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As a marketing manager, you will have to report internally on the performance of all search marketing initiatives. Depending on the nature of your brands business, the metrics you report on to measure success will vary, and require some thought to ensure you are correctly identifying all possible value from your campaign and SEO agency relationship, attributing successes achieved against spend.
What are all of the metrics that you can report on?
| Reporting Metric | Core SEO metric | Usefulness | Sector Relevancy |
| Rankings | Yes | Very, and is often the key metric used to gauge performance of a new campaign within the first 12 months | all sectors |
| Impressions | Yes | Impression data is available through search console and is valuable in being able to understand potential demand for different search queries | all sectors |
| Traffic | Yes | Key metric, and should always be reported on. A key thing to remember is its not always about volume, with the right targeting, traffic levels can be low but conversion can be high which means a return is yielded. | all sectors |
| Average ontime site | Yes | this is a good metric to determine the quality of the traffic being driven, and also effectiveness of your landing pages. A deeper analysis is usually needed to gain any real insights but at a top level this figure will allow you to determine whether the SEO traffic being driven is engaging with your Brands product or service offering (or not). | all sectors |
| Bounce rate | Yes | as above, a good metric to gauge traffic and landing page effectiveness. A key thing to remember is that a high bounce rate isn’t indicative of a negatively performing campaign – it may be that your landing page has a clear call to action, and the user is looking for a quick action. e.g. emergency call out phone number for a plumber. | all sectors |
| Conversions | Ideally your destination website will have goals setup through Google Analytics, which will allow you to track user performance through the site. This is an important metric to include within your reporting and is usually a good metric to use within management reporting when reporting to marketing heads and management boards. | all sectors | |
| Leads | as well as tracking the number of leads generated, its good to tie this in with further data which can be recorded to qualify and evaluate the quality of the leads being driven through SEO. Leads are a good metric to measure for b2b seo campaigns and utilizing data from internal CRM systems will allow you to measure possible return values from leads being driven. | b2b brands | |
| Basket adds | a key metric for ecommerce seo campaigns, basket adds are a good metric to gauge interest by visitors arriving on site through SEO. | ecommerce brands | |
| Basket Abandons | whilst not a critical SEO reporting metric, analysing basket abadonement rates is useful as it may help you to improve either targetting through SEO or user experience on site, leading to a reduction in abandonements and an increase in sales. | ecommerce brands | |
| Sales | sales volumes is a good metric however should be measured within an appropriate timeframe based on your brands business. For example, ecommerce seo campaigns will drive sales on a daily basis when performing well, which is contrary to b2b seo campaigns which will drive 1 or 2 sales a quarter. Measure sales, but ensure you measure across a relevant timeframe to get a true reflection of performance | all sectors | |
| Revenue | probably the most obvious and cared about metric overall, final revenues driven through SEO. Be careful to split our revenues driven through non brand seo traffic and brand SEO traffic so as to show a true set of figures for new customers. | all sectors | |
| Net Profit | net profit is the metric that board members will be interested in, and is probably best measured annually to give an annual indication of pure return on investment. | all sectors |
