The question marketing managers have had for years is “How do we track our marketing exposure and impact?” While seeing your name in bold print is always a good thing, there has never been a quantifiable science behind it. Marketing online has resolved this issue, though. The nature of digital marketing allows for data and analytics to become the fuel for future campaigns and overall business growth. Use these 10 marketing metrics to follow your growth and recognize issues that need to be solved.
QUALIFIED LEADS
Companies want their business to grow, and the only way to do that is to keep new customers coming in. Leads are a key metric that companies use when looking at campaigns. The number of leads help them to understand what content customers respond to and what products or services they are interested in. However, you want to make sure your leads are high-quality, those who will continue through your conversion funnel and make it to the end of you customer value journey.
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST (CAC)
Knowing how much it costs to acquire a customer will make a difference in your marketing efforts. If you add up all marketing expenses and divide by how many new customers you’ve acquired in a specific time period, you’ll have your customer acquisition cost. Say your company spent $500 on marketing last month. You find that you acquired 50 new customers, so your CAC would be $10. Depending on your company, this number could be low or high.
SOCIAL COMMENTS
Some metrics on social media, like impressions and reach, are good for measuring overall campaign health. However, these metrics don’t indicate true engagement with a piece of content. Comments usually suggest the person took the time to read the post, and felt strongly about it. After measuring comments, companies will strive for more of these successful reactions in the future.
AMOUNT OF TIME ON SITE
The length of time that customers spend on your site is important. If they jump around to several pages, they are seeing a lot of valuable content and getting to know your company. Many companies believe that the longer visitors browse, the more connected the two are becoming.
RECURRING REVENUE
The nature of a marketing agency or SaaS business is based on retaining clients for long-term service. Whether you look at monthly or annual revenue, it’s important to keep the trend going upward in order to sustain your business.
CONVERSION RATE
No matter if you have one or 100 leads in a day, each of them should be converted into a paying customer. (Don’t collect leads then passively sit on their information!) According to WordStream, the average conversion rate is 2.35%. However, the study finds that actively running split tests rocketed the conversion rates to more than 11%. Use resources to get your leads to become customers, even if that means low-dollar offers and tripwires.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
One of the biggest marketing metrics companies look for is return on investment (ROI). Your ROI can be calculated by subtracting your investment in a campaign from the profit you gained from that campaign. This measurement determines which campaigns work and which don’t for your company. This way, you are precise when determining your future marketing budget and which campaigns are the best investments.
BOUNCE RATE
A bounce is an event that occurs on your website. When someone lands on a page, sees it, then immediately leaves, they’ve bounced from your site. If a high percentage of visitors are bouncing, try changing up the page design or adding a new picture. You can also insert links or write leading headlines to get visitors to begin clicking.
SEO TRAFFIC
Staying ahead of the search engine optimization (SEO) curve is an important role for today’s marketing managers. Trying to keep up with SEO tactics is an eternal battle for marketers since SEO is constantly changing. Investing in paid vs. organic search (what’s the difference?) is also a critical distinction for a company. Stay updated on this pivotal marketing metric in order to best manage your marketing strategy.
EMAIL LIST PERFORMANCE
Even if you have multiple email campaigns running at the same time, this marketing metric synthesizes campaign performance quickly. Data to include in this metric are: number of emails sent, opens, open rate, clicks and click rate. By comparing your email campaigns’ performances, you’ll be able to test which components are helping and which are hurting. (Struggling to come up with a good email subject line? Check out these 12 subject lines that will increase your open rate.)
