02 Sep Marketing Metrics To Track & Avoid
Deciding which metrics to track and which to avoid in your marketing campaigns is a challenge in itself. In the current marketing landscape, there’s no excuse for flying blind with your marketing efforts and not knowing how your campaigns are performing. Every single decision you and your marketing team make should be made using real data. However, in a world of seemingly endless data it’s vitally important to be sure you’re cutting through the noise and picking out the right insights that matter to your business.
Why is measuring marketing success important?
While the digital marketing world is changing continuously with new software and search engine algorithm updates, the only way to ensure you’re spending your marketing budget in the right places is by measuring the ongoing performance of marketing campaigns across every channel.
Having a data-driven understanding of which channels and campaigns are driving the most revenue, high quality leads and conversions is a key part of optimising your current and future marketing efforts, meaning you can be confident in knowing what is working, and what isn’t.
That being said, it’s worth keeping in mind that these aren’t the only metrics that show your marketing campaign was a success.
For example, engagement is a great way of measuring whether your email campaign was effective or not. Open rates, Clicks and Unsubscribes are all important factors to consider.
High open Rates show that the subject line is intriguing enough for your audience to open the email, but if your click rate is low, it’s worth looking at making changes to the content and CTA’s within the email.
6 marketing metrics to track
ROI
We’ll start with one of the most important metrics out there for evaluating the success of your marketing activities- Return on Investment (ROI). ROI is essentially what it says on the tin, the return on an investment of a campaign. ROI = (Net Profit/Net Spend) x 100
ROAS
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is used to determine the performance of online paid advertising campaigns. Put simply, it’s the revenue generated from an ad divided by the cost of the ads, times 100.
Conversion Rate
A quick indication to the performance of your website. Your Conversion Rate is the percentage of site visitors that complete a desired goal or event out of the total number of visitors to your website. This could be downloads of a gated asset, listens of a podcast or simply an onsite purchase.
Pipeline – Sales Qualified Leads
Your sales Pipeline, and in particular Sales Qualified Leads, are a good indication of your marketing’s ability to bring in new leads. SQLs are considered to have a good chance of converting into a customer based on pre-set criteria.
Cost Per Lead
Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the metric that measures how much you pay for every lead that comes in through your campaigns, measuring how effective your marketing is at generating new leads. It’s simple to get this figure, simply take the total cost of the campaign and divide it by the number of leads generated.
Vanity metrics to avoid
These are marketing metrics which look great, but provide very little value to measuring or optimising your marketing campaigns performance.
Social Media Followers/Impressions
Simply having hundreds or thousands of followers or a high number of impressions on a platform doesn’t show you how engaged your audience is. Try measuring social shares and other engagement metrics.
Website Traffic
While having a higher number of visitors to your site than usual may seem like a good thing, it can be a distraction from the more important metrics. Again focus on engagement and metrics like time spent on the site and most importantly, conversions.
Email Subscribers
Having more subscribers does widen your potential reach, but like social media followers, it doesn’t mean much if people aren’t engaging. Instead focus on Open Rate and Click Rate, and growing the number of leads generated.
Once these metrics are captured you need to determine which to use for your business to truly define success and progress. The metrics are used to measure success compared to previous campaigns or time periods, or effectiveness when compared to industry benchmarks.
In terms of what matters most to the business, it’s important to demonstrate how your marketing efforts contribute to the company’s bottom line. Not only the ability to bring in new visitors and leads and convert them but also cost and brand awareness.
No one metric alone tells the entire story and some differ depending on how you look at them. You have to look at marketing effectiveness in the right perspective.
Tracking and avoiding the metrics as we’ve discussed above will give you a good chance to understand what is working and what isn’t.
