Website analytics packages, like Google and Omniture, provide a wealth of information about your website and how it’s being found and used. There is so much data available, that it can be overwhelming and hard to know what to start measuring first. Here are a few of the basic metrics I think are important for any industrial website.

1. Unique Visitors – this is the number of unique people who go to your site each month. Each person gets counted one time per month, regardless of how many times they actually come to the site.
What to look for: You want this number to trend upward over time. Don’t get worried if it’s down for a month or two, it could just be seasonal trends. The longer time period you can measure, the better.

2. New vs. Returning Visitors – this is pretty self-explanatory. It’s just people who have never before visited your site compared to those who have.
What to look for: A high number of new visitors usually means your marketing is working to draw in new customers. High numbers of repeat visitors indicate a loyal customer base.

3. Traffic Sources – generally, visitors can come to your site one of three ways: 1)they type in your URL or use a bookmark to find it (direct traffic) or 2) they click a link from another site (referral traffic) or 3) they type keywords into a search engine and click on your link from there (search engine traffic).
What to look for: For industrial/B2B companies, look for about 75% of your traffic coming from search engines on a regular basis.

4. Organic vs. Paid Keywords – these are the actual terms people use to find your site. Just make sure to set up your analytics to track any pay per click campaigns, so you can get a clear view of which words are bringing you traffic from which source.
What to look for: This is a great place to start for doing keyword research for a new campaign. You also want to see more than just your company name showing up in the top 20 – you want to non-branded terms too.

5. Top Landing Pages – these are the pages of your site that are most often the first entry point. Sometimes your home page is most often viewed, and sometimes it’s another page.
What to look for: Make sure you have clear calls to action on all your top landing pages. Let visitors know what the next step is and make it easy for them to contact you.

6. Bounce rate – “bounces” happen when someone comes to a page of your site and then leaves without viewing any other pages.
What to look for: If a page’s bounce rate higher than 50%, it’s time to look for usability issues, clarifying calls to action, or revising keywords.

7. Conversions – conversions can be just about any action you want visitors to take on your site. For example, PDF or other file downloads, page views, contact form submissions, newsletter sign ups, request for quote submission, checkout completions.
What to look for: Before you can measure conversions, you’ll need to set up goals in your analytics package and define what you want to measure. Once your goals have been set up, look to increase conversion rates whenever you make changes on your website.

One very important thing that web analytics won’t tell you is how many phone calls are generated from your website and online marketing. This is especially true of industrial websites, so make sure your salespeople are asking potential customers how they found you, and then recording it. Although low-tech, this kind of tracking can give you invaluable data. A better alternative is to set up call tracking with assigned numbers for different marketing campaigns.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 3:20 pm and is filed under General, Industrial B2B Marketing, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.