If You Don't Track These 10 Website Metrics You're At RISK (Ep. 217)

Key Takeaways

when your marketer you get hit by hundreds of metrics that you could potentially keep track of but not all of them are useful at all times some of them I even completely useless and we call them vanity metrics so to try to help you figure out which metrics you should give attention to mark and I are going to share 10 of the metrics that we think are the most important for our business and how to track them and Spergel that these may not be the ones that you think we track so let's get started everyone welcome back to the Atari hacker podcast as you know now we are back to the weekly long format so this is going to be a long episode but it's going to be an interesting one I think you know when I see the amount of time people spend talking about page speed on SEO group versus all the metrics you know they could be like a Kevin birdshot or is like 89% of discussions are PageSpeed for metrics and the rest only gets like 9% or whatever it's like it's terrible so I think that is going to be quite interesting to not talk there's one metric that will talk about PageSpeed though let's talk about the other metrics as oh but before that how's it going mark I was waiting for it's such such a release when you asked me like how it's going it's going great actually yeah yeah and fantastic I never asked you outside of the podcast as well so that's a good way to introduce you without having to think about it and put some segue into it so that's that's how it works really so kind of like my default you know like when I meet people I don't know what to say I just say how is it going and that's that's usually that so if you meet me in real life and I say how's it going I just had no idea what to say to you that second before you know we all have that those the sentences we use right and that's mine so I just gave away my crypto let me let me turn that around how how are you how are you ah it's getting too hot in Budapest but at least we're not logged on so these people start deflected where people start deflecting the question and talking about the weather they really don't know what to say either so you know absolutely yeah I mean I'm okay okay but I'm really hot right now actually the air come to max power just before so I hope people don't hear that in a podcast but that's not the topic of today's podcast so let's jump on to today's podcast and actually I'll let you start actually because you're picking up the first few matrix that we're gonna be showing okay so we're gonna be talking about a lot of metrics today but none of them are as important as this first one because this is what really defines your business and that is net profit so why isn't that profit well it's the amount of revenue make you make your sales last your costs are the cost to produced that those sales minus any expenses or salaries that you have personally it may sound like you know Captain Obvious over here telling me to look at myself in my net profit business obviously exists to make make a profit but they are far far more important than any kind of vanity metric and I'm including like top-line revenue as a kind of vanity metric you know in a way compared to net net profit at least and anything else we're talking about today any other metrics we're measuring them but and they're sort of like part of the chain of events that occur on the way to us making money a business exists to make profit and that's what we that's what we care about so you should keep a close eye on it and the reason I also bring it up is because that four and a bit years ago before we move to our current bookkeeper which is a company called bean ninjas we used to have every quarter we used to send all our receipts invoices download all our e-commerce stuff our PayPal export and send it over to an accountant and she would prepare that this once per quarter so four times throughout the year when she sent has not a good report we would know where our position was and our net profit and then over the next three months it would get progressively out of date and we would really have much clue until we which I dunno again so now that we have a weekly bookkeeping done in a tool called zero there's an online accounting bookkeeping tool we gehler I or anyone else can log in at any point and just see okay how we doing how are we progressing this month and all sorts of interesting things come up when you we start like keeping a pulse on your on your net profit so I would encourage you to at least be doing this this monthly because if you don't know this number then you you really don't know your your business very well yeah I think also it's one of these numbers that this is not the number people share when you talk to them about their business yes people like to share revenue but not I mean which is we're gonna talk about revenue next but like people never talk about net profit and it's like that especially like income people I meet a cop I got activity seven figure business etc and it sounds impressive especially if you're a beginner and you're like oh my god this is so great etc but the thing is like if you buy you a million dollar stuff and resell it for a million dollars you have a million you have a seven figure business yeah but you have zero profit and it's like a lot of people can't like sell themselves at social events for entrepreneurs that way by inflating themselves and so like net profit is really like how much money the company is actually making versus how much you have in revenue so I think it's especially in case studies you will see that a lot where people talk about revenues to like inflate that as well be very careful what you're looking for is that metric which is