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16 Website Metrics to Track If You Want to Grow Your Business
9 avril, par ErinConversion rate.
Bounce rate.
Sessions.
There are dozens of metrics to keep up with in web analytics. It can be confusing at times trying to keep up with everything.
But, if you want to improve your website performance and grow your business, you need to know what they are and how they work.
Why?
Because what you measure gets managed. This is true in your personal life and business. You must track various website metrics to help your business reach new heights.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the most important website metrics, why they’re important and how to track them to grow your brand.
What are website metrics?
Your website is your digital headquarters.
It’s not a static place. Instead, it’s a vibrant, interactive hub your visitors and customers can engage with daily.
Every time a user interacts with your website, you can track what’s happening.
Website metrics help you measure how much your visitors and customers interact with your website.
These engagement metrics help you understand what your visitors are doing, where they’re coming from, how they’re moving on your website and how long they stay. They can even give you insights into what their goals are.
If you aren’t tracking your website metrics, you won’t know how effective your website is.
By paying close attention to your key metrics within a web analytics platform like Matomo, you’ll be able to see how well your marketing is doing and how your visitors are engaging so you can improve the user experience and increase conversions.
16 website metrics to track
Here are the top 16 website metrics you need to be tracking if you want to grow your business:
1. Pageviews
A pageview is the number of times a web page has been viewed.
Many pageviews can indicate a successful search engine optimisation (SEO) or marketing campaign — it can be used to show positive results for these initiatives.
It can also help you determine various issues on individual pages. For instance, performance issues or poor website structure can cause visitors to get lost or confused while navigating your website.
2. Average time on page
Average time on a page is simply the time visitors spend on a specific page (not the entire website); tracking users’ time on various pages throughout your website can give you insights that can help you improve certain pages.
If you get tons of traffic to a particular page, but the average time a visitor stays on that page is minimal, the content may need some work.
Tracking this data can help determine if your website is engaging for your visitors or if you need to modify certain aspects to increase your visitors’ stay. Increasing the average time on the page will help boost your conversions and search engine rankings.
3. Actions per visit
Actions per visit is a key metric that tracks the average number of actions a visitor takes every time they visit your website. This data can help you track your audience engagement and the effectiveness of your content across your entire website.
An action is any activity performed by your visitors on your website like:
- Outlinks
- Downloads
- Page views
- Internal site searches
The higher your actions per visit, the more engaging your audience finds your website content. A side effect of increased actions is staying longer on the site and more likely to convert to your email list as a subscriber or pay for products as a customer.
4. Bounce rate
Like a bouncy ball, your website’s bounce rate measures how many users entered your site and “bounced” out without clicking on another page. This metric can be extremely helpful in determining user interest in your content.
You might be getting many visitors to your website, but if they “bounce” after visiting the first page they land on, that’s a great indicator that your content is not resonating with your audience.
Remember, this metric should be taken with a grain of salt.
Your bounce rate may indicate that visitors are finding the exact information that they wanted and leaving pleased, so it’s not a black-and-white metric.
For example, if you have a landing page with a high bounce rate, then that’s likely not a sign of a good user experience. But, if you have a knowledge base article and they just need to find some quick information, then it could be a good indicator.
5. Conversions
The first step in tracking conversions is defining what a conversion is for your website.
Do you want your audience to:
- View a blog post
- Purchase a product
- Download an eBook
- Sign up for a consultation call
Determine what that conversion is and track how often users take that action on your website.
This helps you understand if your marketing and content strategies are working toward your pre-defined conversion goal.
6. Conversion rate
A conversion rate is the percentage of visits that triggered a conversion. Knowing this metric lets you plan, budget, and forecast future growth.
For example, 5% of your website visitors take action and convert to customers. With this information, you can make better informed financial decisions regarding your marketing efforts on your website to help increase traffic and future conversions.
While there are basic conversion rate benchmarks to strive toward, it ultimately depends on your goals and the specific conversions you decide to track that are best for your business.
That being said, Matomo has some best practices to help you optimise your conversion rates, no matter what conversion metric you are tracking.
7. Exit rate
While “bounce rate” and “exit rate” are similar, “exit rate” is the percentage of visits to a website that ended on a particular page.
Knowing which pages have the highest percentage of visitors exiting your website gives you key information on the pages that may need to be improved.
If you see that your “exit rate” is highest on pages before the checkout (or other CTA’s you have established), you will want to dive into what’s causing visitors to leave from that page. For example, maybe it’s the content, the copy or even a broken link.
This is a great metric to help determine where you have breakdowns between you and your visitors. Improving your exit rate can help guide visitors through your website funnel more easily and boost your conversion rates.
8. Top pages
The top pages on your website are the pages that receive the most visits. Understanding what your top pages are can be crucial in planning and guiding your marketing strategies moving forward.
Your top pages can help you determine the most engaging content for your audience. This can be extremely helpful in guiding your visitors to certain pages that other users find more valuable.
It also helps you determine if you need to focus more attention on different parts of your website to increase user engagement in those areas.
For example, maybe your most-viewed pages have less copy and more photos or videos. Understanding this lets you know that incorporating more media into other pages will boost future engagement.
9. Traffic sources
Your traffic sources are the channels that are driving visitors to your website. The four most common traffic sources are:
- Direct Entry: Typing your website URL into their browser or visiting via a bookmark they saved
- Websites/Referral: Clicking on a link to your site from another website
- Search Engines: Using search engines (Google, Bing or Yahoo) to find your website
- Campaigns: Visitors directed to your website through specific marketing campaigns, such as email newsletters, Google Ads, promotional links, etc.
- Social Networks: Visitors accessing your website by clicking on links shared on social media platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, etc.
Understanding where your visitors are coming from can help you focus your marketing efforts on the traffic sources with the highest conversion rates.
Suppose your email marketing campaign isn’t driving any traffic to your website, but your ad campaign is responsible for over 25% of your conversions. In that case, you might consider doubling your advertising efforts.
