Marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are what drive our marketing campaigns to succeed. It’s vital to learn how to read and measure marketing metrics, so you know how to make the right adjustments in order to reach your goals.
Digital marketing thrives on data, which means thoroughly tracking and analyzing numbers. Depending on your marketing strategies, there can be thousands of metrics to choose from. So, how do you know which metrics to keep an eye on? In this article, we’ll lay out all of the essentials, plus which marketing metrics matter most.
What are marketing metrics?
Marketing metrics are stats and numbers that can be used to track, monitor, and measure the performance of marketing campaigns across various channels. This data is typically displayed in a report, chart, or graph to visually display your progress. Keep in mind, there are different metrics for different channels. For example, the data you track on social media will be slightly different from the data on your website and email campaigns.
Related Article: How to Identify the Most Effective Digital Marketing Channels for Your Business
Why is it important to measure marketing metrics?
By analyzing your marketing metrics, you can highlight the effectiveness of your strategies and the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. Plus, it’s highly beneficial to have data that can help you improve your marketing efforts. A few additional benefits may include:
- Understanding which channels are most effective
- Learning what content is most valuable to your audiences
- Knowing where most of your quality leads are coming from
- Allocating marketing spend to the right channels
- Improving and optimizing your strategies
How to choose marketing metrics
Before we dive into the different marketing metrics, it’s important to understand that every business may view its data differently. It all comes down to one main thing: your goals.
For example, new businesses looking to grow their audience shouldn’t prioritize sales. You have to focus on building up trust with a loyal audience first, so brand awareness and email sign-ups should be your primary focus at the start. More established businesses with a solid following and email list can prioritize improvements to sales conversions.
Examples of key marketing metrics
Even though you can technically measure ALL of these marketing metrics, don’t get into the habit of this. Identify what’s most important to your business and how this data can help you improve and reach your goals. As your business grows, these metrics can and should change. Keep track on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis to see how your efforts are improving.
Social media marketing metrics
Social media is a great channel to boost your brand awareness, referral traffic to your website, and build meaningful relationships with your audience.
New Followers and Follower Growth Rate
Don’t pay too much attention to new followers and follower growth rates. You don’t need a massive following to produce great results. However, it is still important to keep track of your overall growth over time as your business begins to thrive.
Account Reach and Impressions
Account reach and impressions can be beneficial if you’re looking to increase brand awareness. These social media metrics highlight the number of unique accounts that saw your content (account reach), as well as the total number of times your content was viewed (impressions).
Engagement Rate
One of the most important social media metrics you should consider is your engagement rate. This keeps track of every like, comment, share, or save of each post. The higher your engagement rate is, the more likely your audience will buy from you in the future. This is also a crucial metric in understanding what content your audience enjoys the most. Pay close attention to the highest engaging posts every month. Then create more of that type of content to give your audience what they want.
Link Clicks
Another great stat to track and measure is your link clicks. Depending on which social media channel you’re focusing your efforts on, this may slightly differ. For example, Instagram has Story link clicks and profile link clicks while Facebook tracks post clicks.
Referral Traffic
As each social media channel grows, so will your referral traffic or website traffic. Through Google Analytics, you can see where your social media visitors are coming from by viewing the referral traffic. Once you can identify which social media channel is providing the best results, you can double down on that particular channel.
Website marketing metrics
Your website is the gatekeeper driving new leads. Make sure your site is optimized for SEO and capturing new leads. This should be checked and updated on a regular basis for the best user experience.
Total Traffic
This website metric showcases the total number of visitors you’re receiving. Your website traffic can be broken down into various subcategories such as Direct, Organic Search, Social, Referral, Email, and Paid Search. Make sure to keep tabs on which channels are producing the most traffic to your site. Then adjust your strategy accordingly.
New and Returning Visitors
Google Analytics can break down your visitors by new and returning visits. New visitors have never visited your site before while returning visitors have. This can be insightful data to help optimize your lead generation funnel. Consider testing out a popup form for returning visitors that offer a coupon or free trial to improve conversions.
Bounce Rates
The longer someone remains on a particular web page, the more engaged they are with your content. A bounce happens when a user visits a web page and leaves without clicking on anything. So, a high bounce rate is not good. For this marketing metric, identify ways to keep your bounce rates low. This means your audience is interested in what you have to offer.
Email marketing metrics
Email marketing is a valuable tool to inform and educate your audiences even further. If they’ve signed up for your email list, you’ve truly captured their attention. Now it’s up to you, to keep them engaged and entice them to make a decision (aka. purchase).
Open Rate
An open rate is the percentage of people who opened a specific email. This is the first step in keeping your new subscribers interested in what you have to offer. The higher the open rates, the more engaged your audience is. Be sure to test out different email subject lines to see what performs best. Also, keep an eye on your analytics for the best days and timeframes to send each email.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
Another key factor to pay attention to with email is your click-through rate (CTR). This can drive your audience to make a purchase, read a blog or case study, or book a free consultation. To help increase your CTR, keep your call-to-actions (CTAs) hyper-focused. There should always be one primary CTA in every email. If you saturate each email with multiple CTA’s this can confuse or distract the individual on what your main goal is. To boost your CTR, try testing out the use of images, visual buttons vs hyperlinks, and so on.
Conversion Rate
For most channels, a conversion rate tells us how many users are turning into customers. With digital marketing, however, a conversion can be multiple things. So, it’s important to know what your main goal is for every channel. For example, a conversion with email could be downloading a free guide or ebook, signing up for a free consultation, webinar, or product trial, etc.
Unengaged Subscribers
Some of your email subscribers may lose interest over time or maybe they are no longer in need of your services. In this case, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on your subscriber list. Clean out low-engaging subscribers and unsubscribes or create a separate segment list, so you don’t send to these users on a regular basis. Unengaged subscribers can negatively impact the deliverability of your emails (ie. email clients, like Gmail, can flag your emails as spam).
SEO marketing metrics
Search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is the process of making your website more visible on search engines. There are various tools to help track SEO progress, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Organic Search
A great way to monitor the progress of SEO is to check your organic search traffic. This sub-category of website traffic comes directly from users who find you through a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vital to optimizing your digital marketing strategy.
Keyword rankings
Do you know which keywords or phrases your website is currently ranking for? Keywords are search terms used by individuals to find or source information through search engines. Once your website begins ranking for specific keywords, you can use that information to create invaluable content that your audience is already searching for. This is vital information to optimize your content marketing strategy.
Paid marketing metrics
Paid marketing consists of any paid digital advertising campaigns like PPC, social media ads, Google Ads, or display ads. If you plan to hire an experienced team to run your paid ads, it’s important to understand the metrics they report on every month.
Cost Per Click
Cost per click (CPC) is exactly what it sounds like. It’s how much you’re paying in ad spend for every click on the digital ad. There should be a good balance between CPC and the quality of the leads clicking on your ads. It’s good to have a low CPC, but if it’s not driving quality leads then the CPC may increase.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
If you want to know if your ad spend is money well spent, have a closer look at the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). For paid ads, this metric determines the amount of revenue you’re earning for every dollar spent on advertising.
Final thoughts
Learning how to read marketing metrics can be tricky. Start small by monitoring and analyzing the key metrics that align with your primary marketing goals. As your business and marketing budget continues to grow, you can keep adding in more of these metrics over time. When in doubt, reach out to us for a free strategy session. We’d be happy to help you achieve your marketing goals.
