I have often said, “Good marketing is ALL about the numbers.  If you do marketing without paying attention to the numbers, what you end up with is Award Winning Advertising, that Doesn’t Sell Product.”

So the question of the day is:  In this age of information overload, which numbers have meaning to small business owners, with limited marketing budgets?

About 18 months ago I decided my Alexa Ranking was a meaningful scorecard measurement.  So I set a goal of improving my score from a dismal 7.7 million to under 1 million.  It took about a year, but my rating is now, under 1 million.  SO WHAT? Other than bragging rights with a few techy friends, few people really care.  I did sign one customer who was impressed, and hoped I could do the same for his site.  But most of my clients (non-techy small business owners) don’t know what an Alexa ranking is, or why they should care.  My achievement was impressive, but irrelevant.

I looked for a new metric and decided to watch my web traffic. The good news, as you can see from this graph, my weekly traffic is up significantly since the first of the year.   But is it meaningful?  The answer is only if I am selling more, converting casual visitors to prospects and clients.

This is where the numbers become valuable.  As I looked at the increased traffic, I realized more people were coming, and reading, but I wasn’t moving them along the path from stranger to prospect, to client, to raving fans.

My focus is going to shift to conversion for the next few weeks. While I will continue to focus on my content, and promotion (because that combination  is what is bringing people to the site) I am going to pay closer attention to my sidebars adding more specific calls to action.  I can then track the traffic to those links to see if I have motivated anyone to action.  And finally, I am going to try to increase comments.  It makes the site more interesting when this is a conversation, not a monologue, so if you have other tips, favorite measurement tools, or strategies for conversion, please share them here!

Please contact Roundpeg, an Indianapolis web design company, for more information.