Our second campfire session at Pet Connections Expo occurred towards the end of the second day. Admittedly, attendance at both the session and the expo had gotten a little bit lighter, partly due to the impending storm, but the information is just as important as if it was presented at the start of day one!

So in the spirit of helping our community members and followers, we’ll break down the campfire session and immortalize it on the internet. Check out our first session breakdown on making the most of your marketing HERE. If you’ve had the chance to speak with one of the Pet Engine Marketing growth specialists on marketing your pet store, you’ll know we are all about tracking our data and ensuring that our clients get the best ROI for their marketing money. If you want to learn more about how we do what we do, and how it grows your business, and how you are in total control of the vehicle while at the same time letting a professional do the driving, then you should schedule a call!

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So, let’s break down some of the key online metrics to track for your pet store, and we’ll briefly dig into ways that you can improve metrics and get better results when marketing your pet store.

Metrics to Track
for your Pet Store

Website Metrics

When we work with pet store owners, we often find that the website is a good starting point for judging assessing the store’s digital presence and online health. What we mean by that is there are pet stores that don’t have websites at all (and some are doing just fine!), others have shabby antiquated websites that may be turning customers away (or not), and others still may have modern websites that do everything they want for them.

The big tracking tool we use at Pet Engine Marketing with our clients is Google Analytics. Take a gander through our Insider section to learn more about setting up Google Analytics and using it to see what’s happening on your website - it can be overwhelming. And if you want to get useful information on platforms like Analytics delivered straight to your social feeds and inbox, then subscribe and follow us:

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Here are the major metrics to track for your pet store on Google Analytics:

Conversions: This is basically the goal of your website. If you want to sell products on your pet store’s website, then it’s how many products are being sold. If you want to get newsletter signups from your website, then it’s new subscribers. If it’s inbound calls from your contact form, then it’s….you get the picture, yeah?
Incoming traffic: It’s important to know how people are finding your site, that way you can continue to put effort and/or money in marketing areas that are most effective.
a.) New vs. Returning users: This is a good indicator of how good your written content is, or how sticky your website is, or how great your products are. It’s usually much more expensive and difficult to convert a new user than a returner.
b.) Sources: You have to track your effort, and this is a good way to see who is coming to your site organically (or from a search engine), through social media (like Facebook or Instagram), or finding you directly (they put your site into their browser).
c.) Session duration: This is an indicator of the quality of people that are visiting your site. If they reach your site and are only there for 5 seconds, then you’ve spent time/effort in bringing the wrong audience to your site. If they are there for a few minutes (that’s a long time for today’s consumers) then you’re hitting the sweet spot.
Bounce rate: This is the rate of visitors that leave your website after looking at the first page you land on. You want this to be low. This is similar to session duration in that it’s an indicator of visitor quality. If people are leaving immediately after getting to your site, then try to rememdy it by driving other people to the site, or creating better landing pages.

Google My Business

GMB has become more and more important for local businesses. We’ve got some good resources in the Insider area on setting up, optimizing, and utilizing your Google Business listing, so check those out. Here’s some metrics to track for your pet store on Google My Business:

Actions: Pretty straightforward, this is how many people are taking action after viewing your business listing. It could be visiting your site, clicking for directions, or calling directly.
Views: This is an indicator of how effective your SEO efforts are in making sure that your pet store is being seen on Google. You can drill down your conversion rate by doing easy math: Total Actions divided by Views (Actions/Views).
Reviews: Reviews are critically important to any business in today’s world. We just put out an Insider post on Enhancing Customer Loyalty that talks about review statistics. Bringing in and responding to new reviews is a strong indicator of not only SEO efforts but customer service and business health.

Social Media

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of metrics to track for your pet store in the social media space. We can’t go into all of them, so here are just a few:

Subscribers/Followers: Be careful with this. Your pages should be growing, but just because you’ve added 100 followers on Instagram doesn’t mean they are locals that are going to buy from you 12 times per year.
Engagement: This is a better indicator of your audience, brand, and voice. If you know your audience and your messaging is on point, your content will be engaging and your audience will respond.
Reach: This simply means how visible you are in the social media space. It’s important, especially considering that many consumers require 7-10 impressions (vewing a brand or ad) before it really sticks with them.

Improving Metrics to Track
for your Pet Store

Alright, we’ve identified a few metrics to track for your pet store, and now let’s start talking about how we get those numbers up.

Website: Our best advice is to dig into Analytics and find where you’re weak and where you’re strong. Decide if the weak areas are worth improving, and come up with ways to continue to maximize the strong areas. Or, alternatively, pay us to do it!
Google My Business: Increase your visibility on Google (with a strong SEO strategy) and make it easy for customers to provide reviews - give them links via email marketing, an opportunity at the register, or discount incentives (good if you have to bury a negative review). We can also help you with this!
Social Media: Organic growth will be better for your local pet store, but it will typically be slower. You should go for a mix of paid and organic content. With the paid content, make sure you’re keeping an eye on and optimizing your targeting for best results. Or….yup, you guessed it, we can do it for you!

Metrics to Track for your Pet Store
Conclusion

This Insider post turned out about as long as the previous one, which is just a little surprising to us because you normally think of a 20-minute chat or presentation as pretty short. Well, it’s not! Hopefully you are able to find some value in this piece, whether it’s a deeper understanding of what you should be looking for, ideas to improve what you’re already doing, or a strong starting point in marketing your pet store. We’re here to help, so reach out with comments or questions!