Marketing Metrics – What should you be measuring?

Understanding marketing metrics

 
Marketing metrics are vital in any marketing campaign. It’s critical that you watch the correct metrics for your business,  and understand what each of them is telling you. We heartily recommend that you avoid becoming obsessed with vanity metrics such as follower counts or video views. Neither of these guarantee you customers and, in general, it’s far more important to ensure that your content is seen by the correct people rather than as many people as possible. You can achieve this by using and tracking the correct marketing metrics and using them to shape and improve your campaign.
Metrics lie at the heart of every marketing campaign that we run. We recently came across an article on marketing metrics from The Next Web showcasing some of the most important marketing metrics for 2015. In this article, we’ll cover some of the metrics that are key to any high performing marketing campaign.

Reach and engagement

The reach of any advertising campaign is a key statistic but simple numbers are not enough to give you a full understanding of how your marketing campaign is performing., The key to using your reach figures effectively is to track engagement. How many of the people that see your marketing take an action? That action could be favouriting or retweeting a tweet, filling out a form on one of your landing pages, clicking a link or otherwise engaging with your content by answering your Call To Action.
Understanding the engagement rates you expect from your content and how to measure them is key. You should track every change in these metrics. A sudden drop in the open rate for your email marketing campaign may indicate a poor subject line or a change in the spam filtering techniques of a popular webmail service like Gmail. If you don’t track these marketing metrics then you won’t know and your campaign results will be weaker as a result.

Cost per sale or acquisition

This is essential as it allows you to treat your marketing campaigns as an investment that gains you additional customers rather than an expense. Track each sales channel individually so that you have a full picture of which channels are bringing you the highest number of leads at the right cost. This will allow you to direct your marketing spending more intelligently since you’ll know which sales channels offer you the highest possible return on investment.
Tracking this effectively may involve some longer term tracking of individual customer spend, depending on your business model. If acquiring a customer through a PPC campaign costs you twice as much as acquiring one at a trade fair but that customer goes on to spend ten times as much then your return on investment is obviously far higher with the PPC. See? A little insight and time to consider the implications goes a long way!

Total Conversions

This can be simple to track if you’re making effective use of Google Analytics, which is an essential tool for anyone running an online marketing campaign. You need to set up goals within Google Analytics so you can track your total number of conversions. This set of marketing metrics will be key – you’ll know when you achieve a certain number of conversions to break even or achieve an agreed profit on a particular project.You’ll need visibility in any case, and the digital marketing dream suite of tools allows you to have this.
 
Understanding and using marketing metrics is key to an effective marketing campaign. It will give you the ability to tweak and understand the performance of your campaign as it progresses and iron out any problems that are preventing your marketing campaigns from being as successful as they could be – you’ll be able to do more of what works, and stop doing what doesn’t!
Our digital scientists eat this stuff for breakfast – can we help you? Let us know if you have any questions we can answer for you.