Episode summary
Marketers today face data overload with hundreds of metrics to track. However, as Phil explains, not all metrics provide actionable insights. It's essential to focus tracking efforts on the website metrics that offer clear guidance for optimising performance.
Phil outlines the types of metrics that are most important to pay attention to, such as those related to traffic, engagement, and conversions. Analysing trends in these numbers over time offers crucial understanding of how visitors interact with your site so you can refine your website to convert more buyers.
By tracking the right metrics, you can gain data-driven insights to boost website success rather than drowning in superfluous data.
Episode transcript
So when it comes to the metrics that you should be tracking for your B2B website and its performance, they fall, I think, into three categories.
1. Commercial metrics
The critical ones, the essential ones, the ones that are, I think by far the most important are going to be... Traffic, number of visitors and sessions to your website, high-intent conversions.
Visitors that go on to fill out a form that indicates their intent and interest to purchase. Pipeline value generated from those conversions and ultimately revenue.
And those things are above all else the ones that matter because they align you with your desired outcome, with your buyers behaviour.
2. SEO metrics
Second, to those, I think it's worthwhile having some sort of site health or SEO score available. Most SEO tools can give you an indication of that so that you can monitor and address issues that might impact your ability to be found by your buyer.
And in a similar vein, your position for the key commercial keywords that you know you want to be found for is useful data to have available.
3. On-page website metrics
The third category of data that I think most marketers should have available but try not to obsess about, are things like:
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- Duration of visit
- Pages per visit
All the things that Google Analytics and other tools can easily track and tell you when you need.
But those are the metrics that I think are least informative when it comes to making decisions about how you market yourself and how you communicate to your buyer.
So the reason I put them into those three categories is because metrics are an interesting thing. Marketers are taught to obsess over metrics and surround themselves with as many metrics and as much data as they can get their hands on.
But certainly in the current environment, so few of those metrics truly indicate anything important about what your buyers want or need from you.
And if you obsess over them, if you become obsessed with your bounce rate or the number of visits per page, you can start to work on things that bear no relevance to the buyer journey the path to purchase or the things that help people buy from you. So it can become really counterproductive.
And the number of tools that are available to us that can produce and create huge amounts of data, I think is a really dangerous thing because it can take away all the time that you've got to really think about and understand your buyer and do the things that make your website more useful, more relevant, more attractive to them and be totally sidetracked.
So caution is advised when it comes to which metrics to prioritise.
Going back to the ones that are most valuable in a B2B demand generation strategy.
The website is a pivotal tool with the ability to take a good, fit visitor, an ideal customer who's arrived at your site give them the information they need and want, and take them on a journey that results in them feeling able and willing to express their interest, to convert and tell you they want to talk to you, and then go on and book time in your diary or take the demo that you offer.
That is the thing that's critical to the creation of pipeline and that is the thing to optimise and that's the thing to produce, to obtain metrics that help you inform your decision.
Website speed and performance
Performance is, of course, important in B2B website marketing, and it's important to know that your website performs adequately.
The good news is that once you've created a website that scores acceptably in terms of page speed and core web vitals, that situation doesn't usually degrade rapidly.
So it's not a metric that I think you need to monitor daily.
And again, a change in it isn't going to help you know your buyer better, but you do need to ensure that the website that you build performs to the required level.
It's worth keeping an eye on that so that you don't fall foul of a large change that would result in buyers leaving your website before they should.
But it's not a metric that I think is a guiding light in terms of B2B marketing.
It's one of those also, have it available so that you can use it when you need it. But is that because it isn't aligned to the buying journey that we're all trying to optimise for.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is an interesting one. It's not unusual for a marketer to approach an agency with a brief that says reduce our bounce rate.
But I find it really interesting because the irony, I suppose, is that if you're doing really good content marketing, you're creating a good quantity of good quality content that people are discovering in search.
The bounce rate on that will be very high, and that's actually fine.
A 90 plus percent bounce rate on content that you've created to educate your buyer is normal to be expected, and it's fine.
So if you're doing good B2B marketing, I would actually expect bounce rate to go up rather than go down, which is counterintuitive to a lot of what marketers are told about their website.
So I suppose you've either got to split bounce rate in two, which is look at bounce rate on your core website and bounce rate on your content as separate metrics.
But nobody does that, or forget it all together and obsess over creating the content that your buyer wants and needs to make a purchase and focus your energy on that.
When it comes to bounce rate on home page and services pages, they are what they are in my eyes.
I create content and I create sites that I believe align to the interest of the buyer and then I iterate on those and refine them.
I don't use the bounce rate as a directional.
I don't use bounce rate as a stat that directs my energy or my attention.
I use my other metrics that I have about available, the things that I observe happening in the outside world and my knowledge of the buyer to guide me.
Because again, bounce rate is a sort of byproduct of the work that we do. It's not a driving force in the work that we do. We get the bounce rate we deserve in some respects.
And it's more important to create the content that you believe your buyers need because your bounce rate, whether it goes up or down, is not going to tell you what you should create or why.
The core metrics you should focus on
So when it comes to metrics, the absolute number one things to track and monitor are number of visitors you're getting, the traffic you're getting and from which source, by the way.
It's important to analyse this by source. The high-intent conversions that you're getting and the conversion rate from visitor into them, the pipeline generated and the revenue new closed.
Ultimately, it's also really important, as I said, to look at those by source channel, where they're coming from, how they're arriving, and ideally by self-reported attribution, so that you know why they're arriving.
Because those two pieces of data, in addition to or in the context of traffic, high-intent conversions, pipeline and revenue, tell you an awful lot about how to produce more of the result you're looking for.