Digital Analytics that Don't Provide Much Value for Local Businesses

With the rise of social media and digital advertising, and how easy they both made it to track marketing data, it became exciting to see real-time results. Unfortunately, many of the metrics that we value on our personal social media accounts are not what's important for tracking return on investment.

There are several metrics that are commonly tracked by businesses that may not provide much value in terms of understanding the performance of their digital marketing and website development. Here are a few examples:

• Page views: This metric measures the number of times a page on a website has been viewed. While it may seem like a useful metric, it doesn't provide any information about the quality of a visitor's experience on the website or the effectiveness of the content on the page.
• Unique visitors: This metric measures the number of distinct individuals who visit a website over a certain period of time. It is similar to website traffic but it may not provide any additional insights into the behavior of the visitors.
• Followers or likes: The number of followers or likes on social media platforms is a vanity metric that doesn't provide any information about the engagement of the followers or the effectiveness of the social media strategy.
• Impressions: Impressions measure the number of times a piece of content is displayed on social media or PPC platforms. It doesn't provide information about the effectiveness of the content or the engagement of the audience.
• Click-through rate (CTR): This metric measures the number of clicks on a link or ad divided by the number of impressions. It can be misleading because it doesn't take into account the quality of the clicks, or the conversion rate of the visitors.
• Raw data: Collecting data for the sake of collecting data without a clear goal or plan on how to analyze it, can lead to overwhelming amount of data that is hard to make sense of, and won't provide any actionable insights.

It's important to track metrics that are relevant to a business's goals and objectives and to understand what each metric can tell you about the performance of your digital marketing and website development. While these metrics may be tracked by many businesses, they may not provide much value in terms of understanding the performance of digital marketing and website development.