8 Essential Online Marketing Metrics You Must Track

Do you look at your website and wonder why your website traffic is so low? After all, you love how the website looks, and you visit it daily!

But to really build traffic to your website, you have to pay attention to the online marketing metrics. 

These metrics will help you determine your successes and failures with your online marketing campaigns.

These will help you tweak your marketing strategy to help build your website traffic for the future.

Here are the key marketing metrics you need to keep an eye on:

1. Overall Traffic

The first of the website metrics to look at is your overall traffic. This is the number of visitors who visit your website during a given period.

You should start by analyzing how many users visit your website each month.

On the first day of each month, look at how many users visited your website. Track this for three months at a time, and record this information.

Did your traffic increase, decrease, or remain stagnant? This will help you determine what you’re doing right or wrong.

Keep this information at bay for developing your marketing strategy.

You want to make sure that your website traffic increases each month. Assign a percentage as your goal — i.e., 5% increase, 10% increase, etc.

2. Organic Search

This refers to internet users finding your website through search engines.

If you find that this metric is low, then it means that you need to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

This means you’ll have to use a set of best practices to increase your website’s visibility on search engine results pages.

The ultimate goal should be to always be on the first page and as close to the top as possible.

3. Direct Traffic

This is word-of-mouth marketing. If you wish to improve upon this, you have to discuss your website in-person. Mention it at any networking event you attend.

Print out flyers, business cards, and stickers that you can distribute. These will have your website’s information on them.

4. Referral Traffic

This traffic occurs when other internet sources link to your website.

For example, are there backlinks on other websites that refer to your website? Is there a popular email newsletter that includes links to your website? 

The only way to improve your referral traffic is to build credibility with your website. 

There are several tools for link building that can help you work towards establishing your website’s credibility.

As your website becomes an authority within its niche, similar websites will automatically refer to your website. 

Think about the websites you consider an authority in their niche. You would likely refer them to others.

For example, let’s suppose you ran a website about digital nomadism. You would refer to links to other websites in this niche. 

You’d link to Pieter Levels, Nomad Capitalist, or Traveling With Kristin as an example. These are all authoritative websites within the digital nomad niche.

5. Social Media

Social media is one of the most popular methods of driving traffic to your website.

Make sure you keep records of the visitor trends from your social media platforms. You also want to break down which platforms are the most successful.

You might receive enormous traffic from Facebook. But you might notice that your Twitter traffic continues to plummet each month. 

Make sure you have a separate section in your marketing strategy for each social media platform.

This will be one of the best ways to engage with your audience and direct traffic to your website.

6. Look at Each Page

You want to look at each page to determine their success in attracting visitors. For example, let’s suppose you run a website that sells services.

Let’s say you have no problem directing traffic to your homepage.

Each month, this number continues to grow. But, conversely, each month, your Services page continues to plummet.

This means that your visitors don’t wish to engage with your website. You can expect traffic to the homepage to plummet soon.

You should use a service such as attribution heatmaps to analyze the content on any page that’s lagging in traffic.

For example, you might notice that your infographic on your services doesn’t garner any attention.

You might want to consider replacing this with text or an embedded video.

It’s crucial that you know the metrics for each page. If even one page lags behind, they might drag the other pages down with them.

7. Who’s New? Who’s Been Here Before?

One of the most crucial marketing metrics is to analyze your new visitors and your returning visitors.

You want to make sure you have an abundance of both each month. New visitors means that you’ll always have potential customers.

But without returning visitors, your website traffic will plummet even if you experience months of growth.

As a general rule, you can always expect there to be more new visitors than returning visitors. Your goal should be to have 90% new visitors each month and 10% returning visitors.

For new visitors, you have to include strategies on how to reach new target audiences.

For returning visitors, you have to create strategies on how to regularly communicate with them. Regular communication is what builds loyalty among your visitors.

8. Session Duration

This refers to how much time a visitor spends on your website and on your different pages.

As with your website traffic, you want to record the session duration over a period of at least 3 months at a time. Analyze if the session duration is increasing, decreasing, or stagnating.

If it’s decreasing or stagnating, you have to create a strategy to increase it. As session duration diminishes, you might lose visitors altogether.

Often, session duration is tied to a lack of engagement. You want to make sure each page has something for your visitors to engage with.

Whether it’s signing up for a free trial, having a chat with a support agent, or looking at content, etc.

Study These Marketing Metrics Today

If you study these marketing metrics, you’ll find it much easier to create a successful marketing strategy.

Your first step has to be to record these metrics over a set duration. After recording these metrics, you can determine your current successes and failures.

You can then use this information to develop your marketing strategy. If you keep an eye on these marketing metrics, you’ll have no issues in building website traffic.

You can find more great marketing tips on our website!