10 Metrics That Matter Most For Your Showroom Business
In today’s data-driven economy, marketers and entrepreneurs alike are constantly trying to capture and decipher data to understand their target audience’s behavior, determine buying patterns, and maximize marketing ROI.
Many experts claim that marketers and entrepreneurs should be tracking many different metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), resulting in an overwhelming list.
However, we are willing to bet that most of the metrics on your list are vanity metrics and won’t REALLY provide your business much insight or value.
If gaining market share and propelling profit in today’s economy is a goal for your showroom marketing business, then this article is for you. In this article, we will review the top 10 metrics that matter most for your business.
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Website Traffic
Let’s say your website gets around 6,600 visitors per month. That’s great and all, but do you know which pages they visit? Where are your visitors spending the most time on your website? What exact words are they reading on each page? Where are they clicking and what are they clicking on? This is where a heat map comes in handy.
A heat map records (via a video) cursor clicks and all mouse movements, and it also shows you the “scroll depth” of all visitors, which tells you the overall effectiveness of your website design. See the screenshot below, which looks like a weather map. The yellow and red spots are where your visitors are scrolling and clicking most.
A heat map gives you an idea of what draws people’s attention when they are on your site so you can “read their minds” and understand their thought processes. This image is a 30-day sample for the homepage of a client. However, you can run heat-map reports for individual pages on your site.
For example, you may want to know how a landing page is performing for a particular advertising campaign, how web visitors from specific keywords or zip codes are doing, and so on.
Audience Behavior
The screenshot below shows one of our comprehensive Results Reporting dashboard shows some important metrics about how your marketing information is leading to sales opportunities at your company, which most analytics tools do not include. Most “dashboards” focus solely on marketing metrics and overlook what matters most: attributing sales opportunities and revenue from all of the activity you are getting on your site.
Perhaps one of the most important on this list is the number of inquiries, which refers to the number of calls, form fill-outs, and chats initiated from your website. Are you currently tracking these from your website?!
This Is The Results Reporting Dashboard Every Bravo Client Receives
Here’s An Example Of Our Marketing AND Sales Tracking Dashboard
After reviewing the number of inquiries, your team should then export this list into a spreadsheet for each of our customers. This way, every inquiry acts as a ‘line item’ on a spreadsheet/CRM. (See screenshot below.)
This way, you’ll be able to accurately create an ‘inquiry pie’ so that you can calculate cost-per-lead, per channel via the web (i.e., CPL). If your company isn’t running more efficiently and transparently with this granular-level reporting each month, then there is likely something happening on a MUCH larger scale.
What Is The “Source” For Each Inquiry And Order?
“Source” indicates how a visitor found and arrived on your website. In most cases, this is a Google Organic search, Google My Business (GMB) or Google Maps search or a live ad that you’ve placed on Google through the Google AdWords platform. The fourth type is “direct” in Column G, which means a visitor typed in your website domain directly into the search bar on their browser. This also means the visitor didn’t visit any other source before landing on your site (i.e., they already knew of you).
At this point, just know every visitor on your website can be put into a pile. After you put every visitor into their appropriate “pile,” you can then see what source is bringing you the most inquiries (because you’re tracking all phone calls – regardless of the channel it came in from, contact forms, live chats, wishlist submissions, and so on) and what business development initiatives are bringing in clients, and at what cost per each acquired!
This Is A Phone Call Notification For A Call That Came From A Google Ad
Average Time Spent on Site
The average time on site refers to all visitors. In this case, approximately 6,600 visitors spent an average of one minute and 14 seconds on your site. Obviously, the more time spent on your site, the better. This is a good indication that your visitors are actually reading and engaging with your content and that your website design is effectively giving visitors what they want.
However, if you’re looking to yield a 3:1, 5:1, 10:1+ return on investment form the online channel, the number of inquiries you’ve received from the 6,600 web visitors who reached your site is much more impactful than knowing how much time they spent on your site.
Bounce Rate
This refers to how many people leave (or “bounce” from) your site. This typically means that visitors only visit one page after landing on your site and then leave. This also means that they don’t click on any other pages.
Don’t let this metric fool you. If a website is providing people what they’re looking for, a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, you can only prove this to be the case if you are tracking every inquiry that comes from the site, especially phone calls.
% of Mobile Users
This means out of all the visitors that land on your site, 43 percent (in this example) is the portion that accesses your site using a mobile device. This metric is important if your website design isn’t “responsive”, or displaying optimally on all devices and if you are running paid advertising that shows for mobile searches and bringing ideal buyers back to a non-mobile-friendly website. Other than that, it is always a good idea to maximize the mobile experience on your website for visitors.
This number is also important if you are running Google ads or another form of paid advertising for visitors who are searching for a solution your company offers via a mobile phone. In short, you don’t want to be paying for eyeballs that are not receiving an optimal user experience from your company.
Your website performance…
Top Channels
The top channel is displayed as a pie chart, which shows the top sources or channels that visitors used to find your site. In the example below, the bulk of the traffic came from a paid source, such as a live ad campaign like Google AdWords, Bing ads, Houzz Ads, or other directory sites. Organic traffic makes up approximately 38 percent of the total website traffic in this example. We also see several direct searches, some social media, and a referral. A referral might be visitors who come in from a third-party directory or review site, for example.
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
For those doing paid advertising, this is one metric that you probably aren’t tracking as well and as accurately as you should be… YET! The cost per lead (CPL) is what it essentially costs your business to attract leads from your website. The CPL is calculated by taking your total advertising spend and dividing it by total inquiries, minus duplicates, spam, and solicitation.
This number can fluctuate depending on the season, ad budget, market share, number of active advertisers competing for the same eyeballs and so on. So, don’t panic if this number is higher or lower at various times.
Top Keywords
Keywords are the most powerful thing to reference when creating content like blogs, videos, e-newsletter copy, press releases, or Google ad campaigns. This list shows the top 10 keywords that brought visitors from Google to this company’s website. To reference an earlier portion of this post; you may want to look at heatmaps from visitors to your site from just these words.
These People Typed “Bath Showroom Near Me, Etc.” Into Google
These People Were Looking For A Product Category On Google
These People Were Looking For A Specific Brand On Google
By understanding your high-performing keywords you can further optimize your advertising copy, website content, and messaging during your follow-up efforts as well as what to do during the sales process that will generate revenue faster and in a more systematic fashion!
Again, this list can fluctuate due to seasonality, inventory availability, and other market trends. So, it is important to monitor this list periodically and ensure that your mix of keywords makes sense to what it is that you want to transact on the most at your business.
If you currently have an active Google Ad, Bing or Houzz advertising account, the Showroom Marketing Team at Bravo Business Media is open to doing an interactive, audit-like analysis that will be done via video.
Zip Codes Website Visitors & People Clicking Ads Come From
The blue shaded areas on the map image are the specific zip code locations where this company is advertising via the Google Ad platform. We are able to share with them which zip codes receive the most inquiries through the web every month.
Once we know which zip codes are getting the most traction (phone calls, contact form fill-outs, wishlist and live chat submissions and location clicks through their Google My Business and Google Maps page), we are able to make all of the most data-driven course-corrections in the ad campaign and with their company’s Search Engine Optimization profile so that earning more, doing less and gaining more market-share – for the most profitable searchers in the most profitable locations – is always the top priority.
It is safe to say that not all web browsers and website visitors are created equally! Again, let us know if you’d like to chat with our Showroom Marketing Team about ramping up your business development initiatives online.
