Details: Ian McLaren; Marketing Strategy

In this article, we are going to take a look at tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business.

Tracking KPIs is important because you need to keep tabs on how your website is performing and what improvements you can make to improve sales. The team at Profitworks understands the value of tracking KPIs. Learn from us how to become a leader in your market.

Now let's take a closer look at what key performance indicators you should keep track of and how!

Tracking KPIs

Marketing Dashboards

A marketing dashboard gathers all of your marketing key performance indicators into one, easy-to-read location to help simplify your analytics. We recently recorded a podcast episode about this, which you can listen to here!

The KPIs that should be tracked in a marketing dashboard include the following:

Goal tracking
Monthly Sales Data
Weekly Traffic Report (Plus Month by Month & Last Week vs. Last Year)
Weekly Conversion Report (Plus Month by Month & Last Week vs. Last Year)
Search Phrases Generating Traffic

There are many benefits to implementing a marketing dashboard and updating it on a weekly basis. First, it's easy to learn and use. Built-in Google Sheets, for example, are easy to learn and use, especially for those who know how to use a spreadsheet. Second, you can begin tracking KPIs including traffic and sales by linking the dashboard to Google Analytics and Search Console.

In addition, the dashboard is highly accessible; you can easily update and view it on any computer or device. And best of all, it's fully customizable to your business.

Here's an example of what we are talking about:

Track traffic on a weekly, monthly and annual basis.

See how many leads you're generating for your business!

Profitworks' Dashboard can be built for you for free! Click here to learn how.

Google Analytics

As mentioned above, one of the important elements of a marketing dashboard is a tie in with Google Analytics. Without connecting your website to this valuable and free tool, tracking KPIs will be very difficult.

Here are some of the most important KPIs that Google Analytics offers:

Top Landing Pages
Bounce Rate
Goal Conversion Rate
Organic vs Paid Sessions
Average Page Load Time

If you're new to Google Analytics, you can sign up for a free online course that will help you learn about Google's measurement tools so that you can grow your business through intelligent data collection and analysis.

Through the beginner's course, you can learn the basic features of Google Analytics including how to create an account, implement tracking code, analyze basic reports, and set up goals and campaign tracking.

Wondering if you should be using Google Analytics for your business? In this video, we highlight three key reasons why Google Analytics is key for your business in growing traffic and leads.

Tracking KPIs: Sales

When evaluating the success of your website, you must evaluate what the goal of your website is.

Most business websites are seeking to generate sales by allowing potential customers to learn about their product(s) and contact them to request a quote and/or purchase their services.

With that goal in mind, there must be a way of tracking it.

Let us assume, for example, that a business generates 50 sales per month of their respective service/product. Of those 50 sales, there will be a wide range of sources where they came from. Sources can include things such as customer referrals, walk-in traffic (from seeing your sign), sales from your website and a magazine/newspaper ad, etc.

You must be able to differentiate where different sales are coming from in order to properly evaluate the strength of your marketing initiatives. This information can be collected very easily by simply asking your customers and incorporating this step as part of your standard sales process.

A great place to start is to complete a scorecard of the results from your website. If you are looking for a quick and easy scorecard to fill out click here.

Profitworks is able to fully assist with sales tracking and provide full sales data in our weekly dashboard.

Competitor Research

Another helpful way to determine the success (or lack thereof) of your website is by tracking how your website's traffic ranking is moving over time compared to the websites of your top competitors. In addition, there are a large number of valuable insights that can be learned from looking at what your competitors are doing (and not doing).

The best free tool that Profitworks is aware of to assess competitor websites is Alexa (free version).

Alexa allows you to punch in a website URL and get an estimated traffic rank for a website, as well as the top keywords that lead to their website. The ranking data is estimating where your website ranks out of all the websites in the world in terms of traffic; the lower the rank number, the better it is and the higher the traffic that website has. So you want to have a lower ranking for your website on Alexa than all of your competitors.

Profitworks uses this data to get traffic estimates for competitor websites. The keyword information is valuable when looking at websites that generate a consistent amount of traffic (100+ per week) as this information can provide ideas for keywords and content that you can target to take away business from your competitors.

For competitor websites with little to no traffic, there no information available about them on Alexa because it is such a small data set. If you would like to see how your website traffic compares to your top competitors you can click here and we will send you back a report free of charge.

Use Alexa data to get traffic estimates for competitor websites.

Profitworks can help you with tracking KPIs!

Profitworks Small Business Services provides website traffic and website conversion optimization services which increase the number of sales generated from a website.

The focus of our services is on increasing sales and providing a positive return on investment.

To learn more about Profitworks click here, and click the button below for our FREE dashboard.

"We saw not only an increase in website traffic, but more importantly in the quality of leads. It means we are spending more time on the things that truly make a difference to our business."

- Dave Mattingly