As any effective marketer should know, metrics are the foundation of any successful marketing campaign. You wouldn’t dream of having Ant without Dec, or fish without chips, so why should marketing and metrics be any different?
But what are metrics?
Marketing Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are measurable values that are used by marketing teams to demonstrate the effectiveness of campaigns across all marketing channels.
However, it’s important to remember that marketing metrics operate across a variety of different channels, from email marketing and social media, to your website, you must make sure that you choose the appropriate marketing metrics for each channel.
Here are just a few examples of metrics your marketing team could consider tracking:
Email Marketing
- Open Rates: How many people open your email.
- Click-through Rates: The total amount of people who click on a link within your email.
- Unsubscribe Rates: The number of people who click to stop receiving your emails.
- Hard Bounces: How many times you send an email to an address that no longer exists.
- Soft Bounces: How many emails are sent to a full inbox and wont be immediately received.
- Delivery Rate: How many emails actually get delivered.
- Earnings per email/click: How much income your email/link click is generating.
Social Media
- Reach: The number of people who see your content.
- Engagement: The number of people interacting with your content (likes, shares, etc).
- Actions: How many people click links and call-to-action buttons on your page.
- Conversion: Number of people who evolve from being a user of your site to a paying customer.
- Demographics: Information about the people interacting with your brand (age, gender, location).
- Page Previews: How many people hover over your page before clicking on it.
Website
- Traffic: How many people visit your site, (and from where? We can track sources whether they’re direct, referral, organic, or social).
- Conversions: When someone evolves from being a user to a customer.
- Bounce Rate: The number of people who leave your site after only visiting one page.
- New and Returning Visitors: The number of new visitors and returning visitors.
- Interactions: How users behave on your site (eg. time on each page, comments, shares, clicks).
- Top Organic Landing Pages: The pages on your site where people enter after using a search engine, highlighting which pages are most visible.
- Page Loading Times: How long it takes for a web page to load.
- User Demographics – Key information about your users.
- Search Trends: Is your keywords/SEO strategy effective and are users being drawn to your site because of them?
Return on Investment (ROI) – demonstrates how your marketing time, energy and spend are contributing to company growth.
These are only a handful of the many metrics that are available for you to sink your teeth into. But think how valuable this information could be when planning your marketing campaigns! As you can imagine, it’s well worth investing your time into learning how to use them effectively!
Why are metrics important?
Marketing metrics are mind-blowing, but here’s why it’s vital for you to utilise them:
- Marketing is unpredictable:
Using metrics effectively means you can overcome the huge hurdle of unpredictability. Rather than setting a campaign live and crossing your fingers in the hope that it will be a success, using insights that you’ve gained through metrics allows you to strategically and efficiently plan your campaign. - Metrics make you more intelligent:
If you put in the time to monitor, analyse, evaluate and act upon your performance metrics, you are able to increase your competitive intelligence, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and make vital budgetary decisions that will certainly impact upon your success and ROI. - It justifies your efforts:
During the planning of a campaign, you can use your in-depth, data-driven, metric knowledge to help inform and drive your marketing decisions. If you know about your consumer’s demographics or have identified a particularly high bounce rate on your site, then you can use this knowledge to justify either running or altering a particular element of your campaign. - Demonstrates your success!
Through analysing metrics that are relevant to your campaign, you can evaluate your marketing performance, and assess the success of your strategies. Plus, even if your plans hadn’t had your desired outcome, monitoring your metrics is a really effective way of reflecting on your short-comings and learning from them, ensuring that your future campaigns will perform better. It really is a win-win situation!
If you want to put yourself one step ahead of the game, contact a member of our team today and we’d be happy to help you get metric savvy!
We also recommend taking a look at the AMEC website. They are the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and are the world’s largest media intelligence and insights professional organisation. They campaign to highlight the importance of efficient measurement in communication!
