So you are starting to get your head around who is coming to your site, where they navigate to and how long they stay. Super! You also know that they won’t stay forever.
One of the key metrics you want to measure is not only who comes to your website, etc.. But also where they go when they leave. In most case, you will never know where they go. But what if you have links you want them to follow? Perhaps you have been working very hard on your Twitter profile and want to see who actually goes to see it (you will know who follows you by that little e-mail you get).
A key website objectives should be to drive web visitor traffic to your other web presences. In this case, I am going to focus on Social Media sites. But what I will be discussing can be applied to any Outbound linking strategy (from Banner Ads through to link-building initiatives). This could be things such as a Twitter profile (as I mentioned above), LinkedIn profile, Facebook Fanpage, to…. well… anywhere actually.
The key is to put yourself in a position to measure absolutely everything that is happening on your site. Then take all of the data you collect with your analytics program and parse through it in order to draw valuable conclusions; which, in turn, lead to actionable items.
For example, if you have a number of Social media presences, you will want to know what type of traffic you are getting on each. Some SocialMedia sites (such as LinkedIn) allow you to see how many people have viewed your profile.
- Wow, 319 click-throughs from your site to other sources of information about you or your business. Congratulations, you must be doing something right!
- YouTube click-throughs are triple those of Vimeo. Why is the an important metric? Basically, you can expect triple the views of your videos on YouTube, than on Vimeo. So perhaps you should think about why this is happening. Do the O/B links to each of these social media services have the same prominence on your site? Do your readers understand the difference between the 2? Etc….
- Look at Twitter! It’s burning it up! You may want to invest some more time Tweeting.
Of course this is only data that measures outbound clicks to a finite set of Social Media sites you are leveraging for yourself or your business. Traffic and activity will hit these sites from others sources and you will need to take that into consideration when making strategic decisions involving your overall use of Social Media.
This is just the start to well-rounded and planned Social Media monitoring campaign. Clearly Website statistics and their monitoring plays an important roll.
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