Every day, there seems to be a new metric that promises to improve your marketing campaigns and help you develop your brand. The question is: how many are worth your time? Marketing metrics can play a significant role in helping you see what works and what doesn’t as you develop campaigns, but not all data is substantial. So what marketing metrics matter the most to you?
What is a Marketing Metric?
Marketing metrics provide a quantifiable way to track the performance of a campaign. How many times did someone click on an ad, for example? If the data consistently shows no one has, you know the campaign isn’t generating the desired results.
How Do You Know What Metrics Matter?
Developing an effective marketing campaign starts with defining your business goals. For example, do you want to drive more traffic to your product pages? Maybe the goal is to get social media likes or to encourage potential customers to sign up for an email newsletter.
Marketing metrics tell you a story. They show you if the marketing strategy in place gives you the results you want based on your goals. To find the right ones, you must be able to define what success looks like, and having goals in place helps get you there.
If you are new to business or marketing, you may not have a good sense of your goals. Some of the most common include:
- Raise brand awareness – Brand awareness means making your brand more recognizable
- Enhance customer engagement – Create interactions that make the customer experience more enjoyable
- Increase conversion rates – Encourage meaningful action like buying a product or viewing a website
- Develop marketing leads – Get new ideas for who might benefit from your brand
- Develop sales-qualified leads – Get new ideas for someone who can purchase. For example, a real estate agent would want leads that could qualify for a mortgage.
- Get a good return on your investment – Are you getting something back for your time and money investment, and is it enough?
- Expand to a new target audience – Find a new market for your goods or services.
- Drive through clicks – Increase the number of clicks you get on ads or emails
- Drive traffic to a website – See more visitors to the brand website
These are common goals that are measurable for businesses of all sizes. It’s essential to look for ways to track the metrics that tell you if the marketing is meeting these goals or not.
Website Metrics
Often companies start with website metrics because they tend to tie everything together. If you see an improvement in these numbers, your marketing is effective. Website metrics to watch include:
- Total visits – This is the total number of users that visits web pages and other properties such as blogs
- Unique visits – This measures the number of times a single user visits a website. The total visits metric is a holistic view, and unique visits are more individualized. If one person visits your website five times a month, that is one unique visit or five total visits.
- Returning visits – How many users leave and then come back again, and what pages do they see?
- Page views – How many views do each page get? This can help measure the success of targeted ads and product releases.
- Conversion rate – How many visitors go from viewing to taking action? That might mean buying something or signing up for push notifications or newsletters.
These metrics not only measure the success of marketing campaigns but of key assets such as a business website or social media post.
Brand Metrics
Some metrics focus on the brand and its success, such as:
- Brand awareness – In the world of metrics, this typically means social media engagement. How many followers do you have on your social media accounts, and how often do they engage with your posts or share them?
- Repurchase ratios – This is about brand loyalty. How many people come back to purchase from your company again and again?
- Share of voice – Share of voice focuses on how much of your brand’s market you control compared to competitors.
Brand success isn’t easy to quantify, so having the right metrics is critical.
Social Media Metrics
Social media plays a critical role in marketing, especially brand awareness. Social media metrics will tell you things you can’t learn other ways. For example:
- Reach – How many people see a social media ad
- Impressions – Impressions are similar to reach but focus on how often one customer sees an ad. For instance, if the reach is 10, but the impressions are 20, you know that each customer saw the ad twice.
- Engagement rate – This is one of the more critical metrics for social media. It tells how many people interact with an ad when they see it. Ads with low engagement rates are ineffective, especially if the reach and impressions are high.
- Follower growth rate – This is the number of people that become social media followers in a set timeframe. It reflects both marketing success and brand awareness.
- Brand mentions – How often does the brand name pop up in social media conversations? This can tell you a few different things. High brand mentions could be positive or negative. If that number increases, you need to research the context and put it out if there is a fire.
Other Metrics Options
Not all metrics apply to every brand. For example, pay-per-click metrics don’t matter unless you buy a particular type of internet ad. If you invest in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you only pay for the advertisement if someone clicks on it. It is a marketing strategy that helps you market to a large audience for less money.
Click-through rates imply someone clicked an ad to find out more information. Cost-per-click is how much you paid when that user clicked the ad.
All these metrics give you information about whether your marketing is having an impact. If you are struggling to understand them or to get the most from your campaigns, we can help. Connect with our industry experts at Vinci today to find out more.