10. Form average time spent
Forms are a crucial part of your website’s marketing strategy. Forms can help you:
- Learn more about your visitors
- Gather feedback from your audience
- Convert visitors into email subscribers
- And more
Form average time spent is the average amount of time a visitor spends on a specific form on your website. The time is calculated as the difference between the first interaction with a form field (for example, a field focus) and the last interaction with a form.
Want to convert more visitors into leads? Then, you need to understand your form analytics better. Learn more here.
11. Play rate
If you want to keep your audience engaged (and convert more visitors), you need to publish different types of media.
But if your video or audio content isn’t performing well, then you’re wasting your time.
That’s where play rate comes in. It’s calculated by analysing visitors who watched or listened to a specific media after they have visited a web page.
With play rate, you can track any video, podcast, or audiobook plays.
You can easily track it within Matomo’s Media Analytics. The best part? This feature works out of the box, so you don’t need to configure it to start leveraging the analytics.
Try Matomo for Free
Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
12. Returning visitors
Returning visitors are users who visit your website more than once over a specific time.
You will want to measure the number of returning visitors to your website, as this information can give you additional insights into your marketing strategies, company branding and content.
It can also help you better understand your customer base, giving you a clearer sense of their top desires and pain points.
13. Device type
Device type tracks the different devices visitors use to visit your website. These could be:
- Tablets
- Mobile phones
- Desktop computers
Knowing what your visitors are using to access your website can help you improve the overall user experience.
For example, if 80% of your visitors use mobile phones, you could think about optimising your web pages to format with mobile devices.
14. Top exit pages
Top exit pages are the pages that a visitor leaves your website from the most.
Each web page will have a specific exit rate percentage based on how many people leave the website on a particular page.
This can be quite helpful in understanding how visitors interact with your website. It can also help you uncover and fix any issues with your website you may not be aware of.
For instance, one of your product pages has the highest exit rate on your website. By looking into why that is, you discover that your “Add to Cart” button isn’t functioning correctly, and your visitors can’t buy that particular product, so they exit out of frustration.
15. Marketing attribution
Marketing attribution (multi-touch attribution) helps you see which touchpoints have the greatest impact on conversions.
Within Matomo, revenue attribution involves assigning credit for revenue across multiple touchpoints that contribute to a conversion.
Matomo’s multi-touch attribution models use different weighting factors, like linear or time decay, to allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its influence.
Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports provide insights into how revenue is distributed across different touchpoints, marketing channels, campaigns, and actions. These reports allow you to analyse the contribution of each touchpoint to revenue generation and identify the most influential interactions in the customer journey.
Try Matomo for Free
Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
16. Event tracking
Every website has multiple actions a user can perform called “events”. These could be downloading a template, submitting contact information, signing up for a newsletter or clicking a link.
Tracking events can give you additional context into what your visitors are interested in or don’t care about. This allows you to target them better through those events, potentially creating new, unique conversions and boosting the growth of your business.
It can also lead to discovering potential issues within your website if you notice visitors aren’t taking action on certain CTAs, such as broken links or lack of content on certain pages. By uncovering these issues, you can quickly fix them to increase your conversions.
Start tracking your website metrics with Matomo today
There’s much to consider when creating and running your website, such as the design, copy and flow.
While these are necessary, tracking your website’s data is one of the most important aspects of running a site. It’s crucial in helping you optimise your site’s performance and create a great experience for your visitors.
Every interaction a visitor has on your site is unique and leaves valuable clues you can use to improve all aspects of your site experience.
Understanding what your visitors like, what website performance issues they’re running into and how they interact across your website is crucial to improving your marketing and sales efforts.
While tracking this much data can feel overwhelming, having all your key metrics in one place and broken down into easy-to-understand benchmarks can help alleviate the stress and headache of data tracking.
That’s where a web analytics platform like Matomo comes in.
With Matomo, you can easily track, store and analyse every piece of data on your website automatically to improve your site performance and user experience and drive conversions.
With Matomo, you can take back control with a platform that gives you 100% data ownership.
Used on over 1 million websites in over 190 countries, Matomo gives you:
- Accurate data (no data sampling)
- Privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant analytics
- Open-source access to create a custom solution for you
Try Matomo for free for 21 days now. No credit card required.
Try Matomo for Free
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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Incrementality Testing : Quick-Start Guide (With Calculations)
26 mars, par ErinHow do you know when a campaign is successful? When you earn more revenue than last month?
Maybe.
But how do you know how much of an impact a certain campaign or channel had on your sales?
With marketing attribution, you can determine credit for each sale.
But if you want a deeper look, you need to understand the incremental impact of each channel and campaign.
The way you do this?
Incrementality testing.
In this guide, we break down what incrementality is, why it’s important and how to test it so you can double down on the activities driving the most growth.
What is incrementality?
So, what exactly is incrementality?
Let’s say you just ran a marketing campaign for a new product. The launch was a success. Breakthrough numbers in your revenue. You used a variety of channels and activities to bring it all together.
So, you launch a plan for next month’s campaign. But you don’t truly know what moved the needle.
Did you just hit new highs because your audience is bigger? And your brand is greater?
Or did the recent moves you made make a direct difference?
This is incrementality.
Incrementality is growth directly attributed to marketing efforts beyond the overall impact of your brand. By measuring and conducting incrementality testing, you can clearly see how much of a difference each activity or channel truly impacted business growth.
What is incrementality testing?
Incrementality testing allows marketers to gauge the effectiveness of a marketing tactic or strategy. It tells you if a particular marketing activity had a positive, negative or neutral impact on your business.
It also tells you the overall impact it can have on your key performance indicators (KPIs).
The result?
You can pinpoint the highest-performing moves and incorporate them into your marketing workflows. You also discard marketing strategies with negligible, neutral or even negative impacts.
For example, let’s say you think a B2B LinkedIn ads campaign will help you reach your product launch goals. An incrementality test can tell you if the introduction of this campaign will help you get to the desired outcome.
How incrementality testing works
Before diving into your testing phase, you must clearly identify your KPIs.
