, user reports and keywords. This information can tie back to see which marketing efforts are sending the most traffic to your website. Is it social media? Email? Banners? Online ads?
Audience Overview: While social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, both provide their own audience overview statistics, it’s still valuable to see the overview of site visitors. This metric provides information on screen sizes, browsing time/day, browser choice, etc., allowing you to further optimize your site design and marketing budget across various channels. Given the impact of social media, the majority of the industry is focusing its time and advertising dollars on Facebook. Here is a primer on the basics of how to analyze marketing efforts on this platform:
Audience Profile: Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook allows you to monitor your audience profile directly in the Facebook Insights tool, which gives a robust overview of demographic data about your audience.
Likes: “Likes” are valuable as you need an audience to speak to and you want to grow its size. However, “likes” do not always equate to business growth, if you are not engaging with users effectively.
Reach: This is a more important metric, measuring the number of different individuals your content reaches over time. Facebook’s algorithm typically shows your content to less than 1 percent of your audience, so organically, you want to maximize reach and then supplement with paid content, such as boosting popular posts and paid ads.
Impressions: While Reach measures the number of individuals, Impressions measures how many times a piece of content has been seen or consumed. For advertisements, spend is measured in cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
Action: Ultimately, a business’s goal is often to drive activity and action from Facebook to a website, shopping cart, email acquisition or other action. This can be monitored through Facebook Insights.
These measurements are tools that you should use to maximize your online and social media efforts. Understanding the statistics provides a strong foundation for new and revised strategies to grow your business.Article from the Rapaport Magazine - December 2016. To subscribe click here.
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