Setting goals is arguably the most important part of your role as a manager. You have to know where you’re going before you figure out how to get there. I encourage clients to look at several key metrics when setting audience goals. The following are key metrics that we track on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis:

On-Air Cume (per week)
On-Air Time Spent Listening (per week)
Website Unique Visitors (per month)
Website Page Views (per month)
Ad Impressions Served (per month)
App Downloads (per month)
App Opens (per month)
Streaming Cume (per week)
Streaming Tune-Ins (per week)
Total Streaming Hours (per week)
E-mail Database Subscribers (per month)
E-mail Average Open Rate (per month)
Facebook Fans (per month)
Twitter Followers (per month)

These are all gages you can use to measure your progress in the digital space.

In addition, you may consider tracking your position in search engines relative to specific keywords or phrases. Most websites get 75-80% of their traffic from search engines, so better management of your appearance on search engines can help you to increase your traffic.

The big question behind all of these metrics is, “what number should I use as a goal? Where do I start?” There are a number of ways to set the right numbers as goals. Often, I choose to start by identifying the numbers I know—usually the station’s weekly cume and TSL as defined by Arbitron, unique visitors and page views as defined by Google Analytics, and streaming cume, etc. Then, it’s easy to get a better feel for the other numbers.

I encourage stations to aim for 10-15% of their weekly cume in monthly unique visitors as a starting point. Some of our clients are reaching 50%+ of their weekly cume in monthly unique visitors. The sites that achieve the highest traffic are the ones that are driving new unique content to their sites on a regular basis.

If you are interested in more ways to grow your website traffic, click here to read a Radio3D special on ways to improve your traffic.

This week in Radio3D, we are talking about ways to measure your audience. Next week in Radio3D, we will feature more information on measuring your success from a sales perspective.