Here are the top KPIs you should be tracking on your website:
- Ad impressions
- Website visits
- Leads
- Sales
The exact KPIs will depend on your marketing goals. You’re ready to move forward once you know your key performance indicators.
Here’s how incrementality testing works step-by-step:
1. Define a test and control group
The first step is to define a test group and control group.
- A test group is a segment of your target audience that’s exposed to the marketing campaign.
- A control group is a segment that isn’t.
Keep in mind that both groups have similar demographics and other relevant characteristics.
2. Execute your campaign
The second step is to run the marketing campaign on the test group. This can be a Facebook ad, LinkedIn ad or email marketing campaign.
It all depends on your goals and your primary channels.
3. Measure outcomes
The third step is to measure the campaign’s impact based on your KPIs.
Let’s say a brand wants to see if a certain marketing move increases its leads. The test can tell them the number of email sign-ups with and without the campaign.
4. Compare results
Next, compare the test group results with the control group. The difference in outcomes tells you the impact of that campaign. You can then use this difference to inform your future marketing strategies.
With Matomo, you can easily track results from campaigns — like conversions.
Our platform lets you quickly see what channels are getting the best results so you can gain insights into incrementality and optimise your strategy.
Try Matomo for Free
Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Why it’s important to conduct incrementality tests
The digital marketing industry is constantly changing. Marketers need to stay on their toes to keep up. Incrementality tests help you stay on track.
For example, let’s say you’re selling laptops. You can increase your warranty period to three years to see the impact on sales. An incrementality test will tell you if this move will boost your sales (and by how much).
Now, let’s dive into the reasons why you need to consistently conduct incrementality tests:
Determine the right tactics for success
Identifying the best action to grow your business is a challenge every marketer faces.
The best way to identify marketing tactics is by conducting incrementality testing. These tactics are bound to work since data back them. As a result, you can optimise your marketing budget and maximise your ROIs.
It lets you run multiple tests to identify the most impactful strategy between:
- An email marketing strategy
- A social media strategy
- A PPC ad
For instance, an incrementality test might suggest email marketing will be more cost-effective than an ad campaign. What you can do is:
- Expose the test group to the email marketing campaign and then compare the results with the control group
- Expose the test group to the ad campaign and then compare its results with the control group
Then, you can calculate the difference in results between the two marketing campaigns. This lets you focus on the strategy with a better ROI or ROAS potential.
Accurate data
Marketing data is powerful. But getting accurate data can be challenging. With incrementality testing, you get to know the true impact of a marketing campaign.
Plus, with this testing strategy, you don’t have to waste your marketing budget.
With Matomo, you get 100% accurate data on all website activities.
Unlike Google Analytics, Matomo doesn’t rely on inaccurate data sampling — limiting the amount of data analysed.
Try Matomo for Free
Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Get the most out of your marketing investment
Every business owner wants to maximise their return on investment. The ROI you get mainly depends on the marketing strategy.
For instance, email marketing offers an ROI of about 40:1 with some sources even reporting as high as 72:1.
Incrementality testing helps you make informed investment decisions. With it, you can pinpoint the tactics that are most likely to bring the highest return. You can then focus your resources on them. It also helps you stay away from low-performing strategies.
Increase revenue
It’s safe to say that the goal behind every marketing effort is a revenue boost. The higher your revenue, the more profits you generate. However, for many marketers, it’s an uphill battle.
With incrementality testing, you can boost your revenue by focusing your efforts in the right direction.
Get more traffic
Incrementality testing tells you if a particular strategy can help you drive more traffic. You can use it to get more high-quality leads to your website or landing pages and double down on high-traffic strategies to increase those leads.
How to test incrementality
Developing an implementation plan is crucial to generate accurate insights from an incrementality test. Incrementality testing is like running a science experience. You need to go through several stages. Each stage is important for generating accurate results.
Here’s how you test incrementality:
Define your goals
Get clarity on what you want to achieve with this campaign. Which KPIs do you want to test? Is it the return on your overall investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS) or something else?
Segment your audience
Selecting the right audience segment is crucial to getting accurate insights with an incrementality test. Decide the demographics and psychographics of the audience you want to target. Then, divide this audience segment into two sub-parts:
- Test group (people you’ll expose to the marketing campaign)
- Control group (people who won’t be exposed to the campaign)
These groups are a part of the larger segment. This means people in both groups will have similar attributes.
Launch the test at the right time
Before the launch, decide on the length of the test. Ideally, it should be at least one week. Don’t run any other campaigns in this window, as it can interfere with the results.
Analyse the data and take action
Once the campaign is over, measure the results from both groups. Compare the data to identify incremental lift in your selected KPIs.
Let’s say you want to see if this campaign can boost your sales. Check to see if the test group responded differently than the control group. If the sales equal your desired outcome, you have a winning strategy.
Not all incrementality tests result in a positive incremental lift; Some can be neutral, indicating that the campaign didn’t have any effect. Some can even indicate a negative lift, which means your core group performed better than the test group.
Lastly, take action based on the test findings.
Incrementality test examples
You can use incrementality testing to identify gaps and growth opportunities in your strategy.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say a company runs an incrementality test on a YouTube marketing strategy for sales. The results indicate that the ROI was only $0.10, as the company makes $1.10 for every $1.00 spent. This alarms the marketing department and helps them optimise the campaign for a higher ROI.
Here’s another practical example:
Let’s say a retail business wanted to test the effectiveness of its ad campaign. So, the retailer optimises its ad campaign after conducting an incrementality test on a test and control group. As a result, they experienced a 34% incremental increase in sales.
How to calculate incrementality in marketing
Once you’ve aggregated the data, it’s time to calculate. There are two ways to calculate incrementality:
Incremental profit
The first one is incremental profit. It tells you how much profit you can generate with a strategy (If any). With it, you get the actual value of a marketing campaign.
It’s calculated with the following formula:
Test group profit – control group profit = incremental profit
For example, let’s say you’re exposing a test group to a paid ads campaign. And it generates a profit of $3,000. On the other hand, the control group generated a $2,000 profit.