net profit which is after-tax not sorry not not all types but after expenses most importantly which so if they pay for advertising if they pay for products if you pay anything that then that's the number you want to be looking at and it's what tells how profitable an actual business is you know you wanna go for the next one because it shows - yeah so this this next one is revenue and conversion rate per page so so this is really important especially on larger sites as well but also on smaller sites so that you will know what's actually generating the the revenue in in your business quite often it's a small number of pages or a hub that might be generating a significant proportion of your revenue and it would make sense to maybe build that that hub out further or create more similar content or take some learnings from that and and kind of apply that further rather than just you know scattergun producing all sorts of random pieces of content around your niche so it's it's really important to look at this but it can be also a little bit tricky to actually measure at times if you are an affiliate if you're an Amazon affiliate up until very recently it was because it's quite easy because Amazon used to have something called the content marketing report which if you had the Amazon tag one one link or something it would automatically pull it pull it in and it would tell you your Amazon revenue per page and that was that was really really useful because it would pull in everything not just the product you were recommended but all the other stuff the people who who bought through that link bought as well and it would tie it back to to page I've always really important now if you want to do this with other affiliate programs you're gonna need to have some kind of sub ID or tracking ID for for each page most affiliate programs will allow you to do this so you should just create like a sub ID which would be ideally just the URL slug you know after your domain of of that page that's that's quite a good good way of organizing it and then if you do that you can then run off a report at the end of the month or however long how often you're looking at it and you can just tie it back to to the to to that page so you see revenue per page and in that sense and Gil you put something in here about Google I don't like this I don't know much about this so you're gonna have to help me out here what do we do here yeah I mean you can sort of like to regress to that like revenue per page but you also want to maybe track clicks per page and sometimes if you don't have to track a tracking IDs what you can do is you can create events in Google Analytics that allow you to see that in Google Analytics interface as well which is nice because then you can slice it country per browser traffic source etc so it's like it allows you to do that so adding events to that as well allows you to like essentially go deeper and also if you're doing if you're selling products he kind of striking will give you that the problem of you say is that revenue per page is tricky right because they of course if you looking at like the last page people visit it's always going to be your checkout page it doesn't mean that this is the page that essentially convinced people to buy and so it is a very default the conversion tracking world is like first touch attribution license attribution there is also decaying attribution depending on time when people touch this there is assisted attributions of for example you know channels like Instagram for example would be an Isis channel like it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sales unless you're running ads because there's no links on Instagram our break could be an assist channel etc same with YouTube videos and so on so there's a lot of ways to look at that I know it's Google antics actually supports most of these models and you can actually see these numbers based on each model so you can change the model and actually get an idea of that obviously this is for e-commerce and selling your own products not really for traffic foi Affiliate I thought is just like for the traffic ID and usually it's very simple funnel so people go on the page they click on the link they get to the merchant and it buys so you don't have these things if you're looking for like really big complicated funnels as well there's things like signetics for example tools like that that allow you to build this very complicated reports that allow you to see how each page contributed to the sell etc much deeper than Google Analytics so yeah it is it is a deep world but if you're running a simple filter it's just putting a tracking ID and then doing that we're also tracking a Philly mate right now as well which does some of that we can't give you a recommendation or anything as we just started trying it but it is a tool that essentially tries to do a lot of that job for you so it looks looks very interesting all right like the next one let's go on the next one yeah so the next one is contact growth so this is relevant if you are running any kind of email list which you probably should be unless you're like heavy into affiliate and nothing else and this kasoke on it's all very well looking at number of subscribers or something but when you get to a certain point and you have 70,000 and it goes from like 70,000 and fifty to seventy thousand and ninety it's like it's really hard to see if we look in our active campaign dashboard it's like a straight line for the whole month just because like the incremental growth is such a low proportion the overgrowth so the metrics we look at is the D contact gross of new subscribers per day and it's really important that you look at this per day because if there's any kind of [ __ ] up in