Beware of False Success Metrics, Focus on Conversions

You could track an almost endless number of metrics. How do you know which ones mean something? Discover why focusing on conversions is more valuable than relying on others.

Video Transcript

David: Do you remember your question? Do you want me to read it?

Janel: I think I remember the question. So, yeah, I’m looking at my Looker Studio report and the marketing campaign results from Curious Ants.

David: Yeah.

Janel: And the two on the right hand, what do they do after finding us? It’s showing me invalid missing dimensions, and then the one below is incomplete. I have not set up conversions for this website, so I need to go back and do that. But I feel like it’s giving me an engagement rate underneath this. I can share my screen.

David: No, that’s fine.

Janel: Is the logical step just to go back to, into the process and assign… I have gravity forms set up. They can submit a form. I could create some conversions. I just have never set it up, and there’s even a phone. I’ve just never set up any sort of phone conversions, either. I’m guessing that’s probably the recommended step. Go create some conversions, come back to this chart, and connect the proper fields. Because it’s not an e-commerce site, I can’t use the purchase events. I would have to change that.

David: Right, and by creating key events, the new report should work.

Janel: Okay. It will.

David: Yeah, it will. It will.

Janel: It does say key events colon purchase though.

David: Well, but that’s because that’s the key event in the data.

Janel: Okay, got it.

David: So, I like your question because I want to phrase it a different way. Right. What if the client doesn’t have any conversions? What should you report?

Janel: Yes.

David: What I will do to be a little obnoxious about this is provide the report and have the report be broken because there are no conversions. Because I want to prove to the client that the value is the conversion they got out of it. So, number one, that acts as a nag for me to make sure I do the conversions. But two, if the client’s adamant, the report is set up to say, look at all the traffic you got, but we don’t know what you got out of the traffic. Wouldn’t you like to know that, dear client? Please let me set up conversions for you. There are lots of things you could potentially report, like engagement rate, time on site, and bounce rates, but these are what people resort to when they don’t have conversion tracking.

Janel: Yeah.

David: It can be really misleading. So, I kind of don’t want to replace the conversion data with that even in the meantime because I don’t want them to get used to thinking that’s a success.

Janel: Valuable data. Exactly. And they’re basically like, what keywords are we ranking for? Which kind of circles back to the previous question.

David: Yeah. Rank is another good example of thinking that because I don’t know what I’m getting, I want to go to a metric that’s earlier in the funnel rather than the conversion. We want to get our clients to think about what kind of conversions they are getting as soon as possible. And we want that conversation about the quality of the conversions, the number of conversions, and where they’re coming from, so they stop asking questions like, where do I rank for this word? What about this word? What about this one?

Janel: Yeah, yeah.

Tricia: I do something very similar with mine. I always like to have access to Google Search Console. So, I know what’s happening. I put that in the report, and if I had one that I couldn’t get access to, I have a big thing that says, “Cannot Access Google Search Console,” so that a whole page is blank.

David: Great.

Janel: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David: But it’s very tempting to replace those metrics with something in the meantime. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

Janel: Got it.

David: It’s worth the client’s time to know conversions. This is a great example for a site that the client says is just a brochure site, which I don’t believe brochure sites exist, but if someone thinks they’re just a brochure site, I don’t really want conversions. Well, let’s beg that question. What is the purpose of the site, then?

 Yeah. Right. We. Do you realize with a little bit of effort, we could know if people contact you? Right? Wouldn’t that be valuable?

Janel: Yeah, that would.

David: Yeah. So, resist the temptation to substitute something. My report is a suggestion. You do what you think is best for the client. But in my experience, I want to steer the conversation to conversion as quickly as possible and get the focus on conversion so we’re not using these other metrics. And then get caught in a feedback loop of, well, what do we do to improve the time on site? Well, how to do that isn’t necessarily the same answer to get more conversions. And so, I kind of don’t want that. For example, you mentioned the engagement rate in the default report. I almost didn’t put that in there.

Janel: Okay

David: Because I feel that that’s one of those. We can’t really affect it, and if it goes up or down, does it really matter? Does it really affect people’s bottom lines? So, I actually never mention it in my clients’ reports, even though I provide it for them. I never mentioned the engagement rate because I kind of don’t want to get caught in the conversation of, “Well, what do we need to do to improve our engagement rate?” Wouldn’t you rather have customers?

Janel: Yeah. Do you just take it off?

David: I actually leave it on there, because I’m lazy. I should take it off. So maybe you’re challenging me to actually take it off.

Janel: Yeah, because everything else is pretty much going up. I have a lot of green arrows, but that one’s down, so…

David: Right.

Janel: And they’ll ask the question. They will.

David. Right. Yeah. Good. Good question.