In this case, your incremental profit will be $1,000 ($3,000 – $2,000).
However, if the paid ads campaign generates a $2,000 profit, the incremental profit would be zero. Essentially, you’re generating the same profit as before, which means the campaign doesn’t work. Similarly, a marketing strategy is no good if it generates lower profits than the control group.
Incremental lift
Incremental lift measures the difference in the conversions you generate with each group.
Here’s the formula:
(Test – Control)/Control x 100 = Lift
So, let’s say the test group and control group generated 2,000 and 1,000 conversions, respectively.
The incremental lift you’ll get from this incrementality test would be:
(2,000 – 1,000)/1,000 x 100 = 100
This turns out to be a 100% incremental lift.
How to track incrementality with Matomo
Incrementality testing lets you use a practical approach to identify the best marketing path for your business.
It helps you develop a hyper-focused approach that gives you access to accurate and practical data.
With these insights, you can confidently move forward to maximise your ROI since it helps you focus on high-performing tactics.
The result is more revenue and profit for your business.
Plus, all you need to do is identify your target audience, divide them into two groups and run your test. Then, the results will be compared to determine if the marketing strategy offers any value.
Conducting incrementality tests may take time and expertise.
But, thanks to Matomo, you can leverage accurate insights for your incrementality tests to ensure you make the right decisions to grow your business.
See for yourself why over 1 million websites choose Matomo. Try it free for 21-days now. No credit card required.
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21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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7 Benefits Segmentation Examples + How to Get Started
26 mars, par ErinEvery copywriter knows the importance of selling a product’s benefits, not its features. So why should your marketing efforts be different?
Answer: they shouldn’t.
It’s time to stop using demographic or behavioural traits to group customers and start using benefits segmentation instead.
Benefits segmentation groups your customers based on the value they get from your product or service. In this article, we’ll cover seven real-life examples of benefits segmentation, explain why it’s so powerful and show how to get started today.
What is benefits segmentation?
Benefits segmentation is a way for marketers to group their target market based on the value they get from their products or services. It is a form of customer segment marketing. Other types of market segmentation include:
- Geographic segmentation
- Demographic segmentation
- Psychographic segmentation
- Behavioural segmentation
- Firmographic segmentation
Customers could be the same age, from the same industry and live in the same location but want drastically different things from the same product. Some may like the design of your products, others the function, and still more the price.
Whatever the benefits, you can make your marketing more effective by building advertising campaigns around them.
Why use benefits segmentation?
Appealing to the perceived benefits of your product is a powerful marketing strategy. Here are the advantages of you benefit segmentation can expect:
More effective marketing campaigns
Identifying different benefits segments lets you create much more targeted marketing campaigns. Rather than appeal to a broad customer base, you can create specific ads and campaigns that speak to a small part of your target audience.
These campaigns tend to be much more powerful. Benefits-focused messaging better resonates with your audience, making potential customers more likely to convert.
Better customer experience
Customers use your products for a reason. By showing you understand their needs through benefits segmentation, you deliver a much better customer experience — in terms of messaging and how you develop new products.
In today’s world, experience matters. 80% of customers say a company’s experience is as important as its products and services.
Stronger customer loyalty
When products or services are highly targeted at potential customers, they are more likely to return. More than one-third (36%) of customers would return to a brand if they had a positive experience, even if cheaper or more convenient alternatives exist.
Using benefits segmentation will also help you attract the right kind of people in the first place — people who will become long-term customers because your benefits align with their needs.
Improved products and services
Benefits segmentation makes it easier to tailor products or services to your audiences’ wants and needs.
Rather than creating a product meant to appeal to everyone but doesn’t fulfil a real need, your team can create different ranges of the same product that target different benefits segments.
Higher conversion rates
Personalising your pitch to individual customers is powerful. It drives performance and creates better outcomes for your target customer. Companies that grow faster drive 40 per cent more revenue from personalisation than their slower-growing counterparts.
When sales reps understand your product’s benefits, talking to customers about them and demonstrating how the product solves particular pain points is much easier.
In short, benefits segmentation can lead to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment.
7 examples of benefits segmentation
Let’s take a look at seven examples of real-life benefits segmentation to improve your understanding:
Nectar
Mattress manufacturer Nectar does a great job segmenting their product range by customer benefits. That’s a good thing, given how many different things people want from their mattress.
It’s not just a case of targeting back sleepers vs. side sleepers; they focus on more specific benefits like support and cooling.
Take a look at the screenshot above. Nectar mentions the benefits of each mattress in multiple places, making it easy for customers to find the perfect mattress. If you care about value, for example, you might choose “The Nectar.” If pressure relief and cooling are important to you, you might pick the “Nectar Premier.”
24 Hour Fitness
A gym is a gym is a gym, right? Not when people use it to achieve different goals, it’s not. And that’s what 24 Hour Fitness exploits when they sell memberships to their audience.
As you can see from its sales page, 24 Hour Fitness targets the benefits that different customers get from their products:
Customers who just care about getting access to weights and treadmills for as cheap as possible can buy the Silver Membership.
But getting fit isn’t the only reason people go to the gym. That’s why 24 Hour Fitness targets its Gold Membership to those who want the “camaraderie” of studio classes led by “expert instructors.”
Finally, some people value being able to access any club, anywhere in the country. Consumers value flexibility greatly, so 24 Hour Fitness limits this perk to its top-tier membership.
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one productivity and note-taking app that aims to be the only productivity tool people and teams need. Trying to be everything to all people rarely works, however, which is why Notion cleverly tweaks its offering to appeal to the desires of different customer segments:
For price-conscious individuals, it provides a pared solution that doesn’t bloat the user experience with features or benefits these consumers don’t care about.
The Plus tier is the standard offering for teams who need a way to collaborate online. Still, there are two additional tiers for businesses that target specific benefits only certain teams need.
For teams that benefit from a longer history or additional functionality like a bulk export, Notion offers the Business tier at almost double the price of the standard Plus tier. Finally, the Enterprise tier for businesses requires much more advanced security features.
