How Often Should You Check Metrics?

Jillean Kearney
Jillean Kearney
Feb 2, 2015

How often different metrics should be checked.

Monitoring the performance of your website and online marketing initiatives can be a little overwhelming when you consider all of the metrics and information that is at your fingertips all of the time.

It can be hard to keep track and create benchmarks.

Fortunately, it's not necessary to check every metric every day, not even every week.

Below, we break down which metrics should be monitored on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

What to Check At the End of Everyday


Visits and Page Views: Keeping track of how many daily visitors and page views your site is attracting is an easy way to measure performance and see immediate results like dips in traffic or big spikes. Daily visitors and page views are a big indicator of whether your site is performing like it should be. You'll also be able to see which content works best for your audience and find your weak points.

Leads: If you have a goal set for how many leads you would like to generate via your website, then this is a metric that should be checked daily. If you have a bad day in terms of lead generation, it can affect whether you reach your goal or not. Tracking this metric daily, like visits and page views, indicates whether your website is working as expected.

What to Check at the End of Every Week


Call-to-Action Performance: If your site has calls-to-actions, it's ideal to monitor clickthrough rates and overall performance weekly. If metrics are less than ideal, you can move the call-to-actions around on the page and change which ones you use to try new approaches for the upcoming week.

Campaign Metrics: Campaigns (run via AdWords and Double Click for Publishers for example) should ideally be checked every week. Although it's tempting to check a campaign's status on a daily basis, your metrics will provide a more accurate analysis of a campaign's performance after a full seven days. Keep track of the total amount of leads generated by the campaign and any other goals that have been set. Make adjustments weekly as necessary.

What to Check at the End of Every Month


Search Engine Rankings: Improving your search engine rankings doesn't take place over night or across the span of a week.  If you put in work to rank higher for a specific keyword, it will likely take at least a month for a search engine to thoroughly crawl your site, properly index it and adjust rankings appropriately.

Social Media Followers/Engagement: You gain and lose social media followers on a daily basis, but in order to see trends in engagement (and disengagement) wait until the end of every month. If you find that you've lost more followers than usual for the month, spend the next month focusing on your social media strategy.

Lead Acquisition Cost: You can calculate cost per lead by taking the total amount of money spent on online advertising and dividing it by the number of leads generated. If at the end of the month, the cost per lead is too high you can decide to scale back your budget or make changes to your campaigns and other lead-generating initiatives.

What to Check At the End of Every Year


Customer Acquisition: How many leads converted into customers? At the end of the year, it's good for sales and marketing to collectively look at how well lead generation works when stacked up to conversion rates. If a very small percentage of leads are converting, then your campaigns and other marketing initiatives should be more targeted to capture the leads that are more likely to close.

Total Revenue: Combine all of your marketing initiatives (search engine marketing, social media campaigns, display advertising, etc) and calculate how much revenue was generated in total for the year. You may find that one area generated a majority of your revenue, while you lost money in another area. The numbers will help you plan the next year's budget, marketing strategy and resource allocation.

Back to All Articles
Back to All Articles
Feb 2, 2015

How Often Should You Check Metrics?

Jillean Kearney

How often different metrics should be checked.

Monitoring the performance of your website and online marketing initiatives can be a little overwhelming when you consider all of the metrics and information that is at your fingertips all of the time.

It can be hard to keep track and create benchmarks.

Fortunately, it's not necessary to check every metric every day, not even every week.

Below, we break down which metrics should be monitored on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

What to Check At the End of Everyday


Visits and Page Views: Keeping track of how many daily visitors and page views your site is attracting is an easy way to measure performance and see immediate results like dips in traffic or big spikes. Daily visitors and page views are a big indicator of whether your site is performing like it should be. You'll also be able to see which content works best for your audience and find your weak points.

Leads: If you have a goal set for how many leads you would like to generate via your website, then this is a metric that should be checked daily. If you have a bad day in terms of lead generation, it can affect whether you reach your goal or not. Tracking this metric daily, like visits and page views, indicates whether your website is working as expected.

What to Check at the End of Every Week


Call-to-Action Performance: If your site has calls-to-actions, it's ideal to monitor clickthrough rates and overall performance weekly. If metrics are less than ideal, you can move the call-to-actions around on the page and change which ones you use to try new approaches for the upcoming week.

Campaign Metrics: Campaigns (run via AdWords and Double Click for Publishers for example) should ideally be checked every week. Although it's tempting to check a campaign's status on a daily basis, your metrics will provide a more accurate analysis of a campaign's performance after a full seven days. Keep track of the total amount of leads generated by the campaign and any other goals that have been set. Make adjustments weekly as necessary.

What to Check at the End of Every Month


Search Engine Rankings: Improving your search engine rankings doesn't take place over night or across the span of a week.  If you put in work to rank higher for a specific keyword, it will likely take at least a month for a search engine to thoroughly crawl your site, properly index it and adjust rankings appropriately.

Social Media Followers/Engagement: You gain and lose social media followers on a daily basis, but in order to see trends in engagement (and disengagement) wait until the end of every month. If you find that you've lost more followers than usual for the month, spend the next month focusing on your social media strategy.

Lead Acquisition Cost: You can calculate cost per lead by taking the total amount of money spent on online advertising and dividing it by the number of leads generated. If at the end of the month, the cost per lead is too high you can decide to scale back your budget or make changes to your campaigns and other lead-generating initiatives.

What to Check At the End of Every Year


Customer Acquisition: How many leads converted into customers? At the end of the year, it's good for sales and marketing to collectively look at how well lead generation works when stacked up to conversion rates. If a very small percentage of leads are converting, then your campaigns and other marketing initiatives should be more targeted to capture the leads that are more likely to close.

Total Revenue: Combine all of your marketing initiatives (search engine marketing, social media campaigns, display advertising, etc) and calculate how much revenue was generated in total for the year. You may find that one area generated a majority of your revenue, while you lost money in another area. The numbers will help you plan the next year's budget, marketing strategy and resource allocation.

About the Author
Jillean Kearney

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