How Do You Measure Success?
Have you ever heard the famous quote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”? If you take regular stock of how your website or marketing campaigns are doing, you’ll have a better idea of what’s working well and what isn’t. And, just like checking items off your to-do list, you’ll probably be more motivated to meet your goals if you know exactly how far you have to go.
Website analytics can help a business understand who is visiting its site and whether the visitors are engaging with the content and/or making a purchase. They’re crucial for companies seeking to know what’s going on with their website and whether it needs upgrading.
Street Level Studio’s Analyst, Amy Glynn, likes the way web tools provide immediate results. She says, “Digital marketing is so nimble! It allows us to see what is and what isn’t working nearly instantaneously, providing the opportunity for smart, efficient adjustments.”
So, how do we measure success? At SLS, we use Google Analytics to provide benchmarks when a client wants to redesign their website. This helps guide our decisions for improving the back-end development, navigation, as well as new site content. We aim to build sites that are easy to navigate, with content that draws a target audience in to build a relationship with the brand. Analytics help us do just that. We look at who’s using the site, how they’re using it, and adjust the site to grow the audience and optimize their on-site experience.
What we (and our clients) hope to see is how traffic has grown since the website’s creation or redesign. If we see anything negative, such as visitor drop-off, we take actions to remedy it.
Likewise, we can look at online ads, social media posts and ads, or email campaign performance metrics to measure the results of A/B testing, quickly make changes, or inform our next campaign. The Acquisition tab allows us to see how many new users and sessions a website has from all channels. Eighty-five percent of organizations that measure social media data within their analytics tools were able to show ROI (return on investment) for their efforts.
Analytics round out Street Level Studio’s list of creative services and can be attached to many of the marketing strategies that help our clients get notice and grow. They can rest assured that we won’t just “set it and forget it”—we’ll keep an eye on their website, email campaign, or social media and make sure it is positioned to help achieve the results they want. If you want to improve your results, follow Amy’s advice to SLS clients: “Try new things and take risks, then measure your success and use the metrics to inform your next marketing move.”