Apple
Apple is another example of a brand that designs and markets products to customers based on specific benefits.
Why doesn’t Apple just make one really good laptop? Because customers want different things from them. Some want the lightest or smallest laptop possible. Others need ones with higher processing power or larger screens.
One product can’t possibly deliver all those benefits. So, by understanding the precise reasons people need a laptop, Apple can create and market products around the benefits that are most likely to be sold.
Tesla
In the same way Apple understands that consumers need different things from their laptops, Tesla understands that consumers derive different benefits from their cars.
It’s why the company sells four cars (and now a truck) that cover various sizes, top speeds, price points and more.
Tesla even asks customers about the benefits they want from their car when helping them to choose a vehicle. By asking customers to pick how they will use their new vehicle, Tesla can ensure the car’s benefits match up to the consumers’ goals.
Dynamite Brands
Dynamite Brands is a multi-brand, community-based business that targets remote entrepreneurs around the globe. But even this heavily niched-down business still needs to create benefit segments to serve its audience better.
It’s why the company has built several different brands instead of trying to serve every customer under a single banner:
If you just want to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs, you can join the Dynamite Circle, for example. But DC Black might be a better choice if you care more about networking and growing your business.
It’s the same with the two recruiting brands. Dynamite Jobs targets companies that just want access to a large talent pool. Remote First Recruiting targets businesses that benefit from a more hands-on approach to hiring where a partner does the bulk of the work.
Garmin
Do you want your watch to tell the time or do you want it to do more? If you fall into the latter category, Garmin has designed dozens of watches that target various benefits.
Do you want a watch that tracks your fitness without looking ugly? Buy the Venu.
Want a watch designed for runners? Buy the Forerunner.
Do you need a watch that can keep pace with your outdoor lifestyle? Buy the Instinct.
Just like Apple, Garmin can’t possibly design a single watch that delivers all these benefits. Instead, each watch is carefully built for the target customer’s needs. Yes, it makes the target market smaller, but it makes the product more appealing to those who care about those benefits.
How to get started with benefits segmentation
According to Gartner, 63% of digital marketing leaders struggle with personalisation. Don’t be one of them. Here’s how you can improve your personalisation efforts using benefits segmentation.
Research and define benefits
The first step to getting started with benefit segmentation is understanding all the benefits customers get from your products.
You probably already know some of the benefits, but don’t underestimate the importance of customer research. Hold focus groups, survey customers and read customer reviews to discover what customers love about your products.
Create benefit-focused customer personas
Now you understand the benefits, it’s time to create customer personas that reflect them. Group consumers who like similar benefits and see if they have any other similarities.
Price-conscious consumers may be younger. Maybe people who care about performance have a certain type of job. The more you can do to flesh out what the average benefits-focused consumer looks like, the easier it will be to create campaigns.
Create campaigns focused on each benefit
Now, we get to the fun part. Make the benefit-focused customer personas you created in the last step the focus of your marketing campaigns going forward.
Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Just make your campaigns appeal to these people.
Go deeper with segmentation analytics
The quality of your benefit segmentation strategy hinges on the quality of your data. That’s why using a an accurate web analytics solution like Matomo to track how each segment behaves online using segmentation analytics is important.
This data can make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective.
Benefits segmentation in practice
Let’s say you have an e-commerce website selling a wide range of household items, and you want to create a benefit segment for “Tech Enthusiasts” who are interested in the latest gadgets and cutting-edge technology. You want to track and analyse their behaviour separately to tailor marketing campaigns or website content specifically for this group.
- Identify characteristics: Determine key characteristics or behaviours that define the “Tech Enthusiasts” segment.
This might include frequent visits to product pages of the latest tech products, site searches that contain different tech product names, engaging with tech-specific content in emails or spending more time on technology-related blog posts.
One quick and surefire way to identify characteristics of a segment is to look historically at specific tech product purchases in your Matomo and work your way backwards to find out what steps a “Tech Enthusiast” takes before making a purchase. For instance, you might look at User Flows to discover this.
- Create segments in Matomo: Using Matomo’s segmentation features, you can create a segment that includes users exhibiting these characteristics. For instance:
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- Segment by page visits: Create a segment that includes users who visited tech product pages or spent time on tech blogs.
- Segment by event tracking: If you’ve set up event tracking for specific actions (like clicking on “New Tech” category buttons), create a segment based on these events.
- Combine conditions: Combine various conditions (e.g., pages visited, time spent, specific actions taken) to create a comprehensive segment that accurately represents “Tech Enthusiasts.”
- Track and analyse: Apply this segment to your analytics data in Matomo to track and analyse the behaviour of this group separately. Monitor metrics like their conversion rates, time spent on site or specific products they engage with.
- Tailor marketing: Use the insights from analysing this segment to tailor marketing strategies. This could involve creating targeted campaigns or customising website content to cater specifically to these users.
Remember, the key is to define criteria that accurately represent the segment you want to target, use Matomo’s segmentation tools to isolate this group, and effectively derive actionable insights to cater to their preferences or needs.
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Track your segmentation efforts
Benefits segmentation is a fantastic way to improve your marketing. It can help you deliver a better customer experience, improve your product offering and help your sales reps close more deals.
Segmenting your audience with an analytics platform lets you go even deeper. But doing so in a privacy-sensitive way can be difficult.
That’s why over 1 million websites choose Matomo as their web analytics solution. Matomo provides exceptional segmentation capabilities while remaining 100% accurate and compliant with global privacy laws.
Find out how Matomo’s insights can level up your marketing efforts with our 21-day free trial, no credit card required.
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What Is Incrementality & Why Is It Important in Marketing ?
26 mars, par ErinImagine this: you just launched your latest campaign and it was a major success.
You blew last month’s results out of the water.
You combined a variety of tactics, channels and ad creatives to make it work.
Now, it’s time to build the next campaign.
The only issue?
You don’t know what made it successful or how much your recent efforts impacted the results.
You’ve been building your brand for years. You’ve built up a variety of marketing pillars that are working for you. So, how do you know how much of your campaign is from years of effort or a new tactic you just implemented?
