To anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed after looking at Google Analytics, know this: You’re not alone.
Even financial advisors, who make their living working with numbers, can find themselves drowning in a sea of open rates and visitor counts, page views and conversions.
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It’s hard to know which metrics matter and which are just extraneous data points that reveal nothing about the successes or shortcomings of your digital marketing efforts.
Good data helps you build trust and credibility. It empowers you to convert leads to prospects, and prospects to happy clients. Bad data, on the other hand, does nothing but inflate your ego at best. At worst, it can blind you to pitfalls that have the potential to undermine your business’ success.
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Here are three ways to tell the difference between the two.
Good Metrics Focus on the Funnel
You’ll hear many of us in the “martech” — marketing technology — space talk about “the funnel.” This is a series of outreach, design and content decisions that turn your website into a lead-generating machine.
Just like the checkout process on Amazon, your website should have a clearly defined system to attract visitors, turn them into leads, then prospects and, ultimately, clients.
Good metrics give you insight into the health of your funnel. They allow you to focus on each step of the process, showing you what’s working and what could be improved.
Good metrics tell you not just how many people opened your most recent email; they go deeper to reveal how many people clicked back to your website, as well as how many used your contact form to set up an introductory appointment.
Good Metrics Don’t Fixate on Visitors
At the top of the digital marketing funnel are visitors. These are the folks who come to your site, read a post or two and then click away to another domain.