Isolated data points and vague, vanity metrics don’t really tell you how your marketing campaigns are performing. Clear objectives and measurable goals are essential to understanding the performance of your marketing efforts. Because businesses need to use data insights that can influence strategy, utilizing key metrics to measure performance has become an essential part of marketing.
Metrics and analytics help you understand if you are on track to achieve your business and marketing goals. That being said, no two companies will benefit from the same metrics and related data analysis. The things you measure have to matter to your brand and strategically inform your decision making. Fortunately, there are many options that can help with both the gathering and analyzing of data such as Google Analytics, HubSpot Analytics, KISSmetrics, and Clicky to name a few.
You need to determine which metrics will provide the best insights for your business. Below are some of the many metrics that organizations might choose to examine as they strive to make the most of their marketing efforts.
Return on Investment
This metric calculates the effectiveness and value of an investment. It compares and measures the amount of return with regards to investment costs.
Return on Ad Spend
No more complicated than the name, this measures the profit from and performance of a specific marketing campaign.
Cost per Action
One interpretation of this metric is to measure the amount paid to attain a conversion. It is also used to define a strategy that allows an advertiser to pay each time a consumer takes a pre-specified action (fills out a form, downloads something, makes a purchase, etc.) This is a low-risk strategy since you only pay when a customer takes the desired action.
Customer Acquisitions Cost
This calculation can be used to take an overall look at how much it costs to gain a customer and can also help you understand how individual marketing channels are performing. This approach allows you to invest in low cost, high return channels. It should not be used in isolation, however. A channel might cost more but produce consumers who spend more than customers from other channels.
Customer Lifetime Value
Putting a customer-centric twist on a financial concept, this metric determines the economic value a customer brings from his first interaction to his final purchase. It calculates his net worth over the course of his relationship with your brand. This metric can also help identify specific channels that produce consumers with a high lifetime value.
Customer Retention Rate
This rate calculates how loyal your customers are, how many people are coming back to your site and how often.
New versus Returning Visitors
Tracking this metric provides information about whether or not your site is encouraging repeat customers, whether your site providing value-added content or underwhelming visitors. It can also help you understand the performance of any outreach efforts.
Churn Rate
This metric measures the percent of consumers who stop using your products or services.
Landing Page Conversion Rates
This helps you understand how well specific landing pages are resonating with your audiences. Look for pages that garner high levels of traffic but result in low conversion rates to understand where changes need to be made in content, format, or the call to action. On the other side of things, you can also create marketing campaigns to drive more traffic to pages that have low traffic and high conversion rates.
Total Conversion Rate
Think of conversions not only as purchases but also as completion of any desired action such as completing a form, downloading something, signing up for a newsletter, etc. This metric helps you understand which parts of your site visitors are interacting with and the rate at which they are meeting your end goal.
Overall Traffic (total site visits)
This metric tracks the number of people who visit or engage with your site. Patterns seen over time can inform changes that need to be made. This metric can also help determine the effectiveness of any campaigns geared towards traffic generation.
Channel-specific Traffic
This tracks where a visitor was just prior to arriving at your website. It allows you to understand which channels are contributing traffic to your site which in turn allows you to better understand the performance of your marketing campaigns. The types of traffic are:
Direct: people who type your URL
Referral: visitors who followed a link on a different domain to arrive at your site
Organic: someone who searched a topic or keywords and then chose your listing from the results
Social: people who linked to your site form a social media platform
Traffic to Lead
This metric helps you understand where people are coming from, what actions they are taking on your site and then converting. It can inform your spending strategy as well as the value of particular channels.
Time Spent
Understanding the total time visitors spend on your site helps to determine if they are finding the information valuable, the navigation intuitive, etc. You can also track the time spent on each page and which pages time is spent on to learn more about visitors’ perceptions of your content.
Engagement Rate
This metric tracks the number of likes, shares, comments, views, and so on. It helps you understand which content and formats are resonating with your audience - whether or not your posts are inspiring people to interact with your content and your brand.
Bounce Rate
A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your site after seeing only one page. Calculating this rate informs you of the success, or lack thereof, of your landing pages and the relevancy of the content. Look for trends or patterns to learn if there are specific pages with high bounce rates as they may need to be changed in some way. Do take this metric with a grain of salt – someone may leave your site because of experience issues but she may also leave because she found on the first page exactly what she was looking for.
Exit Rate
This metric tracks visitors who leave during the conversion process. Look for patterns to indicate problem areas in forms or your checkout process.
Email Specific Metrics
Delivery rate – to understand how your messages are performing with spam filters.
Bounce rate – lets you understand which email addresses are faulty and need to be eliminated.
Open rate and unique open – tells you how many people are (theoretically) consuming the information you’ve sent.
Click through rate – communicates how many people are responding to the call to action.
Conversion rate – tracks how many readers follow through to the end goal.
Unsubscribe rate – provides information about general perception of what you are sending and the frequency at which you are sending it.
Customer Satisfaction
There is no equation or set of calculations that can inform you of how satisfied consumers are with your brand. You have to interact with your customers, ask for feedback, and use their replies and perceptions to makes changes that will enable you to provide the best quality products or services and to improve the user experience.
The latest in analytics are smart metrics that use predictive modeling algorithms. The software can calculate predictive revenue to help businesses understand a wide-range view of revenue impact. It can predict how much a brand needs to spend to convert, retain, or recapture each customer based on those calculations. The smart software can also measure purchase related behaviors based on products browsed and purchased to predict future behavior of similar consumers. It can also analyze customer engagement patterns to quantify which engagement strategies are most successful in regards to responses and conversions.
Whether you rely on software or spreadsheets to calculate your metrics, you should definitely be looking at performance indicators to understand the results of your marketing efforts. Let the experts at Strategy Driven Marketing assist you in determining which metrics will best inform your brand as you strive to the next level of success. Contact us today.