While every small business in every industry faces unique marketing challenges, understanding these four easy-to-track metrics will help make your digital marketing efforts more effective.

1. Unique visitors: Many people use visits, or the number of times their website was visited in a week or month, to track their site’s performance. Fewer people bother to also track unique visitors, or the number of individualswho visited your site. For instance, you could have 1,000 total visits in June, but only 330 unique visitors. That number tells you that most visitors return to your site an average of three times, suggesting a loyal and active audience.
2. Bounce rate: Your bounce rate tells you what percent of visitors quickly leave your site after only seeing your landing page. In other words, they see your site and bounce. This could indicate that you need to pay attention to your home page content, navigation and/or load speed.
3. Site loading speed: Have you ever visited a site that takes forever to load? Sure, the many large photos slowing it down might be stunning, but chances are you didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Be sure your site’s load times are quick and painless. Otherwise visitors will click away to a competitor before you’ve even had a chance to say hello.
4. Referrals: Referrals tell you where a visitor was directly before visiting your site. They may have been referred to your site from a Google search, a social media page, a digital ad or a hyperlink in a blog. This might not seem important, but it’s key to maximizing and measuring digital marketing. For instance, if you receive ample referral traffic from social media, your efforts there are working. Referrals can also help you pinpoint search keywords that lead customers to you and identify potential partners. If a link on a local blog results in significant referral traffic, that’s a great place to build a business-to-business relationship.