However, I have quickly found this to be the wrong approach. In my last post, I talked about the importance of measuring. You need to measure for results. But when you first start pulling in metrics for your website, you may be overwhelmed with the sheer number of possibilities.

Watch out for information overload

Google Analytics, which is free and great, will give you way more information than you ever need. And the truth is, there is no end to what you could track when it comes to your marketing.

However, you need to pick just a few key metrics. This is the information by which you will judge your marketing efforts a success or failure.

For instance, you could track things like how many visits, where people come from, how long they stay on your site, and much more. But if your goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter, you probably will only need to track one metric, what percentage of people who visit your site sign up for the newsletter. Once you start tracking that percentage, you can try some different marketing approaches and find ways to improve that percentage.

Key metrics are the foundation you build on

Of course, you would be able to build on it from there. For instance, you will want to increase the number of site visits you get. If you have a good handle on the percentage of people who sign up for that newsletter first, it will prove very helpful. Say its 30%. Then say you take out an ad that increases your site visits by 100%. Hopefully, if the ad is well-targeted, that newsletter sign up rate will stay around 30%. If it drops perceptibly, you will know you have a problem.

Key metrics will help you determine marketing success. Without them, you are just looking at a bunch of numbers. With them, you can make real and steady improvements to your marketing efforts.

Find those metrics

To find them, start by brainstorming important goals for your business. For a piece of software, good goals may include sign up rate and retention. Until those are optimized, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to try to flood the site with a bunch of traffic.

Determine your goals first and then figure out the metrics that will help you measure those goals. Then pay attention to those metrics, and ignore the noise of all the other things that you can track, but don’t need to.

This approach will make measuring much more useful to your business, and perhaps will help you take it off the list of things you should be doing, and add it to the list of things you can’t live with out.

Measuring is easier in an internet world. For online marketing, you don’t really have to rely on the customer to tell you how they found your business. You can use analytics to find that out.

Improving is easier too. It is easy to change out ad copy, web site graphics, or a hundred other variables. You can even test a couple of different variables at the same time, to find out which is going to drive the highest number of sales.

While things are easier, they are still hard. It is going to take extra work for you to learn how to measure properly. And once you know how, you have to actually do it. But if you are marketing, you need to measure. And trust me, you’re marketing.

There are plenty of tools that will help you measure your marketing results. They range from the free but robust Google Analytics, to paid analytics tools like Kiss Metrics, to other auxiliary tools, like A/B Testing software and some pretty cool email solutions for finding the best message.

I’ll be posting a lot about this side of marketing, because while it may not be as glamorous and fun as coming up with neat slogans and creating a story around your brand, it is just as important. Measuring is your tool to vastly improve your marketing skills and to help your marketing do its job, which is to bring you business. 

So, if you haven’t already, now is the time to buy in to the idea of measuring all of your marketing efforts. I’ll be sharing specific advice on how to get good at it on this blog, so stay tuned! 

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