Managing an SEO or PPC program for your business is a good start, but how do you make sense of the metrics of your website performance? Measuring your website performance can be accomplished in a variety of ways; it can be tracked within the platform you advertise on or through a digital creative agency.
Today, we’re breaking down the most popular SEO and PPC tactics to help you determine which metrics will show your boss how well your marketing strategy is performing.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves everything that happens on your website. This includes landing pages, blog posts, meta data, hyperlinks, and more. You have more control over what happens on your website, but it can be harder to tell if what you’re doing is working when it doesn’t directly relate to conversions.
Technical
The first step of any good SEO program is getting your website optimization in tip-top shape. This may mean that you need to get your SSL certificate, build a mobile-friendly version, increase page speed, or more. It can also involve on-site technical errors such as missing, multiple, or duplicate H1 headings. Your SEO program manager will be able to discover these technical errors, fix many of them for you, or guide you on how to fix them yourself, if necessary. To compare metrics, run a technical analysis on your website, fix the errors, and run the analysis again. For example, page speed will improve when you reduce the file sizes of your images.
Content
A piece of content that is meant to sell something is easier to track because you can look at your conversion rates and sales. However, a robust content strategy will include pieces that are not meant to drive conversions, but rather to inform and educate readers. How do you know if a piece like that is doing well? Check your Google Analytics and see how many page views it gets per day. Notice where the traffic is coming from. Are people sharing links to it on their social media profiles? Are they clicking to other pages on your website after reading that one? Or perhaps they are signing up for your email newsletter, downloading a white paper, or watching a webinar. They may not be making a purchase, but they are still actively engaging with your brand, which is a sign of success.
Rankings
The best way to tell if your website is performing in regards to SEO, is to compare your website rankings to one year ago. Why one year? Well, this allows for seasonal fluctuations in traffic. For example, if you run a wedding related business, you are naturally going to see more traffic in the winter and spring months when people are planning for their big day. If you try to compare July’s slow season to February’s busy season, it can be discouraging, but it’s all part of the nature of business. Look at metrics such as number of keywords ranking, number of keywords on page one, and search volume for important keywords.
PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) involves the ads that you pay for on various internet websites that lead back to your site for a conversion. These metrics may be more easily tracked than SEO, but can be harder to control.
Paid Search – Bing Ads & Google Ads
Monitoring the success of a paid search campaign may seem pretty easy. Did the user click on your ad and then buy something? If so, great! If not, it’s time to reconsider. When you log in to your PPC account in Google, there are many other things to look at to determine whether an ad is working or not. You can start with your quality score. Is your ad good enough to compete with others? Then, look at how many times your ad was served up to users, how many times they clicked on it, and how many people bought something from there. You can also find all these metrics in Bing Ads.
Paid Social – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & YouTube Ads
The beauty of today’s social media advertising is that you can narrow your ad’s target audience to previous site visitors or competitor’s customers to maximize the ad reach. The ultimate test of success is, again, conversion. But you must also consider that this is a more relaxed form of advertising since customers are not actively seeking you out. They may have been casually scrolling Instagram, not ready to make a purchase decision. Instead, look at how often a person viewed your ad before making the purchase.
Remarketing
Sometimes, a user needs more time to make a decision so remarketing campaigns are helpful because they keep your brand top-of-mind for the buyer. To know how well this strategy is working for you, look at the first time someone visited your website. How many times did they come back? How often? Did they end up purchasing something? These metrics will help you understand if your remarketing campaign is performing well and if not, where you can improve it.
Boost Website Performance with L7 Advertising
A high-performing website takes a lot of strategizing and trial-and-error. When it’s time to prove yourself, look for some of the above metrics to guide your evaluation.
When you’re ready to increase your website performance, get in touch with L7 Advertising. We can run an analysis and look at these metrics to evaluate your website performance and make recommendations to improve your overall marketing strategy.