Reach, engagement, bounce rate, interactions… if you’re new to measuring analytics, the lingo itself can be enough to drive you away.

But we promise it’s not as complicated as it might seem on the surface (though you can get pretty in-depth if you want to). We’ll explain the most important metrics for any business, what they mean and how to measure them.

Reach
Simply put, this is the number of people who saw your post. If you have 1,000 followers, your potential reach is 1,000. However, you’ve likely already figured out that all of your followers are not going to see every post. Your ‘reach’ is the number who actually did.

Engagement
While reach measures the number of people who see your post, engagement (also called interactions) measures the number of interactions with it. This could be a click on the post, a like, retweet, share, favorite, comment, etc.

Facebook breaks engagement down by giving you a number for each action, while Twitter gives you an engagement rate as a percentage. The engagement rate is calculated by dividing the number of actions on a Tweet by its reach. So, it’s possible that you could have an engagement rate higher than 100% (which seems kooky at first). This could happen, say, if 10 people saw your Tweet and each of them favorited it and retweeted it. In this case your engagement rate would be 200%.

Bounce rate
Bounce rate is an important measurement for your website found in Google Analytics. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site, or “bounce”, after viewing only one page. The lower your bounce rate, the better, because it means visitors are sticking around—and clicking around—on your site.

Conversion
If you own a business, this is the most important metric for your bottom line. A conversion happens any time a visitor takes the action you want them to take, be it making a purchase, signing up for your email list, downloading your app, etc.

Conversion tracking is fairly easy to set up using Google Analytics. If you’re unsure how to do it, your webmaster should be able to help you. Once it’s set up, you can easily see which channels are driving the most traffic (social media, Google search, etc.) and where your ad dollars are most effective.

For example, you might run ad campaigns on both Facebook and Twitter. By comparing the cost of your ads to the conversion rate, you should be able to determine the average cost of acquiring each new customer to see which platform is cheaper and more effective.

Of course, no analytics mean anything on their own. You must track them consistently over time to get a clear picture of where your digital strategy is succeeding and where it’s falling short. Need help getting started? Drop me a line.