Make sure your online marketing efforts are generating the results you need by keeping up on “The 3 Most Important Online Marketing Metrics to Monitor” as described by Entrepreneur.com contributor AJ Kumar. With so many different ways to measure results, it’s easy to get too caught up in the wrong ones. Use these three metrics to keep your online marketing on track:

1. Conversion rate and goal completion. Make sure the time and money invested in your web presence is getting you something of value. No matter what your goal for your website, it’s important to be able measure the ratio of visitors that complete the desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. For this, use Google Analytics or look into an analytics service.
2. Backlink profile. Search engine optimization is affected greatly by the quality of the links that point to your website. If you don’t understand your backlink profile, your SEO could suffer. Kumar recommends a service such as Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer to help you get a better understanding. Here are some things you want to look for: Are there any “bad neighborhood” links pointing at your website? Do your backlinks use varied, natural sounding anchor text? Do your links come from sites that were built solely for SEO purposes?
3. Visitor engagement. This refers to how much time visitors spend on your site and how much value they see in your content. Kumar advises to monitor the following stats and look to improve your site’s weaker areas: Average time on site, which should be as high as possible. Bounce rate, which measures the number of visitors who don’t navigate beyond the first page of your website that they land on. It should never be lower than 50 percent. Average pages per visit, which should also be as high as possible. Number of social media shares, which should be high in order to demonstrate that visitors fine enough value in your content to share it with friends.

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