Track the metrics that actually move the needle

Becky says: “Focus on tracking the metrics that matter – the metrics that prove whether your strategy is moving the needle. To do that, you need to know what moving the needle means.”

What are the metrics that matter?

“Sadly, this is homework for everybody because the metrics that matter are bespoke to your business.

You can't just lift what you’ve done for someone else and bring it over. The people that do the work on this are your customers. It's your job to listen to them and understand them. If you listen well, you can start to understand the journey that they go on when they're trying to buy your product or inquire about your service. This works in B2B as well as B2C.

If you start to understand the journey they go on, you will see the little milestones. There are jobs that they do throughout the process. When you uncover what they are, those are the things that you need to be tracking.

ROI is a lagging indicator; you either hit the ROI or you didn't. It doesn't tell you how to fix anything. The leading indicators are, did they download something? Did they watch the video? Did they share with a friend? All those micro-moments are leading indicators – and you can statistically work out how many of those things need to happen, for your business, to get to a conversion. Those leading indicators tell you whether you're likely to hit the ROI or target you're trying to achieve. They're the metrics that really matter because they're the dials you have more control over, and can do something about.”

Are clients interested in micro metrics or are they primarily focused on ROI?

“When they start understanding it better, then they’re interested. When you start to show and model out the way that understanding these things does result in a sale or conversion, it will flip their mentality. You have to take the business on the journey. The marketing person normally gets it quite quickly but there is often someone above them who has lovely vanity metrics and big numbers and doesn't really care about the smaller things.

You need to consider how you make sure the business understands why these metrics matter. Recently, we won a client and they said that they switched agencies because their previous agency wasn't performing. We started to dig into their strategy and what we were going to be doing, and we couldn't really pick any holes in it. That previous agency had been doing a really good job.

What happened was the client had their benchmark of what good metrics looked like in their mind, and they were gunning towards ROI. They wanted to see a return for what they were spending on SEO. However, the agency had been doing upper-funnel work, driving awareness that would have assisted in a lot of conversions. They were doing a great job but they hadn't articulated that properly and the client hadn’t bought into those metrics.

They lost a client over that and, if you're in-house, it could be a job that you might lose. Try to get the business to understand what metrics really matter and what the smaller things that lead to the big things are. Focus on those because they're the things you can optimize as well.”

Do you have a preferred analytics tool for tracking your preferred metrics and how do you present those metrics to a client?

“From a tracking perspective, we are still finding our feet with the lovely GA4. It is working for us and we are predominantly using it because it's what most of our clients are using. We pull everything into our own dashboards and organise our dashboards and reporting against the customer funnel.

The way we present it is around what the customer journey looks like. To go on a journey to work out what the metrics that matter are is to go on a journey around your customer journey. Start with understanding the audience and where they're spending time. Look at the channels that have come up from that research to see where the opportunity lies, where the volume is, and what kind of numbers start to predict what that opportunity might look like and how the channels might play nicely together – always thinking about passing the customer through the funnel.

Then, lay that out as the customer journey, but with the tracking metrics aligned to it. You will see that the customer has told you where you should be. They’ve also told you what you should be saying because you understand what they're looking for at each point. They’ve also told you what you should track because they've told you what they're trying to do throughout the journey. That becomes a visual view of what the journey looks like as a funnel through to conversion. You see how the channels and the metrics work together, which you can roll up into the return on investment you eventually want to see.”

Do you need to have face-to-face conversations with your customers to determine the customer journey or can you get the data from something like GA4?

“For us, it's a mixture. When we start thinking about the customer journey for a client, we first want to understand what they already know about their audience. Inadvertently, everyone knows something about their audience. However, we then need to know how statistically relevant, recent, and robust that information is.

Then, we look for opportunities to strengthen the data and the relevance of it. We would do that through a mixture of surveys, which could include behaviourally written surveys that go out to current customers or a potential audience. We might use a third party to help us reach a particular audience, normally with qualifying questions included to make sure we're getting to the right type of audience that would buy the product or service.

It could also include pop-ups targeting people who are actively using the site. A mixture is where you get the most robust understanding. If they've hit the website, they're already partway through the journey. If you can also get people who haven't hit the website yet, they might identify different needs. It does vary depending on who the client is, what they're trying to sell, and who their audience is.

