Once you get a good handle on the following basic key metrics, you can then expand your data analysis to other stats that may be more relevant to your specific industry, rather than just franchises in general.

Unique Visitors

The unique visitors count is the number of people who visited your website during a specific period (yesterday, last Monday, last month…). Unique visitors are only tracked by the number of individual visits to your website — and not a cumulative count of how many times that visitor re-visits your site. For example, if John visits your site once, and then Paul comes along and visits it, and then Paul returns 3 more times throughout the day, your unique visitor count is still 2 (while your overall visit count is 5 total).

Your unique visitors are important as they show you your audience reach, and any changes in that reach based on different marketing efforts. For example, if you increase your ad campaign budget for a month, you should ideally see a corresponding spike in your unique visitors; if you don’t, then perhaps you need to come up with an alternate marketing campaign to better reach more relevant users.

New vs. Returning Visitors

Furthermore, what percentage of your visitors are new vs. returning? A great website and great marketing should give you a good mix of both: both brand new visitors coming to your site (which means your marketing and referrals are working well to bring in new traffic), and old visitors who keep returning time after time to enjoy more of what you have to offer.

Being able to get return visitors means that your content, products or services are compelling and providing value to your audience…getting you closer than ever to those conversions.

Bounce Rate

A website bounce occurs when someone visits your site and then immediately clicks the back button, or closes the web browser, most likely meaning they made it to your site by accident, or they weren’t able to find what they were looking on your site.

Every lost visitor is a potential lost lead, so understanding why visitors are leaving your site is an important task to take on. Perhaps your landing pages need better flow or navigation, or you’re missing some enticing content to keep users interested.

Referrals

Referrals help you to understand where your visitors are coming from: did they click on your site from a search engine results page? Are they finding you from a reference on a blog posting or link directory? From social media posts?

Knowing where your traffic is coming from will tell you where you should be focusing on your business promotion: if you get great traffic from other blogger’s posts, maybe you should focus on building out your content marketing and blogging community/blogger relationships. If you’re getting good traction from Facebook posts, maybe you should put more energy into your social media marketing.

Top Pages

We’re going to split this metric into two parts: top visited pages, and top exited pages.

Top Visited: review your top 10 pages report from Google Analytics. This will show you a list of your most popular and most viewed pages. This report is extremely helpful for you to understand where you should focus on building out your content marketing: if a specific blog post topic is very popular, maybe it’s time to write a re-vamped version of it, or write some new posts on the same thread. If you have a busy landing page for an offer, maybe it’s time to invest in some more advertising to get even more traffic on that landing page, or it’s time to design a new, similar offer to advertise.

Whatever the case is, this report will show you which of your pages are working best for your audience.

Top Exited: Not to be confused with a bounce, a website “exit” is when a visitor leaves your website after visiting a number of pages. It’s very important to know which pages on your site have the highest exit rates (besides, for example, an order confirmation page).  Perhaps you have a broken link somewhere, or a page that isn’t loading correctly.  Examining a highly exited page from all device types (mobile included!) may tell you that something is broken, or that a page needs a format refresh.

Goal Conversions

The goal conversion rate might be the most important metric of the ones we’ve listed today. Goal conversions track the number of visitors who achieve a predefined “goal” on your website — for example, filling out a form, submitting a ‘contact us’ request, or making a purchase. So basically, this rate tracks how successful your website is in getting your visitors to do what you are wanting them to do.

Your goal conversion rate requires constant review; if you notice a sudden decline in your conversion rate, it might be a good indication that there is a broken page in your goal path, or that something is wrong with your checkout process.

Where Should You Start?

How many of these key metrics are you already monitoring or tracking? If you see any new ones that are missing from your lead generation plan for 2016, take time to review your current results in your analytics tracking tool, and understand your baseline or starting point. Then you can work to incorporate goal metrics into your overall inbound marketing plan and forecast the changes you want to see over the next fiscal year.

It’s also important to capture each of these metrics for each franchise location, so that you can compare the results against each other.  Is one location doing better than another in terms of unique visitors?  What are the reasons that could be happening? Maybe a top page for one franchise website could work on another franchise website as well, and help to drive their traffic up.

To make sure you aren’t missing any other key pieces of an inbound marketing strategy, download our free guide to marketing specifically for franchise and multi-location businesses.