By John Eberhard

Last week I talked about how important it is to use statistics when managing a marketing activity or marketing campaign. This week I am going to talk about what statistics you should use for various things.

Web Site

With a web site, you should track:

1. Total Web Visits. Some people think you should track unique visits, which means only one time per visitor. Total web visits counts someone multiple times if they come more than once. I like that because you want people to come more than once.
2. Page Views: This is the total number of pages that were viewed during a given time period. Note this will always be higher than web visits, because people will usually view more than one page per visit.
3. Total Web Conversions: This is the total number of people who filled out a form on the site and became a lead or joined your mailing list.

Google Analytics is the popular way to track web statistics and is a free service from Google.

Email Marketing

1. Total email sent out in a given time period
2. Total responses to the email promotion, whether that be leads in a lead generation campaign, or sales when you are selling an item directly online

Pay Per Click Advertising 

1. Total leads or total dollar sales, depending on whether you are doing lead generation or sales
2. Total cost per lead or cost per sale. This is an average of how much you spend on pay per click advertising during a given time period divided by the number of leads or the number of sales.

There are a variety of other statistics to track for pay per click, but the above are the main ones to see how the campaign is running.

Search Engine Optimization

1. Number of links to your web site coming from other sites
2. Ranking of your group of target keywords, specifically how many you are in the #1 spot for on Google, Yahoo and MSN, how many keywords you have in the top 10, the top 20, and the top 100.
3. Total web visits to your site. Since SEO is more of a long term action, track the total web visits per month and compare it to the same period in the previous year.
4. Referrals from Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is the number of people that came to your site from each of the major search engines.

Social Media Marketing

1. Number of friends, fans, followers and connections on social media accounts. You should be working on increasing these numbers every month.
2. Amount of engagement on social media accounts. This is the number of times someone liked your post, commented on it, shared it, or retweeted a tweet on Twitter.
3. Number of visits to your main web site coming from social media sites. This tells you that your posts to social media sites should include links back to your main site.
4. Number of actual leads generated from social media. This is an important one, because leads lead to sales, and you can’t spend friends, engagement or web visits.

Video Marketing

1. Your video’s ranking on the YouTube search engine for the primary keyword you are targeting.
2. Number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.
3. Number of people coming to your main web site from YouTube.
4. Number of leads generated by videos.

I think it is important to note that with all marketing actions, to goal is to create want for your products and services and to sell something. It is easy to get fixated on video views or YouTube channel subscribers, or social media engagement, or even website visits. But where the rubber meets the road, and has to, is when people respond to your marketing actions. Sp keep that in your mind as the priority.

Good luck with tracking your marketing actions.