9 Marketing Metrics You Should Measure

You’ve gotten over 900 more followers and 5000 more likes on your social media page in the last month, great! But calculating your marketing success rate shouldn’t have to end there. Infact, most times, these feel-good numbers are purely vanity metrics and don’t directly convert to sales or engagement.

As business owners, we tend to forget that actionable marketing metrics are what is most important in measuring the success of our overall digital marketing strategy.

Marketing metrics are key indicators that show how well a business’ digital marketing campaign has performed. It also gives you a better understanding of how visitors react to your business and helps you evaluate and improve on your digital marketing strategy

However, these metrics are measured in relation to a business goal as well as the marketing channels used.. For example, for a business whose goal is brand awareness, reach and unique visits to the website should be an important metric that it should measure

The question is, what metrics should you measure in relation to a business or marketing goal? Here are 10 Marketing Metrics you should measure.

Marketing metrics to measure

1.  WEBSITE TRAFFIC SOURCE

Every business should have a web presence, Your website is your company profile on the web. It is  one of the first places that visitors interact with your brand especially to get more information on the kind of services you offer, therefore it is key to track the sources where your website visitors come from.

Tracking a traffic source helps you to channel more marketing efforts to the high performing sources from which they came as well as choose to improve your search engine optimization strategy or social media marketing strategy depending on which channel has a low performance rate.

2.  NEW VISITORS AND RETURNING VISITORS

Understanding your visitor behaviour helps you figure out the pattern your visitors go through, what content interests them, how they engage with different pages on your website, how long their session duration lasts and eventually convert to sales.

New visitors are good but returning visitors are better. This means that it is highly important to track the rate at which visitors come back to your website, because the higher the return rate, the higher the likelihood of conversion. If you find that your website’s returning visitors rate is low, then it’s time for you to adjust your inbound marketing strategy accordingly. Some areas you can Improve  include: search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing etc. with the aim of  creating a valuable experience for the visitor.

3.  LEAD TO QUALIFIED LEADS RATIO

Not all leads are marketing qualified leads. A Marketing Qualified Lead is a prospective client who has shown more interest in your services than your average lead, and is now ready to be nurtured and passed down the marketing funnel as a Sales Qualified Lead, which eventually leads to a conversion.

Monitoring a lead to qualified leads ratio helps you evaluate the quality of leads your CRM passes down to your sales team as well as adjust the criteria for business qualified leads.

4. REACH

Depending on your digital marketing goals, tracking metrics like reach, can show you unique visitors that visit your website or your social media pages. This metric is best measured for businesses whose goal is to get brand awareness.

5.  BOUNCE RATE

A bounce rate is the average number of visitors that left your website after visiting only one page. A bounce rate can be both a good and a bad sign for your website. On the negative side, a bounce rate can tell you how relevant that page is to the keywords optimised for it. On the flip side, it can also show that the visitor came on the page, found what they were searching for and left. These two scenarios can be differentiated by the number of sessions the visitor stayed on that page, with the latter having a high chance of a return visitor.

Also having a difficult UI (User interface) or UX (User experience) on your website can lead to a high bounce rate. In that case it’s best to improve on your website development and design.

6.  CONVERSION RATE

This is the most important metric to determine whether or not your marketing efforts were useful in reaching your marketing goals. Basically, the ratio of a website’s visitor to conversion. Conversions vary from business to business. It can be a sale for an eCommerce store,  a newsletter signup or  an eBook download for a service brand.

A conversion rate is calculated by the  total number of  visitors divided by the total number of conversions multiplied by 100

7.  CLICK-THROUGH RATE

A CTR measures the number of link clicks in an advertisement or an email. It is good for measuring how successful your ad campaigns or email campaigns are performing. A lot of factors determine how often your ad links are clicked, which includes, call to action copy, keywords used, images, positioning of the ads etc. Click-Through Rates are calculated by the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.

8.  COST PER CLICK

This is the amount of money you pay to Google (or any other Ad platform) for each click on your pay-per-click digital marketing ad campaigns. A good cost per click should always be low as it is determined by several factors like the quality score of your website or landing page, keyword bidding, Google ad rank. CPC is calculated by the total spend divided by the total number of clicks.

9. RETURN ON INVESTMENT

This is the overall measurement on how your marketing investments are contributing to the success of your digital marketing campaign. Knowing your ROI helps to evaluate whether the digital marketing spend is worth the revenue. ROI data can help you improve performance on less successful digital marketing campaigns as well as help you decide on a digital marketing budget. ROI is calculated by dividing Net profit by cost of investment multiplied by 100.

In Conclusion…

Digital marketing analytics tools like Google analytics and HubSpot analytics as well as social media marketing tools like Hootsuite, Buzzsumo, etc are some of the tools that your business can use to measure its digital marketing campaign metrics to know if you are on the right track or if you need to revisit your digital marketing campaign strategy.