The key is incrementality.
This is a way to properly attribute the right weight to your marketing tactics.
In this article, we break down what incrementality is in marketing, how it differs from traditional attribution and how you can calculate and track it to grow your business.
What is incrementality in marketing?
Incrementality in marketing is growth that can be directly credited to a marketing effort above and beyond the success of the branding.
It looks at how much a specific tactic positively impacted a campaign on top of overall branding and marketing strategies.
For example, this could be how much a specific tactic, campaign or channel helped increase conversions, email sign-ups or organic traffic.
The primary purpose of incrementally in marketing is to more accurately determine the impact a single marketing variable had on the success of a project.
It removes every other factor and isolates the specific method to help marketers double down on that strategy or move on to new tactics.
With Matomo, you can track conversions simply. With our last non-direct channel attribution system, you’ll be able to quickly see what channels are converting (and which aren’t) so you can gain insights into incrementality.
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How incrementality differs from attribution
In marketing and advertising, it’s crucial to understand what tactics and activities drive growth.
Incrementality and attribution help marketers and business owners understand what efforts impact their results.
But they’re not the same.
Here’s how they differ:
Incrementality explained
Incrementality measures how much a specific marketing campaign or activity drives additional sales or growth.
Simply put, it’s analysing the difference between having never implemented the campaign (or tactic or channel) in the first place versus the impact of the activity.
In other words, how much revenue would you have generated this month without campaign A?
And how much additional revenue did you generate directly due to campaign A?
The reality is that dozens of factors impact revenue and growth.
You aren’t just pouring your marketing into one specific channel or campaign at a time.
Chances are, you’ve got your hands on several marketing initiatives like SEO, PPC, organic social media, paid search, email marketing and more.
Beyond that, you’ve built a brand with a not-so-tangible impact on your recurring revenue.
So, the question is, if you took away your new campaign, would you still be generating the same amount of revenue?
And, if you add in that campaign, how much additional revenue and growth did it directly create?
That is incrementality. It’s how much a campaign went above and beyond to add new revenue that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
So, how does attribution play into all of this?
Attribution explained
Attribution is simply the process of assigning credit for a conversion to a particular marketing touchpoint.
While incrementality is about narrowing down the overall revenue impact from a particular campaign, attribution seeks to point to a specific channel to attribute a sale.
For example, in any given marketing campaign, you have a few marketing tactics.
Let’s say you’re launching a limited-time product.
You might have:
- Paid ads via Facebook and Instagram
- A blog post sharing how the product works
- Organic social media posts on Instagram and TikTok
- Email waitlist campaign building excitement around the upcoming product
- SMS campaigns to share a limited-time discount
So, when the time comes for the sale launch, and you generate $30,000 in revenue, what channel gets the credit?
Do you give credit to the paid ads on Facebook? What about Instagram? They got people to follow you and got them on the email waitlist.
Do you give credit to email for reminding people of the upcoming sale? What about your social media posts that reminded people there?
Or do you credit your SMS campaign that shared a limited-time discount?
Which channel is responsible for the sale?
This is what attribution is all about.
It’s about giving credit where credit is due.
The reason you want to attribute credit? So you know what’s working and can double down your efforts on the high-impact marketing activities and channels.
Leveraging incrementality and attribution together
Incrementality and attribution aren’t competing methods of analysing what’s working.
They’re complementary to one another and go hand in hand.
You can (and should) use attribution and incrementality in your marketing to help understand what activities, campaigns and channels are making the biggest incremental impact on your business growth.
Why it’s important to measure incrementality
Incrementality is crucial to measure if you want to pour your time, money and effort into the right marketing channels and tactics.
Here are a few reasons why you need to measure incrementality if you want to be successful with your marketing and grow your business:
1. Accurate data
If you want to be an effective marketer, you need to be accurate.
You can’t blindly start marketing campaigns in hopes that you will sell many products or services.
That’s not how it works.
Sure, you’ll probably make some sales here and there. But to truly be effective with your work, you must measure your activities and channels correctly.
Incrementality helps you see how each channel, tactic or campaign made a difference in your marketing.
Matomo gives you 100% accurate data on your website activities. Unlike Google Analytics, we don’t use data sampling which limits how much data is analysed.
2. Helps you to best determine the right tactics for success
How can you plan your marketing strategy if you don’t know what’s working?
Think about it.
You’ll be blindly sailing the seas without a compass telling you where to go.
Measuring incrementality in your marketing tactics and channels helps you understand the best tactics.
It shows you what’s moving the needle (and what’s not).
Once you can see the most impactful tactics and channels, you can forge future campaigns that you know will work.
3. Allows you to get the most out of your marketing budget
Since incrementality sheds light on what’s moving your business forward, you can confidently implement your efforts on the right tactics and channels.
Guess what happens when you start doubling down on the most impactful activities?
You start increasing revenue, decreasing ad spend and getting a higher return on investment.
The result is that you will get more out of your marketing budget.
Not only will you boost revenue, but you’ll also be able to boost profit margins since you’re not wasting money on ineffective tactics.
4. Increase traffic
When you see what’s truly working in your business, you can figure out what channels and tactics you should be working.
Incrementality helps you understand not only what your best revenue tactics are but also what channels and campaigns are bringing in the most traffic.
When you can increase traffic, you can increase your overall marketing impact.
5. Increase revenue
Finally, with increased traffic, the inevitable result is more conversions.
More conversions mean more revenue.
Incrementality gives you a vision of the tactics and channels that are converting the best.
If you can see that your SMS campaigns are driving the best ROI, then you know that you’ll grow your revenue by pouring more into acquiring SMS leads.
By calculating incrementality regularly, you can rest assured that you’re only investing time and money into the most impactful activities in terms of revenue generation.
How to calculate and test incrementality in marketing
Now that you understand how incrementality works and why it’s important to calculate, the question is:
How do you calculate and conduct incrementality tests?
Given the ever-changing marketing landscape, it’s crucial to understand how to calculate and test incrementally in your business.