your opt-in software or just any part of your funnel this is usually one of the first things that the brakes at least in our experience is happen three or four times and you will get a very early lead indicator if this number starts going to zero or dropping significantly for a few days you can kind of dig into dig into the problem and see is there a technical issue or you know it's something else which is which is causing this so it's it's a really important metric and I think you really need to watch it like a like a hawk if you're doing any kind of sales based funnel based email marketing yeah I mean you say that because we had our pop-up break for three weeks at some point and we didn't know this we didn't track it properly so these things will happen even and that's why we start taking more attention to this basically I wanted to put that metric together with active users so if you are running an affiliate site or something that you're not building an email list ising active users in Google Analytics is essentially the closest metric to that it's the number of unique people that have interacted with your website in the last one day seven days seven days at least as the default views in analytics and what it does is it shows the growth of your audience right and it shows it kind of like mixes together engagement with discovery it gives you an idea of how many people touch your business so if you're gonna be pushing something selling something or you just if you want to see the growth of your site in search things like that usually you need to see that curve go up when I said when a curve goes down usually for us because a lot of our traffic is organic and pretty much most of our sites it means that our search is doing worse as well but also it gives us an idea that maybe the stuff we're doing does not engage people that were following us as much so even if you have any know this is quite interesting you can actually follow that metric either in the default analytics dashboard when you open it all you can go in audience and active users and you'll find that report here and you can go more granular it's like different durations and things like that and get an idea especially if you have a website that's like actually trying to build an audience this is actually quite powerful it really gives you an idea of like the size of the audience and if run things like retargeting for example it's also going to give you an idea of how powerful that's gonna be because these are the people that will be on your retargeting so it is an interesting one it goes together with contact grows I think ah next one next one is revenue per employee so this is actually a metric which like fortune 500 companies use like big companies you so Netflix for example makes 2.3 million dollars per employee so it's the total amount of revenues divided by the number of employees they have quite simple Amazon only three hundred thousand dollars I say only he is still huge about three hundred thousand dollars per per employee now what you want to look at with this metric why it's so important is typically when you when you start and it's just you and you things you'll start taking off you will tend to make very high or a decent amount of money per per employees is just you but what can happen if you're not careful is that you start adding a lot of people but your revenue might go up but like not significantly so and you end up spending a lot of staff cost which is probably going to be one year at one of your most expensive costs for for a website so like content link building you know these kinds of things you end up spending a lot of money on stuff which isn't moving the needle revenue wise for you and therefore isn't contributing to you to your bottom line so you know this is this would be when you're you go all out on having epic branding and you know huge may be support team or like doing all this kind of unnecessary stuff which may be cool and adding value but not necessarily like bringing home the bacon so I think it's always a good metric to keep an eye on you don't need to watch this every every week but like just once a quarter when you do your quarterly planning and quarterly meeting have a look at have a look at revenue per employee if you have a lot of freelance staff then you can kind of like break that off into two different metrics or you can kind of combine it combine it all into one yeah yeah I think gives you an idea of how bloated your companies is that's the way and I think these two like employee and profit margins often correlate I mean net profit because it's like employees tend to be the highest cost for your business therefore the more employees you have in the lower revenue per employee you have the lower unit profit usually which is an encouragement to run in and that's how we run our stuff and we're pretty happy about that why does always reduces your management overhead which is also nice so yeah recommend basically running lean companies we do that very effectively these days and so as a result these are the metrics were looking at then we're running into more like IIM type matrix so this was like more high-level stuff still matters like you know the contacts etcetera number of users but now it's like you regress to like traffic etc and that the first one is going to be session and engagement metrics by source page and browser side kind of a group all of these together and you know the metrics are gonna be looking at each time on page bounce rate I'm not a huge fan because bounce rate on lytics just means nothing if you spend six minutes on the page and go back or like a two hours on the page and go back and only visit one page is counted as a bounce by default Attucks it's just not a good metric