No matter the stage of your marketing efforts, establishing the necessary metrics for success is instrumental for a productive marketing campaign.
To identify an effective approach, it is necessary to know what the objectives are. Marketing that yields positive outcomes requires careful study and research rather than just relying on instinct. Following the numbers, analysing the data, and evaluating the effects should be the focus.
Marketing metrics
Utilize metrics to keep track of, document, and evaluate progress with the passage of time. The measurements used can vary and be different depending on the platform.
You need to be focused on your objectives and select the criteria that will monitor your triumphs and disappointments. Even though there are several performance measurements to follow, you must pinpoint what is truly relevant for each campaign.
Marketing metrics matter
A joint study by Google and MIT established that nearly nine out of ten leading marketing professionals utilize influential metrics, such as gross revenue, market share, or customer lifetime value, to gauge the efficiency of their efforts. Some of the benefits of using these and other metrics include:
- Having data to support informed decision making
- Knowing which channels provide the highest ROI
- Justifying marketing spend and overall budget allocations
- Increasing results across the board
- Honing in on where and how to maximize lead conversions
Radek Vanis, Chief Marketing Officer, recently used LinkedIn to discuss his views on why marketing metrics are important to him.
Vanis noted that finding a return on investment (ROI) from marketing activities in the business-to-business environment has become a somewhat debatable topic. It can take us three months or longer to close a sale, but we often succumb to the desire of quickly figuring out performance numbers and confining ourselves to brief timelines.
He goes on to point out recent research shows that:
- 77% of marketers measure ROI within the first month of their campaign, trying to prove ROI in a shorter amount of time than their sales cycle
- Of those marketers, 55% admitted that they had a sales cycle of three months or more
- And only 4% of marketers even measure ROI over a six-month period or longer
How to set your key marketing metrics
There are lots of checklists available that indicate what you need to monitor and any items that you may not have accounted for. The reality is that each business and project manager has their own set of preferable analytics for marketing.
In the end, there are two major concepts: objectives and concentration.
Goals
An illustration – if you want to amplify sales by five percent this quarter, you shouldn’t focus strongly on monitoring the amount of likes on your most recent Instagram post. Select marketing measurements that are directly related to the desired results. Also, don’t forget strategy. When creating a plan for your objectives, it is beneficial to have an idea of how you are going to achieve them. The choice of strategy will guide you in selecting the most appropriate marketing measurements. In the illustration above, if you require that BOFU material, for instance, a post regarding options for competitors that clearly mentions your item, is a big part of your approach, then you should track metrics including CTA link clicks, page views, and average length spent on the page.
Focus
Yes, there are overly ambitious goals that cause you to be very enthusiastic about measuring your progress. It is understandable that one would like to be informed on all aspects of their business since having knowledge is a source of strength.
We are aware of our own experiences which prove that it is usually a drawn-out process, and not productive to pursue each statistic just because one believes it is necessary.
Key marketing metrics
Here are some must-know terms, with definitions and examples you can use to build a high-impact portfolio of custom marketing metrics for future campaigns:
1. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
CPA is the expense associated with obtaining one new customer. This may change based on the type of effort, communication vehicle, and even depending on the season.
Anuj Bhatia, an expert on worldwide enterprise strategies, has stated that CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), which is also known as one of the most paramount measurements in marketing, particularly in digital marketing, is the entire amount of money spent to acquire someone that will pay.
You can use CPA to determine your success with your advertising, however, it is more common to use channel-specific CPA in order to optimize how much money you put into each channel.
Work out the cost per acquisition by collecting the details on your advertising expenditure as well as the sales figures. We then figure out the cost of acquiring each customer by taking the amount you spent on your marketing campaign and dividing it by the number of people who made a purchase. Here is the calculation:
CPA = Campaign Cost/Number of conversions
When it comes to deciding what makes for a good CPA, concentrate on finding a lasting way to reduce your firm’s cost per acquisition in the long run.
2. Cost per lead (CPL)
Prior to obtaining new clients, you need to secure new prospects. The amount of money per individual lead acquired by a campaign, channel, or total expenditure is recorded.
This statistic concerning sales and marketing assists individuals with making preferable objectives, estimating return on investment, and changing allocations as required. The CPL budget includes expenses for paid advertisement spaces and social media tracking applications.
Discover what your Cost Per Lead (CPL) is by calculating the total amount of money spent on marketing divided by the total amount of new leads gained within a timeframe. These types of calculations should be carried out once a quarter or, provided there is enough capability and capacity, once a month.
It is essential to have a framework implemented that enables you to track and document the source of every single lead. You might have irrelevant sales processes listed in your data that your squad didn’t work on.
3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
The amount that an individual is anticipated to spend throughout the entirety of their relationship with a business from initial buy to final purchase is identified as customer lifetime value.
This estimate is determined by the costs you use, any chances for additional sales, and important projecting info, like prior experiences for correlated customers.
Marketing has demonstrated that to be successful, it is often more beneficial to focus on quality rather than quantity; therefore, there should be some initiatives geared towards current customers to keep them around for the long haul.
To determine it: Hubspot has a convenient calculator, or you can still utilize the equation: CLV = Average Customer Value multiplied by Average Customer Lifespan.
4. Click-through rate (CTR)
The amount of clicks on an ad, link, or website in relation to the amount of times it is viewed is called the click-through rate. The copy displayed has proven to be successful, as it has a high click-through rate of approximately 4%.
