Most online business owners are actively trying to drive traffic to their site on an ongoing basis. Doing so typically requires a significant amount of time and resources spent on marketing and advertising. But as a business owner, how do you know if your marketing efforts are paying off? The key to honing your skills and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is, of course, keeping a close eye on your analytics and gleaning important insights to continually improve your efforts and increase your ROI. Below we explore marketing analytics in four key categories: search, social, email and online advertising

Search Engine Marketing Analytics
One of the most common places today’s customers turn for solutions to their problems and answers to their questions is the Internet, specifically, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, with Google being the most popular and widely used. Whether or not you’re allocating marketing resources to pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertisements, you should at the very least keep your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) in mind when choosing keywords and developing content.

How many visitors do you have per day, per week and per month to your website? Should you focus your efforts on getting more traffic to your website? Or do you have sufficient traffic, and should you instead focus on optimizing your existing website content and flow to reduce the bounce rate, and increase the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site?  Analytics can help you determine where to focus your efforts.

Search analytics can also help you understand where your current traffic is coming from. Are visitors finding you organically through their keyword searches? If you have a lot of organic traffic, then chances are you have good page rank as well, meaning your website likely appears in the top search results, on the first or second page of google. If your traffic is primarily referral traffic, then what are the referring sites? Understanding this concept can help you focus your marketing on the referring sites that are already sending you qualified traffic.

Email Marketing Analytics
Whether you’re just starting out building your online fan base, or you already have a tribe of followers, chances are you’ve heard the saying “the money is in the list.” Often times this “lists” refers to your email subscribers. But how do you know if your email campaigns are working? Most of today’s email marketing platforms have comprehensive analytics tools to help you determine which of your email campaigns are performing well, and which are not so that you can adjust accordingly.

Email analytics are important in understanding the effectiveness of your headline, overall content and call to action (CTA). A good headline will result in high email open rates. Once an email is opened, the goal is to get the reader to click on a specific call to action, either to “learn more” or to purchase a product. Once an email is opened and someone takes action, this is referred to as the click through rate (CTR) or click to open. A high CTR indicates that your message and CTA is resonating with your audience.

Additionally, as email marketers strive grow their subscriber base, email analytics can help you measure the growth of your subscriber list, as well as identify where subscribers may be dropping off. If you get a high number of unsubscribes as a result of a particular email campaign, use analytics to understand why and consider changing your messaging approach in the future.

Social Media Marketing Analytics
Social media sites are key to many marketing efforts for video products. Platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and LinkedIn are places video content creators can reach and engage with their audiences and customers in real time. Whether you’re doing paid advertising through your social channels or simply growing your fan base organically, understanding your analytics is the key to continuing to give your audience content that will keep them engaged and coming back for more.

Most successful social campaigns achieve high levels of viewer engagement. Compelling content seen by your followers or advertising targets will respond to content they love through likes, comments, shares or becoming a fan or follower of your page.

Understand your complete social media funnel by first looking at the number of views each of your posts gets. From there, look at engagement. And finally, look at the number of viewers who took the desired action, be that following your social account, providing you with their email address or making a purchase. Knowing your analytics can help advise your campaigns and increase your conversions on social sites.

Online Advertising Analytics
When you’re ready to start driving traffic to your website or sales page via paid display ads or other forms of online advertising, a close look at your performance analytics will help ensure you’re getting the most out of your efforts.

The goal of your online advertising should ultimately be to result in conversions. A conversion can take many forms, including a sale or a lead capture. Know how much you’re paying per 1,000 impressions (CPM) as well as your cost per click (CPC) and cost per conversion. These are common metrics to evaluate advertising campaigns and can help you understand how your campaigns are paying off. Campaigns with low CPM, CPC and cost per conversions rates often lead to higher returns on your advertising investment (ROI).

Successful business owners live and breath their analytics in order to optimize and fine tune their marketing efforts and continually improve their outcomes. So long as you never stop measuring, testing and tweaking accordingly, your results will continue to improve and your business will continue to thrive!