initially but it's like you can still do carry a little bit but it's I'm not a fan if there's a variation on the same page maybe it's interesting but otherwise I think it's not very good but pages per visit stuff like that it's quite interesting and so I'm looking then i'm segmenting it first of all per traffic source as to when everyone does right checking like google traffic and like your facebook ads and like your social traffic etc what that does is it allows you to see useless sources of traffic and they happen often like for example a lot of people apart from monetizing with these players don't really manage to make any money from Pinterest because you can drive a lot of traffic which i think is a lot less engage and doesn't care that much about you etc and so it might look cool in analytics in numbers but then when you look at engagement metrics then you realize that even though it looks cool unless you're running you know media very not strive something like this it's not exactly the best source of traffic and you may be better focusing on like SEO even if you only generate half the traffic from SEO because the engagement so much higher and you realize how good of a traffic source SEO is when you actually look at it that way then you're going to look at it per page so I like to like essentially compare how long people spend on the page against the average of a page on my website but I also like to look at the word count on my page against the time spent so it's like you know let's say I have a two thousand world article I'd like to benchmark it against other two thousand world articles because if like a benchmark against us you know podcaster note for example I'll go all the podcast is a bad idea because people might play it on the on the page but you know a 500 word article or something that it makes sense that there would be less time on the 500 word article it doesn't mean it's worse I'm so like benchmarking these essentially understanding if people are actually enjoy new content finding what they want etc and finally per device and the reason that check per device is not really per device in web browser it's not really for engagement but rather to find broken stuff on the website and as you know we have had broken pages on like depreciated versions of Safari so for example you know like someone still has an iPad 2 for example iPad 2 has not had a new iOS version for maybe like five years or something so it's running a four five years old more than that like five yeah 5 years old Safari or something and so that version of Safari might actually break your website well the current version of Safari might just be fine and as a result like maybe you lose like 2 or 3 percent of your traffic just can't open your page you get 3 second time on page and you realize that when you break it down that way and there's a tool for that called browser stack actually that you can you know if you see these kind of numbers then you can seem to have a free trial so you can go and sign up for that all you can have it when you do a site redesign something but you can then go and open on that device or not all versions of Safari your website and see what it looks like and very often you find these like small pockets of traffic that just don't get a good experience on your site and you have to go and tweak and fix your CSS or something that or fix on javascript to make it work we know it by experience it's cost us a few times so that's what you want to look at this per device and browser etc I think I think that's kind of like a good point as well so the reason we're looking at all these metrics well there's two reasons on the one hand we want to make kind of big strategic decisions about the direction we take our business and how it's how it's going and all that and then on the other hand you have this kind of like red alert system if something's broken or terribly wrong these by looking at these metrics having dashboard look at them checking them regularly that will flag problems before it takes you you know months or weeks or months otherwise to catch them yeah I mean also one thing is like if I see like on the page level for example that like the engagement is low and my main traffic is like search that's when you look at the angle of your content the search intent so like you google the keyword you look at what angle the top pages are taking and you compare it to yours and then you just do tweaks to like this you know the formatting of the article maybe the answer needs to be higher up on the page for the exact query etc like these kind of things it's not only gonna boost your rankings but it's going to also boost engagement and usually these two kind of like snowball with each other so yeah like this this is like my bread and butter whenever get analytics really and to go and find like Google Analytics you go in behavior site content all pages and then your main metric you can take either a landing page source or browser and then the second metric you can just cross with whichever you want so like you'll be able to find exactly what you want there so that's your bread and butter for engagement on your site basically the next metric is an interesting one as well this is for the the PageSpeed junkies there's a few of them I see I see them on Facebook groups posting the screenshots all the time so I know they're here it's the page loads people per country and in Google Analytics and it's very different from like a you know speed test on GT metrics or on lighthouse or something that because what analytics shows you it shows you the real load speed for people if they have a slow computer if they have [ __ ] internet etc and but like it it's much like it's the real-life version of this not like a