There are two types of metrics: hard and soft. Hard metrics revolve around actionable items, typically, sales, such as number of purchases, but it can also be a number of, for example, event attendees. On the other side of the coin are soft metrics. These measure the lightest forms of customer engagements, such as web page visits or site clicks. These may not make the collective hearts of your sales department beat faster, but they do mine because these soft metrics are an excellent indicator of whether your digital campaign–online ads, for example, or your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts–are capable of creating the desired result. And, even better, these metrics can be used to understand, tweak, and continuously improve your those results.
So what are those soft metrics? I thought you’d never ask …
- Website traffic: This tells you how many people have seen pages on your website. It is not a powerful number, but it does indicate possible interest in your site.
- Traffic by Channels: This tells you where traffic is coming from. This is much more useful than the previous metric because it helps you fine-tune spend on ads and content creation.
- Unique vs. Returning visitors: Determine if your goal is to create unique visitors or return visitors. If, for example, you are selling something cheap (where customers typically make snap decisions), you aim for unique visitors–they come, they buy, they go, rinse and repeat with a new person. But if you are selling something costly (where customers return to your site again and again because a purchase that costs thousands is not a one-and-done decision), then you want returning visitors. Then check the metrics for individual pages to pinpoint precisely what type of visitor you are getting and where they are going. And review sales numbers to put this information into context. For example, if you are selling a cheap item, and your metrics show that you are getting the traffic, but the sales numbers are low, this indicates that the page, or the offer, is not be resonating with your target market.
- Bounce and Exit rates: These are often confused: bounce refers to how many visitors leave your site after viewing only one page, exit is how many visitors leave a specific page—they may have viewed others on their way to that page. Of the two, exit is more valuable in diagnosing performance in conversion funnels.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): This tells you how many people have clicked on a call-to-action button or link. It gives you a sense of how successful your content (such as an ad) is, but it is no indicator of success towards your goal.
- Session duration: This shows how long users spend on your site or page. Like returning visitors, this is one of those metrics that’s more valuable viewed by page rather than by site. So, what’s best—long visits or short visits? And what’s the benchmark for time? The answer is relative. Are you selling low-cost, impulse-purchase items? Thirty seconds or less is a good time on page. Are you selling something worth hundreds of dollars? A longer stay on page is justified, particularly if there are a lot of details to view.
- Page scroll rate: This tells you how far down your page visitors scrolled. Like with session duration, the optimal scroll percentage depends on what’s on the page. If you publish articles (such as with a blog) or have lengthy product pages, you want to see visitors scroll 75% or more. Page scroll rate is not a metric that is enabled by default, but if you enable it manually (your web developer can help) it’s a part of most major analytics suites such as Google Analytics.
