High-performing digital marketing strategies rely on a built-in feedback loop that pulls regular analytics reports, analyzes marketing activities, and optimizes based on those findings. But marketing teams (and their analytics specialists) can sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that is accessible to them. It’s easy to wonder what are truly important key performance metrics to put at the top of your process list to make sure your feedback loop remains high-functioning. Here are the top key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be sure to focus on in your wellness brand marketing.
Understanding Acquisition
One key performance indicator for your wellness brand marketing lies in understanding how visitors are coming to your site. In your GA, this is the “Users” topic area. For our wellness brand clients, our team works to understand not only the number of visitors coming to the site but also what channels are leading to what individual goal.
Understanding Quality of Visits
In addition to understanding the number of visitors coming to your wellness brand site, it’s important to understand the quality of those visits. Quality can be shown by average time on your site, and pages or visits, and you can use event and goal metrics to help you analyze the quality of visits to your site.
Utilizing Event and Goal Metrics
Google Analytics offers several KPIs right out of the box to help show the quality of visit. Average time on page, average time on site, bounce rate, exit rate, and pages per visit all help identify to what degree users are interacting with your site. These metrics are called “soft metrics.” It is important to understand what these metrics mean in regards to your specific site. A low time on the page may mean something completely different depending on what the purpose of the page is. This is where a critical analytical mind and an understanding of the site’s goals are vital to providing the correct insights. Due to this, it is suggested to utilize and implement additional “hard metrics.” Hard metrics include event tracking, for example, call tracking, download buttons, and form fill submits in addition to Google Analytics goal and funnel tracking. Here are some examples of event tracking tools, below.
Call Tracking
It is recommended to utilize a call tracking vendor to offer full visibility into the calls your site produces. If this is not possible, there are additional ways to gain some visibility into this information. By utilizing Google Tag Manager, it is possible to add a tag that fires when a user elects to click on a phone number on your site to call, wherever click-to-call is available.
Download Tracking
The wellness industry lends itself to informational brochures and downloads. While it is recommended to include much of this information on your site to boost SEO, sometimes it is necessary to offer a download. Unfortunately, PDFs cannot be tracked through Google Analytics as pages are. This is why it is important to tag any download buttons so that you can see how many users are clicking to download your content. This is an instance where if you were relying on soft metrics to tell the story, you may look at a high average time on page (assuming users are keeping the page open after downloading and reading through the content) or a high exit rate. Utilizing event tracking removes the implications and guesswork around this type of analysis.
Form Fill Tracking
Form Fill Tracking is particularly useful in instances where your form fill does not lead to a thank you page. In instances where the URL does not change, it is critical to utilize event tracking. Within Google Tag Manager there are also options where the tag only fires if the user successfully fills out the entire form, helping to reduce false fires or multiple fires per user.
Go Deeper: In instances where you cannot utilize this functionality, it is important to look at the difference between total events and unique events. If you are seeing 200 form fill events with only 125 unique events, that means users are clicking on the form submit button multiple times. This could suggest a usability issue or that the form is too long or complicated.
Goal and Funnel Tracking
Goal and Funnel Tracking provided through Google Analytics is also a key tool you should utilize to understand the performance of your site. Here, it is important to identify what is the true goal of your site. Often, goals are used to track seasonal or short-term goals of the site. This is not the best use of goals and can instead be tracked through events or through custom reports. Goals should just be used for the top-level actions that speak to the success of the site. In addition to goals, it is suggested to set up goal funnels as well. This will provide visibility into not only the number of goal completions on your site, but you will also gain visibility into where users may be dropping off within the funnel. This information will provide information that can help optimize your UI/UX.
Go Deeper: Sometimes it is hard to identify what should be set as a goal vs. an event. A goal should be directly linked to the success of the site or the brand. One of the best ways to identify this is to ask your CEO or CMO “what do you want us to report on when someone asks how the site is doing?” Hint, it’s not bounce rate or time on site. This type of question helps identify what truly matters vs. what is “good to know”.