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“What’s your sales metrics (the average revenue per sale)?” I respond back to them.
Unfortunately, almost all entrepreneurs and business owners stare at me clueless, unable to answer my simple question, which is perhaps one of the most common reasons why their sales never increase.
You see, knowing your sales metrics is super essential to sales growth because once you know it, you can dramatically (or methodically) skyrocket your sales and your competitors will get left behind in the dust.
Here are five sales performance metric you must follow:
- Website Traffic
The number one metric that every website owners obsess about is website traffic – a total number of unique visits to your website.
Surely, website traffic is supercritical for a successful online business, and you can monitor this metric quickly by using Google Analytics.
Your website traffic is a good indication to know whether your website is growing, stagnating, or declining. You can also measure this sales performance metric to see the efficiency of specific promotional methods. Let’s say, for example, your website experiences a sudden traffic spike after posting a guest post on a popular blog, which should indicate to you that you should be doing more of the same in the future.
On the other hand, if your website’s traffic is in decline for a very long time, this tells you that you should change your approach and try new things because whatever you’re currently doing is not working. If you don’t do it fast, your website will fail.
- Your Website Traffic Sources
In addition to knowing your website traffic numbers, you should also know where all those traffic are coming. Again, you can do this quickly by using Google Analytics (it’s free).
This free SEO tool breaks down your traffic sources into four different categories: organic traffic (traffic that comes through the search engines), direct traffic (traffic that types your domain into the browser), referral traffic (traffic coming from another website), and social traffic (traffic generated through social media).
Why should I care about all these traffic sources?
The answer is simple: each traffic source will tell you more information about your website.
For example, if 70% of your website’s total traffic is organic traffic, that tells you how well your site ranks in the search engine, which in turn will show you how effective your SEO strategy is. With over 40,000 searches per second on Google alone, today search engines have become one of the most important sources of traffic.
Referral traffic gives you an idea of a total number of visitors who come through other websites – perhaps you published a guest post, or a site linked back to content on your website.
If a lot of websites are linking to your site, your business can benefit in two ways: First, your website rankings will dramatically improve, and you’ll be less dependent on the search engines to drive traffic. Second, plenty of links referring your site means that you’re doing an excellent job and shows how valuable your content is.
Direct traffic is the total number of visitors who type your website URL into their browser – for instance, http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com. A good amount of direct traffic indicates a loyal following.
Lastly, social traffic indicates a total number of visitors that come from the social media sites. The more valuable, relevant, and shareable your content is, the more engaging it becomes on social media, and thus, more traffic you will get to your website.
Which traffic source is best for me?
Well, the answer isn’t simple. It all depends on the website type you’re running. However, one thing is for sure: it’s always beneficial if your traffic came from different sources as it will help minimize the risk of your website being slaughtered if your primary site traffic source shrink.
- Your Website Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is another critical sales metric, which has a significant impact on SEO. It tells you how many people leave your website immediately after arriving. So the lower your bounce rate, the longer your visitors are staying on your site (enjoying your content) and converting.
On the other hand, a high bounce rate indicates to you that your visitors are leaving, immediately after they arrive.
But, this sales performance metrics don’t tell you why they are leaving. You’ll have to do the spy work yourself by digging a little bit deeper. However, usually, a high bounce rate include poor website design, slow load times, poorly targeted keywords, and broken websites.
With these things in mind, you can easily and quickly improve your website’s bounce rate by making your site look professional, function properly, and publishing valuable content regularly.
- Your Best Performing Pages
Google Analytics also has a Behavior section that allows you to quickly see your top performing pages in regards to traffic volume.
Knowing which pages get the most traffic on your website is highly decisive as it helps you understand what your audience honestly respond to. If you publish different types of content on your site, this is when you can start to analyze what content type is working, and post more of those materials in the future.
However, traffic numbers aren’t the only way you can discover your “top performing” pages.
You can also look at the total number of social shares for a page, which is an indication of a high-quality article. Google Analytics doesn’t have this tool. However, there are plenty of other tools and WordPress plugins that displays this information, such as Social Metrics Pro.
Once you know which content is popular with your audience, the next step becomes even more straightforward: publish more of it!
- Your Website Conversion Ratio
The conversion ratio is another top critical sales performance metric, or perhaps the most vital sales performance parameter of all because it can have a massive impact on your website’s profitability – if you can only improve your conversion rate from 2% to 4%, you can double your profits, almost overnight!
Conversion rate indicates how well you motivate a traffic to take the desired ACTION.
Here’s how to calculate your conversion rate:
Conversion rate = total visitors to your site/number of conversions
A website may have different conversion “goals.” For instance, if you’re running an eCommerce store, then you might have these three conversion goals:
- Make a sale (number one priority!)
- Ask a visitor to sign up for your email list
- Ask a visitor to share your content on social sites (optional, but still highly valuable)
Understand this: if your website has high conversion rate, then whatever you’re doing is excellent. On the other hand, if it has a low conversion rate, either you are probably driving the wrong traffic, or your sales copy is weak, or your call to action isn’t powerful enough to drive conversions.
Because conversion rates can have a powerful effect on profits, you should spend your time and effort on optimizing your website for conversions, regularly. Even small changes can deliver a dramatic spike in your sales.
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