START WITH WHERE YOU MAKE MONEY

•  Follow the money back to your website. Where is it coming in?

•  Usually suspects are the contact form for lead generation websites, and of course purchases on more classically eCommerce websites.

•  Exposure, blog post reads, and shares are great extra’s but with the exception of Affiliate Marketer’s they don’t generally pay the bills.

But we’re just getting started, here’s how to get down to the Key Performace Indicators that matter for you.

Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

REVIEW WHAT’S COMMONLY CONSIDERED IMPORTANT •  Audience Engagement: Viewers time on page and pages

accessed, this is generally where we add more actions like clicking a call to action button, buy now, or submitting a contact form.

•  Traffic Sources // Social Media Traffic

•  Site Content Trends (Behavior): What pages and posts are being viewed the most? How can you use this to inform new content creation, and tweaking existing content.

•  Funnel Visualization: By seeing how people are traveling through the site currently it will allow you better patch holes and refine your strategy.

But we’re just getting started, here’s how to get down to the Key Performance Indicators that matter for you.

Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

TALK WITH ALL SITE STAKEHOLDERS

Before you start rocking on creating conversions in Google Analytics, talk to all the people that will care what is considered a conversion on the website. This might include other senior leadership of the business or anyone that is involved in key strategies of the digital marketing for the organization.

Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

HONE IN ON A TYPE OF CONVERSION Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

•  URL Destination

•  Visit Duration

•  Pages Per Visit

•  Events

Conversions through downloads, video plays, specific links, and button clicks can be tracked as ‘events.’

SET UP GOAL TRACKING Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

1.  Set up a post purchase page for your goal. Like /thank-you that someone is directed to after the sign up for your newsletter, make a purchase or send a contact form.

2.  After this, setting up goals in Google Analytics is a fairly straightforward process once you know how to do it. Have no fear!

3.  Log into your Google Analytics account and go to the website profile for your site.

4.  Click on the “edit” button to the right of your site link. 5.  You should now see an area if you scroll down a little call

only “goals”. Click on the first link on the right to “add goal”.

SET UP GOAL TRACKING Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

6. Once there, name your goal. I named mine “subscribers”. Under Goal Type, select “URL Destination”.

7. After that, you should be given more options to input your “thank you” page information.

8. Under “match type” select “exact match” and input your goal url as “/thank-you/” if your whole url was http://www.mysite.com/thank-you/

9. If you want to track sales, you can additionally input the value of your average sale too (win!).

ESTABLISH A BASELINE FOR YOUR KPI’S Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

Form a baseline by continuing to watch your key performance indicators. Perhaps you’ve determined overall traffic, keywords ranked for, and contact form submissions are you’re most important numbers and you have. After looking at analytics you’re first month looks like this •  7k unique visitors this past month •  Your site is being ranked for 1000 keywords

•  You had 10 contact form submissions this past month

•  Bonus: 3 of those were qualified leads.

DETERMINE A NEXT STEP GOAL & ONE YEAR, MORE AMBITIOUS GOAL

Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

A 3 Month ‘Next Step’ Goal, might be your best bet to have something real and actionable to start shooting for. •  Let’s say you might decide to shoot for 8k unique visitors in 3

months, 1,100 keywords, and 13 contact form submissions. Start making changes! More solid posts and/or landing pages, more social promotion and more interlinking. Perhaps the visual design needs some improvement to increase conversions. •  Incremental and realistic goals will always be better than sky-

high unattainable ones. For one year, you might shoot for 12k unique visitors, 1,500 keywords, and 20 contact form submissions in one year.

TRACK YOUR IMPROVEMENTS Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics

By determining these key goals and writing them down, you’re closer than most to making constructive change on your website. This is a great first step. The next steps will be creating the content to serve your audiences needs, increasing the promotion for your best content and improving your design for conversions.

THANK YOU! Way to Establish Key Metrics to Measure with Analytics