Once a person has made their selection, the subsequent experience should satisfy the expectations they had when they clicked on it.
Discover how to determine it: Payed advertising services such as Facebook supply this information gratuitously within the network. You can always calculate the click-through rate yourself by putting in your total clicks and impressions into the webFX calculator.
5. Bounce rate
Essentially, the bounce rate is a measure of the number of people who view a single page on a website and then leave without taking any further action. A high bounce rate signifies that your content, writing, or offer is not keeping visitors engaged on your site, leading to breakdowns in potential sales.
Determining the steps to measure: Begin by deciding what marketing analytics entails and what data is necessary. Tools such as Google Analytics can work out bounce rate without you having to do anything.
The trick is to lower the percentage over time. Under ideal circumstances, there would be no bounce rate at all. Generally, a website is thought to be successful if the bounce rate is 40 percent or less.
Categories of Content Marketing Metrics and KPIs
Measuring elements like referring links to your material, references to your company on social networks, and news stories about you can be used to show that your company’s standing and recognition is getting bigger.
Keeping tabs on specific grades can be beneficial, but there are more meaningful or mission-oriented means of keeping a record of your actual influence.
Being conscious of the different types of metrics and their functions can aid in building an efficient tracking process that is tailored to your company’s needs when incorporated as performance gauges. Here are some of them:
1. Consumption Metrics
Metrics related to usage reveal the number of people taking in your material as well as how much time they are investing in looking into it.
- Pageviews: Use this metric to gauge which pieces of your content are the most engaging. Focus on those types of content in the future.
- Unique visitors: This metric allows you to estimate your audience’s overall size and how many of them are repeat visitors.
- Average time on page: Is your content engaging? If this metric is relatively high, then you’re doing fine. But if your visitors are simply skimming through the content, it is not very engaging, and you should put some serious work into it.
- Behavior flow: Diving into Google Analytics, behavior flow will help you understand how a user navigates through your website. The chart shows where a user lands on the site, navigates through various pages, and exits. This can help you identify and optimize the drop-off points for user retention.
2. Website Engagement Metrics
You desire people who view your website to interact with your material. The greater your involvement metrics, the more captivated your followers are in what you have to provide.
- Inbound links: The number of sites referring to your site will help you earn higher domain authority. Your goal is to assess the number of links earned for a particular content piece. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz allow you to evaluate the number (and quality) of links that refer to your site and create more link-building opportunities. Find out the page with the top links to create similar pieces in the future, improve rankings, and search visibility.
- Session duration: Every person who visits your site counts as one session. Session duration measures the amount of time one user spends on your site, regardless of the number of pages they view.
- Page depth: This metric, also called “pages per session,” gives you an average number of pages someone will click when visiting your site.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Each button or link on your website has a CTR – the ratio of clicks to views. Higher CTRs mean higher engagement.
3. Retention Metrics
Retention metrics give an indication of how successful your website is at keeping visitors.
- Return rate: Return rate allows you to see how many new vs. how many return visitors you’re getting. You will have a different approach to those two groups, but it is important to have a healthy mix.
- Pages per visit: How many people click on your page, exploring it before leaving? This metric shows you how engaging and valuable the bulk of your content is, and not just the piece that led the audience to your page.
- Bounce rate: Your website bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing the first page. In general, the lower the bounce rate, the better. This means that users tend to spend more time on your site. Identify the content with a higher bounce rate to repurpose or update it.
4. Social Metrics
Gaining important understanding from supporters, prospects, and clients can be done through the use of social media.
- Follower count: Be on top of your social media and always know how large your social media following is. This metric allows you to follow your social media audience growth over time as well.
- Social media shares and likes: How is your content fairing on social media? Does any of it have any potential of going viral, or are all your efforts falling on deaf ears, and you’re not getting any likes or share? Find out by diligently tracking all shares, retweets, pins, and so on. There are plenty of tools you can use to set up sharing buttons to help you know the number of shares of a content piece across social networks. Take your best-performing content to set benchmarks to understand the audience’s expectations.
- Comments: Social media comments are an accurate measure of engagement. Keep track of them to know how people respond to what you have to say and maybe get ideas for additional content that might get more traction.
5. Content Production Metrics
These metrics will help inform future content creation choices.
- Time spent on content creation: Tracking the time spent creating compelling content will help you hone your CM strategy. You can decide whether to hire freelance writers so that you can focus on other marketing activities or take content creation in-house with a team of writers. Finding out the time going in will come in handy to assess the efficiency of content creators.
- Performance over time: The article you published got over 100 shares during the first week. So after a month, how is it going? Is it still raking in some audiences? Has your content been created for any event or specific purpose? Do you see a drop in engagement or shares after a week? Identify the content to start with maximizing the value for each of them.
The Need for Balance
Understanding user behavior is no easy feat. There’s no silver bullet. By putting into practice measurable metrics, you will start to take steps in the right direction.
Using metrics to track the outcomes of certain content is essential to stay afloat in the cutthroat digital landscape.
You can always buy reach. You can increase page views by inserting page dividers into your material, making slideshows with a sequence of pages, and requiring users to navigate through your content.
You can push each visitor to make some type of buying or action decision by overwhelming them with too many offers. You can choose not to put in any links that would lead away from your page, even when you are referencing research or another individual’s concept.