For the questions, you want them to be behaviourally written – whether it’s a written survey or an interview. Until we started to specialise more in behavioural science and brought behavioural scientists into our team, I didn't realise how biased the questions people ask are. Writing unbiased questions is a real art. You need to leave it free and open for the person to give their truthful, honest view.

Whoever's writing the questions or running the session (be it in-person, a roundtable, or one-on-one), needs to be trained and skilled at not priming the customers to say what you want them to say. You need to actually understand what it is that they're trying to do. Humans are weird. Behavioural science shows us that we don't always do what we say we're going to do and we don't always think before we do things. A lot of what we do is emotional. It’s really important to try to ask the right questions and draw out the almost immediate response for what someone thinks they might do. Then, you gather all that data.

You’ve also got search trends, search volume, and keywords. That’s an amazing voice of the customer; seeing the phrases they use and the popularity of those.”

Do you need to use videos of user sessions to hear the voices of users who are less comfortable having a conversation with you?

“Definitely. We also use social listening. It's amazing what someone is willing to openly say to a wide audience on Twitter or Instagram that they wouldn't necessarily want to say directly to you. If they know that it’s the brand themselves doing a piece of research, they might not want to tell you how they feel about your brand. However, they’ll go and tell the rest of the world on social media. Social listening is a really good tool for understanding pain points and the ways that people think.

Sentiment analysis is also helpful. There are some really good AI tools out there that will take large data sets and give you data around the underlying tone of those messages and posts, without you having to read every single one of them. You can pull out things that are repeated regularly and get a feel for the mood of a particular customer, or around a particular topic they might be talking about, on social.

We use many different methods to pull that data in. It's down to what the client is comfortable with, what they've got access to, and what they've got the budget for. All of these things either cost time (if you're doing it in-house) or money (if you're working with an agency or third party). If you can't do everything at once, you want to work out where your quickest and best wins are going to be, and where you’re going to get the most insight. Then, you can start understanding the pain points of your customers, and their go points: the things that drive them to move quicker.

It's one thing to know what stops someone from progressing, but you also want to know what pushes them to progress quicker on a journey and if there is anything you can do to assist that – in terms of how you create content or the type of content you create. It’s not just what you say but also the format in which you say it. Does your audience want this content in video or on TikTok more than they want it as old-school written articles? Consider how they want to digest the information you’re telling them to help them in the process of buying your product or service.”

Do you need to insist on using these kinds of metrics for every client, even if they don’t want to give you the budget for it?

“Again, it depends. For us, it always comes back to whether we will be able to add enough value. If we’re knowledgeable in their area already and we can see loads of SEO opportunities, with obvious gaps that they’re missing and ways we can optimize, and we know we can make an impact, we might not insist on doing this kind of research.

For these metrics that matter ahead of the final enquiry, we can make an educated guess. However, if we felt that we didn't know enough – their strategy is quite advanced and they're looking for micro increases that might make big differences at their scale – and they really need someone who’s going to understand the detail of what they're missing out on, then you need to do that research.

You need to be able to prioritise and look at how the different channels are going to work together. One of my biggest bugbears in marketing is that we end up working in little silos. SEOs have keywords they’re going to optimize and think they know what the customer probably searches for because of the search volume, but they haven't thought about what’s next. You might get to the top position and drive thousands of visits for that keyword but, if it's not the final buying keyword, you’re never going to see them buy. You need to think about what’s next and how the other channels can help you drive that user through to conversion.

If you're not thinking about that, your work is a bit pointless. You will probably lose loads of people who don't go on to convert because no one held their hand through the process. If you’re not thinking about the metrics to measure that – and how to work with your colleagues in paid, email, or wherever it might be to get to that conversion – then you’ve wasted your efforts.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop getting obsessed with the big metrics. If you’re running at a metric that feels impossible, stop going for that. Break it down to something smaller that's more achievable and will eventually roll up into that bigger metric. Don't get distracted by metrics that don’t matter.

Bounce rate is typically one of those. We're all done with bounce rate, aren't we? However, the metrics that don’t matter are personalised to your business. Certain metrics are really important to some people so bounce rate might be significant for you. I try and steer people away from bounce rate. Instead, understand what you expect the user to do and what you think they want you to do. Ideally, they’re the ones who tell you what that is.”

Becky Simms is Founder and CEO at Reflect Digital, and you can find her at ReflectDigital.co.uk.