The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

This is a guest post by Zeke Camusio, founder of The Outsourcing Company.

Most tracking tools take pride in how much information they provide. Although some advanced reports are extremely useful, it’s important to focus our attention on the most important metrics; the ones that make all the difference.

What’s Your Goal?
The first thing you need to figure out is your website’s goal and how it can contribute to grow your company within your business model. Are you trying to sell products online? Do you want people to sign up for your free newsletter, build rapport and then offer them specials once in a while? Whatever your business model is, you need to figure out the role of your website in it.

Primary and Secondary Metrics
Once you’ve figure out what your goal is, it’ll be easy to understand what metrics are more important to your business. Conversion rate is almost always the most important one, whatever a conversion on your website happens to be. But then you need to figure out what other metrics are important to you. For example, if you have a car dealership and you offer interactive presentations for each of your cars, the time your visitors spend looking at cars on your site is very important, because people usually do some research before buying a car and the fact that someone spend 10 minutes looking at the photos and reading about the features of a new car of yours is a really good sign.

Also, keep in mind that for a lot of industries, people do research online and then they buy offline. If that’s your case, interaction with your website might be your most important metric.

Some of the Most Important Metrics
Total unique visitors: The number of people that visit your website every day.

Traffic sources: It shows where your traffic is coming from. This is a great metric if you are trying (and you should) to measure how much traffic each of your campaigns is sending you and how each campaign is converting.

Visitor’s location: This will give you a great insight as far as where your visitors are located and what the conversion rate is like for each country. For example, you can see that visitors from India don’t convert at all and visitors from the UK convert very well.

Keywords: This metric shows you what keywords people found you through and how each of those keywords convert for you. For example, you can see that people that search for “car dealership in Seattle” convert a lot better than people that search for “car reviews”.

Behavioral metrics: These are the metrics that teach you about people’s buying habits in your industry. You should watch, pay attention and learn. Some of these are: most viewed pages, time spent on site, navigation path and most common search terms using your site’s search feature.

Bounce rate: It shows you how many people leave your website right away after they arrive. Keep a close eye on this one and find out why people are leaving your website so fast.

Exit pages: This report will show you the last page of your website people visit before leaving. For example, they might leave your site through the contact page, which could mean that they were looking for your phone number.

Entrance pages: It shows you what content people find you through. Find out what this is and create more similar content.

Value per visit: You need to know how much you are paying for visitors coming from each of your campaigns. You also need to know the conversion rate for each campaign and the cost per conversion, segmented by campaigns. This way, you can make sure that you only invest money in campaigns that have a positive ROI.

Conclusion
Figure out what your goal is and what metrics are important to you. Track them over time, experiment and look at the trends. Try to understand your stats and the most important metrics. If you know why people buy and how they behave online, you have a much better chance to give people what they want and increase your website’s revenues.

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur. His sixth endeavor, The Outsourcing Company, is an Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, Colo. and New York. Zeke writes an entrepreneurship and Internet marketing blog called Let’s Do It! Check it out at www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog.