SMB Marketing Analytics: Definition and What to Analyze
Marketing analytics for SMBs is key
Lorne is looking for ways to drive more revenue for his small business. To do that, he knows he needs to improve his marketing. The problem is, Lorne isn’t sure where his marketing needs to be improved. He doesn’t have a clear idea of how it’s currently performing.
The above scenario illustrates the importance of digital marketing analytics. Analytics allows you to see where your small to medium-sized business (SMB) marketing is working and where it isn’t, helping you to improve it going forward.
But just what is SMB marketing analytics, and what are the best digital marketing metrics for SMBs like yours to analyze? We’ll answer both of those questions below, so keep reading to find out more information.
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What is SMB marketing analytics?
SMB marketing analytics is the process of analyzing and interpreting the data you gain from your campaigns.
Before you get to analytics, you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking various metrics in your marketing. Pay attention to what users are doing on your site, how they’re interacting with your ads, and so on. Then you can use analytics to gain insights from that data.
Why should you perform marketing analytics for SMBs?
The reason SMB marketing analytics is so vital for your campaigns is that without it, you won’t have any idea how to improve.
You should constantly be aiming to make your marketing more effective — otherwise, it will consistently underperform. But to improve your marketing, you must analyze its current performance.
Digital marketing analytics provides you with all that information.
Some of the things you can learn from digital marketing analytics include:
- What customers like and dislike
- Where customers are struggling
- What strategies are driving the best results for you
- Which products are the most popular among customers
- And more!
With SMB marketing analytics, you can see exactly how you can improve your marketing to drive better results.
Essential digital marketing metrics to include in your analytics
Analytics requires you to examine metrics you gain from your marketing. Through your analysis, you’ll be able to uncover and interpret valuable insights about your marketing performance.
There are countless digital marketing metrics out there, too many to possibly cover on this page alone. However, some metrics are more valuable than others. Below, we’ll cover some of the most useful marketing metrics to analyze.
Here are 11 metrics to interpret through your SMB marketing analytics!
Digital marketing metrics on your website
Some of the most useful metrics to analyze originate on your website. Those metrics can provide insight into your search engine optimization (SEO) and web design.
Here are some of the best types of data to evaluate to improve your marketing:
Traffic source
One of the most important facets of your online marketing is web traffic. People need to come to your site or they won’t be able to convert there, so the more interested users your site attracts, the better.
In addition to knowing how many users come to your site, though, it’s good to know where they’re coming from. That’s the idea behind traffic source. You can use platforms like Google Analytics to see where users discover your website, telling you where to focus your marketing.
Average session duration
You don’t just want users to visit your website. You also want them to stay there long enough to convert. For that reason, it’s extremely helpful to analyze average session duration, which measures how long each user stays on your website.
Interpreting this metric is a great way to see if your site is captivating enough. If all your site’s session durations are short, that tells you that you need to do more to keep users interested.
Pages per visit
In addition to seeing how long users stay on your website, you can look into how many pages they visit there. A user might spend 10 minutes on your site, but did they spend all that time on one page, or did they move around?
Ideally, users will move from page to page, thereby increasing their chances of finding your product or service pages so they can convert. If your analysis shows that your average pages per visit is low, consider using more internal links or pointing users to neighboring pages.
Bounce rate
We’ve mentioned how you want people to stay on your site long enough to convert. But sometimes, people leave after a few seconds or even before the page loads.
When people leave your site almost immediately after arriving, it’s called bouncing. The metric that measures how many users bounce from your site via bounce rate.
Including bounce rate in your marketing analytics can tell you a lot about your website quality. If your site has a high bounce rate, that means it’s doing a poor job of quickly engaging users, so you may want to consider reoptimizing your web design or your content.
Page speed
Page speed is easily one of the most essential metrics on any website. In fact, 83% of users expect pages to load in three seconds or less. If your pages are slow-loading, your bounce rate will go up. Google will then notice the negative user behavior and move your site down in rankings.
To avoid those issues, you should include page speed in your analytics. That will help you interpret the reason for things like a high bounce rate.
