4 Powerful Business Metrics You Should Track for Success

By Chris Christoff

Do you want to use your business metrics to make smarter business decisions? Let’s look at four important metrics and how to use them to grow your business.

Are you a business owner looking for a way to take your brand to the next level? If so, you’ve probably heard advice from experts about how marketing and engagement are essential for growth. While that statement is true, your metrics are the factors that help you determine what to do next when creating marketing materials, engaging with your audience or redesigning your website.

We know that there are tons of different metrics from your email, CRM, website forms and analytics. There’s also a lot of confusion over how people can leverage these numbers for a highly effective website that gets more conversions.

Today we are going to demystify some of these metrics while showing you how to use them to your advantage. We will cover metrics across all of your platforms. So whether you use social media, email, your website or all three, we have you covered.

Let’s get started!

Email open rate

Most business owners use email marketing to connect with their existing customers or nurture prospects. If you look at your analytics, you’ll see many terms for how users interact with your emails. But one of these metrics stands out above the rest.

While “email open rate” is self-explanatory, the best way to optimize this metric for your brand is not always clear. You need people to open your emails if you hope to build rapport and convert more leads.

There are a few ways to boost the number of people who open your emails. First, you’ll want to make sure your emails are getting sent to your subscribers, not getting lost of blocked. After you ensure email deliverability, it all comes down to how you engage with your audience.

The best way to make new subscribers want to open your emails is to send out a welcome message the moment they sign up. Not only do welcome emails have an 82% open rate, but they also help you set the stage so consumers know what to expect. Setting these expectations makes subscribers want to continue opening your messages, because they understand why you are reaching out to them.

You should also make sure that you deliver on your promise and provide value to your readers once they commit to opening your email. If someone clicks through and sees a bunch of information they don’t care about, there’s a significantly lower chance that they’ll bother opening your email next time.

Qualitative customer feedback

The next metric on our list is qualitative customer feedback. Essentially, this metric is calculated by looking at what customers have to say about your brand on social media and website survey forms. You can use whatever scoring system you would like to measure the satisfaction of your audience. However, it’s vital to ask specific questions about your brand and give users a chance to type a response.

When you create feedback forms, you build good favor with your customers, because most people like having their voices heard. Not only will you build stronger connections with your audience, but you’ll also have an easier time identifying areas of opportunity across your products and brand.

For example, if you are thinking about adding a new product to your store, you could conduct a survey and ask your users if they are interested in the idea. If you find that most of your audience is looking for the product you want to add, you can bet that it will be a good fit for your business.

This metric is also invaluable for reducing your retention rate by helping customers as soon as they mention they are having a problem. By being there to correct the issue, you’ll increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Sources for incoming traffic

Next, let’s talk about the value of tracking your incoming traffic. Your website analytics will show you how people find your website. The three most common ways are direct, search and referral.

Direct searches represent people who type in your URL at the top of their browser and hit Enter. Search encompasses anyone who finds your website on Google. Referral traffic occurs when someone clicks on a link to your website from another site or social media.

Understanding where your traffic is coming from can help you make smarter marketing decisions and allocate your resources where they are needed the most. If you’re not getting a ton of referral traffic, you may consider spending more time sharing your content on social media.

You can also use these metrics to track individual referrals, like ones that occur when you work with influencer marketers. The ability to see how influencers drive traffic to your site could encourage you to work more (or less) with specific creators.

This metric can help you decide if you need to focus on building brand awareness, improving your SEO, or both!

Average session duration

The final topic we are going to talk about is your average session duration. You’ll find this information on your Google Analytics dashboard. Ideally, you want people to spend plenty of time on your website. When consumers land on your site and quickly leave, this contributes to your bounce rate and can hurt your attempts to appear on search engines.

More importantly, if consumers are bouncing from your website, there’s a reason behind this behavior. The sooner you can figure out why so many people are quickly leaving your website, the more people you can potentially convert in the future.

There are countless reasons why people could be leaving your website. The most common cause is a poor user experience (UX). Menu placement, loading times and color schemes all play a role in how users interact with your brand. If you’re wondering how important these elements are to your site, consider this statistic: A mere one-second delay in your page loading could lose you 7% of your mobile conversions.

You can pinpoint these issues if you know when users are having a difficult time on your site. Another great way to use this information is to find out which page has the highest exit rate. For instance, if you notice that over 70% of people leave on the checkout page, it may be time to think about streamlining your payment page. You could do something simple, like add a guest checkout option, to see if that changes the outcome, or overhaul your entire payment page. The ability to experiment with different options and gauge the results based on factual data will help you improve your company.

Putting it all together

The best thing about tracking metrics across all of your platforms is that you can get a comprehensive analysis of your website, products and customer base when you put them all together. Every metric has another one that complements it and provides even more value for business owners.

We’ve shown several instances of how these metrics complement one another. The best example that comes to mind is how your bounce rate is directly connected to your average session duration. You can piece together information and follow the chain of metrics until you identify the source problem.

It takes time to adjust to using all of these different figures in your day-to-day operations, but it’s a task worth pursuing if you want to find success.

Chris Christoff is a writer at business.com