Marketing metrics are the numbers you use to improve the effectiveness of campaigns. They are essential for providing feedback and revealing where your marketing efforts, and dollars, are best spent. Here are seven of the top metrics using by marketing managers today.
A popular metric for campaign effectiveness is the number of converted leads, which is the number of extra customers who actually purchase your product or service.
You can tell if leads are attributable to a campaign using digital online trackers such as url strings and affiliate tracking software, and using coupon codes or asking customers, “where did you find us?” Without tracking, you could just estimate the spike in purchases from new customers -- above the baseline -- around the time of the campaign.
A short step away from the converted leads metric is revenue. You can get this by multiplying the number of converted leads by the average dollar amount each converted lead spends. Or you can just estimate how much revenue grows above the baseline level.
Measuring the impact of a campaign in dollars gives a clearer indication of performance. If your firm’s margins are tight -- where you only get back a modest percentage of revenue after deducting costs -- you might want to also calculate changes to operating profits.
You can use the revenue metric to see which marketing channels are contributing most to the growth of a business. Revenue growth is a goal marketers often go for because it’s simple to measure and is closely tied with business profits.
You may not always be able to measure return on investment (ROI) accurately, but it’s a concept and calculation you should always bear in mind. If you spend $1,000 on advertising and increase operating profits by $1,500, you have an ROI of 50% ($500 return from $1,000 spent).
Anytime the ROI is positive, the marketing campaign may be worth doing. Expensive forms of marketing can be justified as long as the ROI is good. The concept is useful across all marketing fields, from advertising and brand management through to SEO and social media.
A limitation of the ROI metric is that you probably are not capturing everything. For example, you could be greatly improving your brand value from a campaign that appears to have a poor ROI in the short term. You might also not be capturing every cost in the calculation, such as the opportunity cost of doing marketing instead of another useful activity.
Would you prefer to sponsor a YouTuber with 100,000 subscribers or one with 10,000,000 subscribers? Such a question is an example of using community engagement metrics in marketing.
Community engagement metrics are numerous and, most times, you need two, three or more combinations of metrics to assess performance. For example, you wouldn’t only look at subscriber numbers, but also how many views and likes were received for recent posts / videos.
Community engagement covers social media marketing -- such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- as well as other metrics such as magazine readership and email subscribers. Sometimes have a marketing consulting agency can be valuable to help you navigate these different metrics and ensure you are focusing on the right things.
Community membership matters for referral numbers, social proof, sharing, word of mouth recommendations, trust and public awareness. It’s an area where you need to keep investing and analyzing the results. Sendible have created a list of 42 social media questions for marketers to ask each new client.
Good marketing relies on knowing, reaching and persuading people from your potential customer base to buy your products or services. Demographic metrics are a fast way to narrow marketing campaigns to target likely customers. Demographic analysis is a common component of online marketing courses.
For example, you can match the demographic filters on Facebook ads to the information you’ve collected from customers about age, gender and location. If 90 percent of customers are from your home country, then it may be cost-effective to restrict ads to your home country. You can also experiment with ads to certain other countries to see if a market for your product exists there.
Search engine optimization (SEO) relies on getting links from high-authority websites and pages. If you don’t have many links from sites with good website authority metrics, your website may seldom appear on the first page of Google search results.
Popular metrics include Majestic trust flow and Moz domain authority. Majestic SEO and Moz have created authority scoring measures that try to mimic the Google ranking algorithm. As a marketer trying to get links to improve the authority of your site, you are better off targeting sites with high authority scores.
Online sales depend on the quality of your landing page(s), especially in competitive markets where prospective customers may be bouncing between websites. Conversion rates show how effective a particular landing page is in convincing users to look into the product further and commit to purchase. It can be measured by enquiries per visitor or sales per visitor.
You need to pay attention to conversion rates because scope almost always exists to improve landing pages, as well as the product or deal. Small landing-page improvements are possible by, for example, changing fonts, using slightly different words, or adding testimonials. Large improvements are possible on pages that confuse visitors, leave important questions unanswered, or hide the all-important call-to-action.