synthetic test on a perfect Google server or whatever and so what allows me to see is allows me to see if my CDN or hosting is doing a good job in every country and most important in the countries where we have customers right so I usually compare like I know more or less like well customers ourselves come from you know if you make cells on another on us for example obviously you're looking at speeding us and so on and even if your side speed ease is trash invasions here that you don't care that much because it doesn't matter if you're only selling amazon.com and so it allows me to to check that and I have changed direct CDN Solutions etcetera based on that you can find in google antics in behavior site speed page timing and then you can choose the main metric to be do country and then you will see that it will show you a graph with how much higher although you are than the average face per country and for example for us I checked with us before this podcast and we have lower page speed than average in India Hungary that's probably me because I'm on that crazy 4G connection China and Mexico for example so these are the countries where we actually like doing Wars but in the US for example we look 50% faster than the average around the world which helps conversion rate on a Treehugger so if you want to see how fast your sites really are for users is really cool and then you can also dig in in terms of like other mobile I don't desktop etc and kind of understand a lot of countries have sheets mobile networks for example which explains like so a page feed but like if you check computer page speed then you'll be fine and then you can't really do much if they have a bad network but it will give you an idea of like where to work on page speed and you can try your CD ends and Hosting's that way that's why I have for example like nitro pack a lot because like that graph when I installed nitro bag this went from like I'll give you this test photo hacker but like maybe 10 15 seconds sometimes I'm like really big pages I went down to like for something it's like the dropper was massive and this is the real page load speed for people and it was really good so I recommend you check that one the next one it's it's a pretty classic one is flagship pure ranking so essentially it's the queued rankings are like they're just a benchmark they're not really important because they only give you your rankings for a given keyword at a given time in a given location and so your search traffic is not that your search traffic comes usually from all around the world you might even have different rankings based on different states in the US for example your rankings do change multiple per day very often and and also you rang for many long term value don't tell variations of a key word to be fair so I do think there's a good quite strong correlation between how a benchmark how you are reporting in a keyword tool for rankings and the traffic you're getting to the page that that keyword is targeting even from longtail and you know silver all how well how well your site site is doing what where it's most useful for us is like troubleshooting things further down the line so you know if you're you start losing some sales or you know losing the new subscribers or something like that you use like regress it back so like what's what's my opt-in rate what's my traffic and then finally like what's my what's my rankings and so like you know we had to experience a couple weeks like over the last two weeks our traffic on Authority hacker it was down like 7% or something like that and then I mean I wonder what's causing this if we we haven't like you know lost some rankings is there something we need to fix it so I mean to do but actually we look at the rankings it's like they're stable so it's just you know okay maybe a bit seasonality there or like post Corona or something yeah having it's hard to tell but there was a booster on KO Nevers I can imagine that now as life's coming back to normal in most countries then then it goes back to normal well yeah but like you know I agree like Q was a good metric which is what it's in this list it wouldn't be the otherwise I think it's a good metric we use a cure incur for rankings I think we value on optimal or they run appSumo sometimes it's my favorite rank tracker we have a traps as well but the problem is HFC doesn't update every day and it's not the most accurate range accuracy honest just is justice of like counterpoint there the there are two companies in the world that do rank tracking to do it properly and every single tool H RAF's SEM rush like every single one even a cure anchor a curing cures not doing their own records they're bad what's the the rankings from one of these two companies yeah but it's updates once a week and then they're curing every update when you press the button for example so that's what we mean by accuracy like because it's like it's it's it's a while since it last updated rather than it's giving you the wrong number yeah we use keyword rankings as well when we do on-page tricks so we do these a lot these days right we go back to a page we like will analyze search intent or something we'll find out like what Google is using for Fito snippet seems like that would change that we index the page and then use the rank trackers to see the variation and see whether Google likes what we're doing or not I'm sorry I like keyword rankings also allow us to see whether we're going in the right direction for that and falling building campaigns basically so that's also is it's a feedback for work that we're doing a Bulls on page and off page for SEO the next one I like is click straight against position in webmaster console um so basically gives you an idea of what percentage