8 Ways to Tell if Your Digital Marketing Plan is Working

This is the one most people will likely think of first when evaluating a website. This can take the shape of individual sessions (counting each instance a person spends time on your website), visitors (total number of unique people who visited your website), or pageviews (the number of individual webpages seen in total). These trends can be easily mapped over time and filtered to categories more relevant to you. If your business is in Michigan, for example, knowing how many Michiganders visited may be more important to you than the grand total.

It’s not enough for someone to visit your website if they’re not sticking around to take in the information. Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who quickly leave a page. A good rate can vary by industry and other factors. Generally-speaking, though, anything below 50% is favorable (insert your own joke about attention spans on the Internet). Higher bounce rates may indicate a page with content that is not engaging, or one funneling the wrong type of audience toward it.

What words—when people search them—do you want to appear as a result for? Knowing how many people have arrived to your website after searching for these words is a great indicator of whether Google is viewing your website as a good source for that information, or not. Google unfortunately tends to play this data close to its vest, but there are other sources to turn to.

One of the factors Google utilizes to determine higher-ranking sources is the amount of time users who searched for certain things ultimately spend on that source. The higher the average time per visitor, the more likely Google will boost a page’s ranking for certain keywords. The best way to reach these heights? Engaging, appealing, and informative content. An average of 2 minutes is a respectable goal, but reaching higher averages is even better.

This is an overall score of 1-100 given to a collective website as a measure of its likely search ranking strength. These scores are typically proprietary, given by companies such as Moz based on their own criteria. They can still be a good way to gauge strength against averages over time.

When another website links to your own, a backlink is formed. Backlinks can be a factor in search rankings, but more is not always necessarily better. Google will evaluate the reliability factor of the website doing the linking and consider that in its process. The more reputable and well-known the pages that link to you are, the better of an effect they are likely to have on your overall ranking performance. The first step of building effective backlinking? You guessed it: having good content others will want to link to.

While it takes a lot of individual work, website ranking is not a single-player game. Your website competes against others; especially those in your area. If your competitors are also working hard on their digital marketing, it will pay to know how they are doing and where they seem to be excelling or concentrating their attention This is a good example of when you might need to call an audible on your strategy to revise your content, change the keywords you want to focus on, or consider additional support such as ads.