If you’re not sure how incrementality testing works, then follow these simple steps:
Your first step to get an incrementality measurement is to conduct what’s referred to as a “holdout test.”
It’s not a robust test, but it’s an easy way to get the ball rolling with incrementality.
Here’s how it works:
- Choose your target audience.
With Matomo’s segmentation feature, you can get pretty specific with your target audience, such as:
- Visitors from the UK
- Returning visitors
- Mobile users
- Visitors who clicked on a specific ad
- Split your audience into two groups:
- Control group (60% of the segment)
- Test group (40% of the segment)
- Target the control group with your marketing tactic (the simpler the tactic, the better).
- Target the test group with a different marketing tactic.
- Analyse the results. The difference between the control and test groups is the incremental lift in results. The new marketing tactic is either more effective or not.
- Repeat the test with a new control group (with an updated tactic) and a new test group (with a new tactic).
Matomo can help you analyse the results of your campaigns in our Goals feature. Set up business objectives so you can easily track different goals like conversions.
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Here’s an example of how this incrementality testing could look in real life.
Imagine a fitness retailer wants to start showing Facebook ads in their marketing mix.
The marketing manager decided to conduct a holdout test. If we match our example below with the steps above, this is how the holdout test might look.
- They choose people who’ve purchased free weights in the past as their target audience (see how that segmentation works?).
- They split this segment into a control group and a test group.
- For this test, they direct their regular marketing campaign to the control group (60% of the segment). The campaign includes promoting a 20% off sale on organic social media posts, email marketing, and SMS.
- They direct their regular marketing campaign plus Facebook ads to the test group (40% of the segment).
- They ran the campaign for three weeks with the goal for sale conversions and noticed:
- The control group had a 1.5% conversion rate.
- The test group (with Facebook ads) had a 2.1% conversion rate.
- In this scenario, they could see the group who saw the Facebook ads convert better.
- They created the following formula to measure the incremental lift of the Facebook ads:
- The control group had a 1.5% conversion rate.
- Here’s how the calculation works out: (2.1% – 1.5%) / 1.5% = 40%
The Facebook ads had a positive 40% incremental lift in conversions during the sale.
Incrementality testing isn’t a one-and-done process, though.
While this first test is a great sign for the marketing manager, it doesn’t mean they should immediately throw all their money into Facebook ads.
They should continue conducting tests to verify the initial test.
Use Matomo to track incrementality today
Incrementality can give you insights into exactly what’s working in your marketing (and what’s not) so you can design proven strategies to grow your business.
If you want more help tracking your marketing efforts, try Matomo today.
Our web analytics and behaviour analytics platform gives you firsthand data on your website visitors you can use to craft effective marketing strategies.
Matomo provides 100% accurate data. Unlike other major web analytics platforms, we don’t do data sampling. What you see is what’s really going on in your website. That way, you can make more informed decisions for better results.
At Matomo, we take privacy very seriously and include several advanced privacy protections to ensure you are in full control.
As a fully compliant web analytics solution, we’re fully compliant with some of the world’s strictest privacy regulations like GDPR. With Matomo, you get peace of mind knowing you can make data-driven decisions while also being compliant.
If you’re ready to launch a data-driven marketing strategy today and grow your business, get started with our 21-day free trial now. No credit card required.
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CRO Audit : Increase Your Conversions in 10 Simple Steps
25 mars, par ErinYou have two options if you’re unhappy with your website’s conversion rates.
The first is to implement a couple of random tactics you heard on that marketing podcast, which worked for a business completely unrelated to yours.
The other is to take a more systematic, measured approach. An approach that finds specific problems with the pages on your site and fixes them one by one.
You’re choosing the second option, right?
Good, then let’s explain what a conversion rate optimisation audit is and how you can complete one using our step-by-step process.
What is a CRO audit?
A conversion rate optimisation audit (CRO audit) systematically evaluates your website. It identifies opportunities to enhance your website’s performance and improve conversion rates.
During the audit, you’ll analyse your website’s entire customer journey, collect valuable user behaviour data and cross reference that with web analytics to find site elements (forms, calls-to-actions, etc.) that you can optimise.
It’s one (and usually the first) part of a wider CRO strategy.
For example, an online retailer might run a CRO audit to discover why cart abandonment rates are high. The audit may throw up several potential problems (like a confusing checkout form and poor navigation), which the retailer can then spend time optimising using A/B tests.
Why run a CRO audit?
A CRO audit can be a lot of work, but it’s well worth the effort. Here are the benefits you can expect from running one.
Generate targeted and relevant insights
You’ve probably already tested some “best practice” conversion rate optimisations, like changing the colour of your CTA button, adding social proof or highlighting benefits to your headlines.
These are great, but they aren’t tailored to your audience. Running a CRO audit will ensure you find (and rectify) the conversion bottlenecks and barriers that impact your users, not someone else’s.
Improve conversion rates
Ultimately, CRO audits are about improving conversion rates and increasing revenue. Finding and eliminating barriers to conversion makes it much more likely that users will convert.
But that’s not all. CRO audits also improve the user experience and customer satisfaction. The audit process will help you understand how users behave on your website, allowing you to create a more user-friendly customer experience.
A 10-step process for running your first CRO audit
Want to conduct your first CRO audit? Follow the ten-step process we outline below:
1. Define your goals
Start your CRO audit by setting conversion goals that marry with the wider goals of your business. The more clearly you define your goals, the easier it will be to evaluate your website for opportunities.
Your goals could include:
- Booking more trials
- Getting more email subscribers
- Reducing cart abandonments
You should also define the specific actions users need to take for you to achieve these goals. For example, users will have to click on your call-to-action and complete a form to book more trials. On the other hand, reducing cart abandonments requires users to add items to their cart and click through all of the forms during the checkout process.
If you’re unsure where to start, we recommend reading our CRO statistics roundup to see how your site compares to industry averages for metrics like conversion and click-through rates.
You’ll also want to ensure you track these conversion goals in your web analytics software. In Matomo, it only takes a few minutes to set up a new conversion goal, and the goals dashboard makes it easy to see your performance at a glance.