If your analytics lead you to the conclusion that your pages are too slow, you can speed them up via methods like caching your pages and compressing images.
Digital marketing metrics in your paid advertising
Another of the most important areas to analyze is paid advertising. You should be constantly refining your paid ad campaigns, but you can only do that if you take the time to view the data you gain from them, and then use that data to determine where your ads need improvement.
Here are three of the most important online advertising metrics to examine in your analytics!
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that shows you how many people are clicking on your paid ads. More specifically, it represents a ratio between impressions and clicks. So, CTR tells you how many of the people who see your ads also click on them.
Your marketing analytics can use this metric to determine how effective your ad copy is. If no one clicks on your ads, it means your ad copy isn’t very compelling — or it could simply mean that you’re targeting the wrong audience. Either way, CTR can point you in the direction of what to fix.
Conversion rate
Even more essential than CTR is conversion rate. Conversion rate measures how many people convert after clicking on your ads.
Plenty of people might click on your ads, but not all of them will convert. Nine out of 10 people could click on your ad for your latest product, but maybe only one of those people actually buys the product.
Analyzing your conversion rate can clue you in on the performance of your ad landing pages. An ad that earns tons of clicks but almost no conversions likely has an underperforming landing page, one that could be better optimized to encourage purchases.
Cost per click (CPC)
The third major paid advertising metric to use in your analytics is cost per click (CPC).
Most paid advertising is pay-per-click (PPC), meaning you only pay for your ads when people click on them. So, to know how much you’re paying for each ad, you would look at CPC, which measures the average amount you pay each time someone clicks on one of your ads.
Analyzing CPC is necessary for interpreting how much you’re spending on your campaigns. If you’re spending too much money per click, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
Digital marketing metrics on your social media
Social media is another phenomenal spot for online advertising, and it’s one where you can benefit from analyzing a few additional metrics. Here are two of the main social media metrics to assess!
Post reach
Post reach refers to how many of your followers view your social media posts.
To calculate post reach, divide the number of impressions on a given post by the number of followers you have, and then multiply by 100. So, if you have 150 followers and your post has 85 impressions, it means your post reach is around 57%.
Analyzing your follower count alone can be misleading. Just because a lot of people follow you doesn’t mean those people are truly engaged. If you want to get a sense of how tuned in your followers are, you must assess post reach.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate goes a step further than post reach by measuring how many of your followers not only see your posts, but engage with them. There are numerous ways to define engagement — comments, mentions, and likes are all viable actions to include.
However you define it, you can divide your total number of engagement actions by your total number of followers — and then multiply by 100 — to find your engagement rate.
So, let’s say you define an “engagement action” as a comment or a mention. If you have 20 comments and 15 mentions for the day (35 “engagements” total), and you have 50 followers, you would divide 35 by 50 and then multiply by 100 to get an engagement rate of 70%.
Whatever the result, analyzing it will allow you to interpret how tuned in your followers are. A low engagement rate often means you need to rethink the type of content you’re sharing.
Digital marketing metrics in your email marketing
The final major area of marketing where you should harness analytics is email marketing. Here’s one of the biggest email metrics to evaluate in your analytics!
Opt-in rate
When you send out marketing emails, you aren’t just sending them to random addresses. You’re targeting users who have voluntarily signed up for them via the forms on your website — that is, users who have opted into your email campaigns.
If you want to know how successful your email signup forms are, you can analyze opt-in rate. Opt-in rate compares the number of people who view your email forms to the number of people who actually sign up for them.
Your analytics will tell you how effective your email forms are. A low opt-in rate means your forms aren’t attracting many users, meaning you could probably stand to reoptimize them.
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WebFX can help you make the most of your SMB marketing metrics
Want to use your SMB marketing analytics to drive incredible results for your small business? WebFX would love to help you! With over 28 years of experience, we’re the experts when it comes to driving top-tier marketing results.
In the past five years alone, we’ve generated over 24 million leads and $10 billion in revenue for our clients. By partnering with us for our digital marketing services, you can gain access to the same next-level service our clients receive.
To get started with us, just call 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!