Metrics for Measuring Reach

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Every business that promotes products and services needs to measure
reach on an ongoing basis. The following metrics are useful for
understanding the effects of marketing programs designed to reach new
customers.

• Overall traffic volumes – track large spikes or dips in requested page views.
• Number of visits – indicate how well you reach and acquire visitors.
• Number of new visitors –calculate ratios to determine quality of new visitors.
• Ratio of new to returning visitors – identify changes in overall audience makeup.
• Percentage of new visitors – reveal effect of change due to marketing reach and acquisition efforts.
• Entry pages and contents – ensure ability to connect with every visitor reached.
• Visitor geographic data – identify traffic spikes from unexpected locations.
• Top 5-10 error pages – resolve visitor experience problems.
• Impressions Served – calculate reach and overall success of marketing campaigns.
• Email message open rates – determine quality of list and subject line appeal.

Measuring Customer Acquisition

 

Measuring acquisition is easier than measuring reach. The difference
is that reach metrics depend on information from various sources,
whereas acquisition metrics come from your own web analytics data.

Acquisition measurement is focused on the number of visitors your
website is acquiring and where they all come from. Below are the metrics
that can help gauge the success of your website and marketing
initiatives in acquiring prospects and customers.

General Acquisition Metrics

 

• Percent of new visitors – flag big changes in new visitor acquisition and their effect on overall web traffic.
• Average number of visits per visitor – ensure that content consumption remains stable, an indirect measure of user experience.
• Average number of page views per visit – understand changing nature of visitors attracted to your website.
• Average pages viewed per visitor – short-term measure of how well you direct visitors beyond homepage or landing page.
• Page stick and slip – view big changes in stick or slip on homepage and key entry pages, including campaign landing pages.
• Cost per visitor – rise/fall shows fluctuation of visitor acquisition costs due to increase/decrease in marketing spend.

Campaign Response Metrics

 

• Responses and respondents – important indicator of campaign success.
• Cost-per-acquisition/Cost-per-Click – keeps you within campaign budget.
• Referring domains/URLs – better serve visitors based on needs and origin.
• Search Engines – ensure money spent on SEO and PPC is justified.
• Search Keywords and Phrases –use info from search queries to refine marketing message and materials.

Note that the raw data for the above metrics is not useful by itself
because your most important metric is the relationship between your
current and previous data measurements. As indicators of change, the
above KPIs can alert you to the ever-changing quality and quantity of
your visiting traffic, and this may call for additional research.