When the SEO/web team isn’t working hand in hand with the marketing team, neither has a complete picture of how your digital marketing efforts impact your website.
By Susan Saldibar
How hard is your website working for you? How many visitors do you get each month? Do they stay on your site or leave? And what about that all-important conversion rate?
Are you leaving all this mission-critical stuff to your “web guys” to tackle?
Not that you should be holding their feet to the fire (or maybe you should). But when the SEO/web team isn’t working hand in hand with the marketing team, neither has a complete picture of how your digital marketing efforts impact your website. Oh you may tell them what your keywords are and how you want those landing pages laid out. But understanding your key performance metrics, or “KPIs” and how they indicate performance is what matters most. Without that, according to Jason McCloud, VP of digital marketing for Sage Age Strategies, a Senior Housing Forum partner, you’re flying blind. And wasting money.
KPIs tell the story of how effective your website is.
Jason has shared his list of “must use” KPIs, along with targets, based on industry best practices. These are the ones you need to keep on top of and make sure your marketers and SEO/web folks are as well:
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Bounce Rate; should be 45% or lower
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Time on Site; 2.5 minutes or longer
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Average # of pages visited: 3.5 or more
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Conversion Rate; 6% or higher
Of course conversion rate is, what many digital markers consider the “Holy Grail” of web metrics. A high conversion rate tells you someone is engaged sufficiently to give you their highly coveted contact data. You have them and they are now yours to win or lose!
But Jason urges us to remember that there are key metrics that go into acquiring that all-important conversion. You need to know where you are today in each of the above key areas. Then you need to track progress as you introduce new campaigns and test out different Calls to Action (CTAs). You can do this by asking your webmaster for weekly analytics. That is the only way you’ll know what’s working. And what isn’t.
You don’t know what you don’t know. But you need to know!
As Jason says, “You have to know enough about your metrics to know if your web and marketing teams are taking the right actions and making the right decisions to improve your ROI.” Obviously, the more you know the better your chance of success. Work smarter not harder! And that goes for the entire team. “Working hand in hand makes a huge difference in how quickly you can make adjustments and fine tune your content, visuals and calls to action to optimize those conversions,” says Jason.
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