The success of your business depends on the performance of your Customer’s Journey. I will teach you what metrics you should track for each stage of this journey and how to measure them.
“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.”
Peter Drucker
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs and business owners are running their businesses blind. Around 91% of businesses fail within 10 years and only 3.9% of businesses make $1 million in sales. If companies can improve the performance of the customer’s journey, they will have more chances to survive and increase their revenues.
The Customer’s Journey is divided into three stages:
- Awareness: Buyer tries to identify his current problem
- Consideration: Customer identifies the problem and the potential solutions
- Decision: The client decides the best solution to satisfy his needs
Image Source: Hubspot
KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, are specific metrics that show how a business is performing against its goals. What are the right KPIs, and how do you track and measure such?
Today you will learn how to track 8 KPIs that will help to know if you are doing the right things along the Customer’s journey. You will also learn how to measure them using Google Analytics. Are you ready?
Let’s start with the Awareness Stage. What are the most important KPIs in this stage?
KPI#1 – The number of your Article Views
Use Google Analytics to check the number of views of your articles and get insights about traffic sources, average session duration, and bounce rate. You need to identify what posts are the most popular among your audience and the engagement rate.
If you receive many visits but your visitors left immediately, you need to review your content, because you are bringing the wrong traffic or your content doesn’t match your audience’s expectations.
Go to Google Analytics, click on Behavior/Site Content/All Pages and you will find your most visited web pages, the average session duration, and the bounce rate.
If you want to know the traffic source of your most visited web pages, go to Secondary Dimension, click on acquisitions and choose Source/Medium.
KPI#2 – The number of your Social Shares and the Audience Engagement
The number of your social shares indicates the capacity to outreach to potential customers and businesses, increase the brand reach and build social proof. You need to track the comments and interactions on your content that your target engages the most with.
Fortunately, every social media platforms provide useful analytics functions to get this info. To calculate the average engagement rate you need to add the likes, comments, and shares and divide the total result by the total followers, after that multiply the result by 100.
Average Engagement Rate: Likes+Comments+Shares / Total Followers x 100
LinkedIn Pages provide Analytics of Visitors, Posts, Followers and Employee Advocacy.
Business Manager is a Facebook tool that helps you organize and manage your business. Once you have a Facebook Business Manager Account, you can access many valuable insights about your posts.
If you have a YouTube account, you can select the YouTube Studio and from the Channel Dashboard, select Analytics from the left-hand menu. Toggle between Overview, Reach, Engagement, Audience, and Revenue.
KPI#3 -Number of followers and subscribers
More followers mean more reach and the opportunity to interact with more people and gather feedback on the account and its posts. Check your social media accounts to measure this KPI because these numbers are easily quantifiable. To calculate the audience Growth Rate you just need to divide the new followers by the total followers and multiply by 100.
Growth Rate= New Followers / Total Followers x 100
KPI#4 -Inbound Links
An inbound link is any URL, video, or image on a site other than yours that will bring a user back to your site if clicked. Getting more brand mentions and links means that the industry sees you as a credible and authoritative source. You can find Inbound Links to your site using Google Analytics.
Log into Google Analytics, go to Acquisition/All Traffic and click on Referrals. Select the drop-down menu “secondary dimension” and select “Acquisition” and “Referral Path”. This will show the exact page URL that is linking to your site.
Log into Google Search Console, click on “Links” and you can check “Top linked pages – externally” to identify the pages in your property linked from external pages. After that, click on “Top linking sites” to track the number of unique links to your property from outside your property.
Consideration Stage. The most important goal in this stage is to generate Leads
KPI#5 -Click Through Rate
A low click-through rate (CTR) means that users find your content not relevant. You could be targeting the wrong audience or your offer could be the wrong one. To calculate the click through rate on your website you need to divide the number of clicks on the call to action by the number of times your ad is shown or the visitors go to the page containing the lead magnet.
CTR =Clicks / Impressions x 100
For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%.
You can find the click-through rate of your web pages on Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition/Search Console and click on Landing Pages (the pages through which visitors entered your site) and you will find the CTR of each web page.
Tip. I recommend including a clear call to action (CTA) at the end of every post on your website encouraging visitors to download a lead magnet or a gated resource. Check this video to make your Call to Action more effective.
KPI#6-Cost Per Lead
Analyze what campaigns and content perform better by tracking your cost per lead. To calculate the cost per lead you just need to divide the cost of your campaign by the total number of leads it helped you generate.
Cost Per Lead= Cost of your campaign/Number of leads
You can also use Google Analytics to find your cost per lead. Go to Conversions/ Goals/Overview /Goal Option and select the Goal you previously created, for example, Goal 3 – Registrations.
You can create your specific goals on Admin/View/Goal.
Now we are in the Decision Stage and the main goal is to drive more Sales
KPI#7 -Conversion Rates.
Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period.
Conversion Rate = Number of conversions / Total ad interactions
For example, if you had 50 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be 5%, since 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%.
You can also use Google Analytics to check the conversion rates. Go to Admin/Goals report under Conversion > Goals > Overview, where you can select the goal you’re interested in from a drop-down menu and see relevant data. Previously you should have created this goal.
KPI#8 -Length of Sales Cycle
Measure the length of your sales cycle to understand how long it takes for you to convert your leads. This will help you identify channels that help you generate leads that close faster and have a shorter sales cycle.
Congratulations, now you know what KPIs you should track for each phase of the customer’s journey and how to use Google Analytics to measure them. Don’t limit yourself to measure these KPIs only. You can dive deeper and identify more relevant KPIs depending on your business and marketing plans.
P.S. Before you go, you may also be interested in the following articles:
How to Rank your Product on the First Page of Google even if Nobody Knows it
5 Strategies to Win New Clients at the Consideration Stage
5 Tips to Boost Online Sales in the Buyer’s Decision Stage
4 Ways to Build Trust in Marketing and Earn the CEO’s Support
Why Marketers are not Driving Growth
POST WRITTEN BY
Jose Maria (Chema) Lopez
A Madrid Polytechnic University International MBA has worked as global marketing director in B2B and B2C international leading companies implementing global marketing and communication strategies to ensure business objectives and to optimize brands reputation and visibility on a global level.
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