6 Digital Metrics You Should Be Watching

18 July 2013
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According to a recent Mashable article, some of the most commonly tracked metrics for a brand's online success are: page views, unique visitors, click-through rates, bounce rates, load times and  - in social media - followers and fan counts.

While these are key metrics, this post argues that there are six other metrics you might not realize are as important for getting a clear picture of how well you're doing online. Here's an overview of three:

Time spent per page

Don't assume sections of your website where visitors spend the longest amount of time are your best - they may be struggling to get the information they need here due to confusing language, bad user interface or other problems. The article suggests that multiple minutes spent on a web page without an article, video or some sort of interactive component (like checkout page) might be problematic. Not sure? Mashable suggests adding a "Is this page useful?" widget for testing.

Retweets, Favorites and Comments

"It's far better to have fewer, loyal, active brand fans who distribute your message as brand evangelists than a large group of anonymous fans who visited your page once for a coupon and never returned." - Mashable

If you use the number of followers as your main social metric, you're missing the point.

Most brands take note of engagement across sites, but you need to be actively tracking how they correlate with your online activity and content. Did a time consuming or more expensive campaign garner more signs of engagement than your normal posts? What time of day or week do you get the most engagement? How does your engagement changed over time? And who is talking / liking / tweeting to you - does your most engaged audience correlate with your target market audience?

Where do people leave from?

Do you track the exit page or page last visited? If someone comes to your website and goes to at least two different pages, take note of where they bounce off. According to the article, any page that is the site of 5 percent or more of your total departures needs to be changed with better or revised call-to-actions and related topic pages.

What are your Top 6 Metrics? To see more tips and and the other three suggested metrics, read the Mashable article.

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