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2. Review your analytics
With your goals in mind, the next step is to dive into your website analytics and identify pages that need improvement.
Consider the following conversion metrics when analysing pages:
- Conversion rate
- Average time on page
- Average order value
- Click-through rate
Ensure you’re analysing metrics aligning with the goals you set in step one. Average order value could be a great metric to track if you want to reduce cart abandonments, for example, but it’s unsuitable to get more email subscribers.
3. Research the user experience
Next, you’ll want to gather user experience data to better understand how potential customers use your website and why they aren’t converting as often as you’d like.
You can use several tools for user behaviour analysis, but we recommend heatmaps and session recordings.
Heatmaps visually represent how users click, move and scroll your website. It will show where visitors place their attention and which page elements are ignored.
Take a look at this example below from our website. As you can see, the navigation, headline and CTA get the most attention. If we weren’t seeing as many conversions as we liked and our CTAs were getting ignored, that might be a sign to change their colour or placement.
Session recordings capture the actions users take as they browse your website. They let you watch a video playback of how visitors behave, capturing clicks and scrolls so you can see each visitor’s steps in order.
Session recordings will show you how users navigate and where they drop off.
4. Analyse your forms
Whether your forms are too confusing or too long, there are plenty of reasons for users to abandon your forms.
But how many forms are they abandoning exactly and which forms are there?
That’s what form analysis is for.
Running a form analysis will highlight which forms need work and reveal whether forms could be contributing to a page’s poor conversion rate. It’s how Concrete CMS tripled its leads in just a few days.
Matomo’s Form Analytics feature makes running form analysis easy.
Just open up the forms dashboard to get a snapshot of your forms’ key metrics, including average hesitation time, starter rate and submission rates.
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5. Analyse your conversion funnel
Next, analyse the conversion funnel to see if there’s an obvious bottleneck or several pages where visitors abandon your desired action. Common conversion abandonment points are shopping carts and forms.
For example, you could find there is a drop-off in conversions between checking out and making a purchase or between booking a demo and signing up for a subscription. Understanding where these drop-offs occur lets you dig deeper and make targeted improvements.
Don’t worry if you’ve got a very long funnel. Start at the bottom and work backward. Problems with the pages at the very end of your funnel tasked with converting customers (landing pages, checkout pages, etc.) will have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. So, it makes sense to start there.
6. Analyse campaigns and traffic sources (marketing attribution)
It’s now time to analyse traffic quality to ensure you’re powering your conversion optimisation efforts with the best traffic possible.
This can also help you find your best customers so you can focus on acquiring more of them and tailoring your optimisation efforts to their preferences.
Run a marketing attribution report to see which traffic sources generate the most conversions and have the highest conversion rates.
Using marketing attribution is crucial here because it gives a fuller picture of how customers move through their journey, recognising the impact of various touchpoints in making a decision, unlike last-click attribution, which only credits the final touchpoint before a conversion.
7. Use surveys and other qualitative data sources
Increase the amount of qualitative data you have access to by speaking directly to customers. Surveys, interviews and other user feedback methods add depth and context to your user behaviour research.
Sure, you aren’t getting feedback from hundreds of customers like you do with heatmaps or session recordings, but the information can sometimes be much richer. Users will often tell you outright why they didn’t take a specific action in a survey response (or what convinced them to convert).
Running surveys is now even easier in Matomo, thanks to the Matomo Surveys third-party plugin. This lets you add a customisable survey popup to your site, the data from which is automatically added to Matomo and can be combined with Matomo segments.
8. Develop a conversion hypothesis
Using all of the insights you’ve gathered up to this point, you can now hypothesise what’s wrong and how you can fix it.
Here’s a template you can use:
This could end up looking something like the following:
Based on evidence gathered from web analytics and heatmaps, moving our signup form above the fold will fix our lack of free trial signups, improving signups by 50%.
Make sure you write your hypothesis down somewhere. Matomo lets you document your hypothesis when creating an A/B test, so it’s easy to reflect on when the test finishes.
9. Run A/B tests
Now, it’s time to put your theory into practice by running an A/B test.
Create an experiment using a platform like Matomo that creates two different versions of your page: the original and one with the change you mentioned in your hypothesis.
There’s no set time for you to run an A/B test. Just keep running it until the outcome is statistically significant. This is something your A/B testing platform should do automatically.
A statistically significant result means it would be very unlikely the outcome doesn’t happen in the long term.
As you can see in the image above, the wide header variation has significantly outperformed both the original and the other variation. So we can be pretty confident about making the change permanent.
If the outcome of your A/B test also validates your conversion hypothesis, you can implement the change. If not, analyse the data, brainstorm another hypothesis and run another A/B test.
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10. Monitor and iterate
You need to develop a culture of continuous improvement to succeed with conversion rate optimisation. That means constantly monitoring your conversion goals and running tests to improve your metrics.
While you don’t need to run a conversion audit every month, you should run audits regularly throughout the year.
How often should you conduct a CRO audit?
You should conduct a CRO audit fairly regularly.
We recommend creating a CRO schedule that sees you run a CRO audit every six to 12 months. That will ensure you continue identifying problem pages and keeping your conversion rates competitive.
Regular CRO audits will also account for evolving consumer behaviours, changes in your industry and your own business goals, all of which can impact your approach conversion rate optimisation.
Run your CRO audit with Matomo
A CRO audit process is the only way you can identify conversion optimisation methods that will work for your site and your target audience. It’s a methodical, data-backed strategy for making targeted improvements to send conversion rates soaring.
There are a lot of steps to complete, but you don’t need dozens of tools to run a CRO audit process.
Just one: Matomo.
Unlike other web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, Matomo has the built-in tools and plugins to help with every step of the CRO audit process, from web analytics to conversion funnel analysis and A/B testing. With its accurate, unsampled data and privacy-friendly tracking, Matomo is the ideal choice for optimising conversions.
Learn how to increase your conversions with Matomo, and start a free 21-day trial today. No credit card required.
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