of users click on your results placed on the position you're at right because obviously if you ranked number 10 you would get less clicks that if you ranked number 2 so it's like it's not like you shouldn't just look at your click-through rate in search console because it's depending on your position so I usually like divide the two obviously it's not a very metric why because sir play outs there's hundreds of them and so like you know if there's like a carousel on top or for your query or if there's all that plus also the numbers you see in search console actually global unless you actually specify a country which I tend to do a lot these days I tend to set up like just us or whatever the biggest country we're working in is because it gives me something that's close to reality especially for sales so I like to do that I like to look at my clicks right what allows me to do is it allows me to understand how good my search type my title is basically not just for the rankings but also for like enticing people to click so like an example is like they we had a blog post that was like like how to do like how to do something but we had like 60 items in this I changed what I talked to like 60 ways to do this or something and like the click-through rate went up 30 percent just by doing that and so like looking at that metric and I don't need to rank higher given the same ranking position I can just get more so traffic and usually when you get more clicks right you tend to rank higher eventually so I like this metric a lot in terms of optimizing traffic and getting more traffic again that's something that does not require your links one thing that also helps me with is kima so for example a lot of people I haven't done the test but a lot of people have done that test with the FAQ schema that was pretty big in 2019 and of 2019 well bloggers talked about this I realized that they get less clicks to their website for example because people just read the schema but don't really click to the website some people might contradict that I'd like to hear that actually if you won't say in the comments in YouTube that'd be interesting but like this is why it allows you to do it allows you to see how our schema is working however your title tag is working and you can find in webmasters console search performant queries and then it can take the two boxes average rankings and CTR and you'll be able to see these numbers and that allows us to do a lot of our work that is on page one basically it's really it's an easy game if you're an agency listening to this or an in-house SEO somewhere I remember back from when Gayle I used to run an agency many many years ago optimizing click-through rate it's it's like one of the quick wins you can do to kind of like prove your worth in in in a situation where ads you know like doing all the content marketing link building stuff takes time so if you need to show someone a quick win it's a good a good metric to to show them that you've been that you've improved and that you can actually demonstrate and you know less than a month or so yeah it's one of the easier ways to climb in tops we top five as well without building links I really if you get much better engagement than clicks right you tend to rank higher eventually it does take sometimes it's not it's not something that will happen tomorrow but if you maintain that for like a few weeks then you tend to jump up without building moldings which pays off basically I think it might help with a few investors oh it might because obviously your title still shows on a video snippet anyway the last one that I have is actually the impressions per page in Google webmasters console and it's just like the number of impressions in such URL gates and I think that's one that's great for new pages or pages you just update it for example but your rankings haven't moved yet it's kind of like a metric you look at before you get any movement in order to get some feedback on what you're doing or whether it's good or bad impressions tend to vary a lot even if you're not really getting much traffic like you would get a lot of impressions before you get any traffic in ticks right and that just tells you how far overall differ probable Google is towards the changes you've made to your site and you can get these results pretty quickly after a few days of doing a change to a page or something even though you're not ranking yet or after raising a new page or something so I quite like looking at that for new projects and updated projects so that's basically the 10 metrics anything else to add to this just for the last one it's really good if this is like your first site and you're like you know how long is it gonna take me to rank I'm not getting any traffic have a look in in webmasters console look at the impressions you're getting set a much earlier lead indicator of progress and I'm gonna use this as an amazing Segway if you are looking to start your site you can actually go on all technical training comm and we have a free organelle that you can check out that has a lot of people have liked a lot spent two hours showing how we build new sites so you can check that out there will be a promotion for the entire system at the end but the training is free before that we get less of whether you buy it or not and it's pretty good so go and check it out and if you enjoyed this episode one thing you can do as well is you can click on the subscribe button below on YouTube you can give us a like if you're listening to your podcast you can go on YouTube and click on the subscribe button as well if you want to whenever you have time and you're out of the car and we hope you enjoy this episode and we'll see you next week have a good week bye [Music] you [Music]