Moz founder Rand Fishkin points to his Fitbit as an example of how consumers can measure their physical activity, sleep and calorie intake to achieve their health and fitness goals.
Marketers also rely on analytics to track brand results, but Fishkin believes the industry isn’t measuring all of the activities it should.
Marketers are only using data to measure their results, but not the work that goes into it — like the steps tracked on Fitbit.
Too often, Fishkin says marketers rely on intuition or experimentation when approaching a marketing problem, when they should be using data to track their work.
“This is what’s missing from our current approach to analytics. We measure results, but not the inputs that create those results,” Fishkin said during the Unbounce “Call to Action” conference in Vancouver on Tuesday.
“I think this is the greatest analytics challenge that’s facing us today as a web marketing industry. It’s understanding how to generate targets — how to measure the work and map that to our success.”
Fishkin says most marketers have three goals with analytics: reporting, diagnosing and generating targets.
“We’re really good and number one and two, as an industry,” he says. “Number three we almost don’t do at all … We have to know what works to create success.”
He has seven tips to help marketers measure their work:
1. Boost the number of internal links on your own website for search engine optimization.
2. Put in new content targeting low-volume key words.
3. Try to get people who mention you on social media to include links to your content.
4. Test new titles and headlines on ranking pages.
5. Use automation and scheduling tools for social sharing. It doesn’t have to be impersonal.
6. Add related topics to your key-word target pages.
7. Use audience feedback to improve your site.
He says each tactic can be broken down into into three formats: The work (ie. put up two Facebook posts a week and pitch guest contribution once a month); The metrics (ie. traffic increase, Facebook shares and new page likes) and; The goal(s) (ie. grow Facebook reach and visibility to new audience).
“If you can break things down into work that can be measured, metrics that can show how that work did, and the goal that you are trying to achieve or influence through that work or those metrics, you’ve got something,” Fishkin says.
“Then you can figure out which work actually moves the needle.”
