As a marketer, your primary focus may be on creating attractive and engaging marketing campaigns; however, your job does not end there. In order to determine how well your campaigns are being received by the target audience, it is important that you rely on data to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns. The best way to measure the success of your marketing campaigns is to take advantage of various key marketing metrics.
Today, with digitization becoming the norm, marketers and businesses have the option to gain data about their various marketing metrics from different sources. By using this data, businesses can dig in deep to understand the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, determine their marketing ROI, identify any potential gaps, tweak their campaigns to make them more successful, and perform several other analysis.
Marketers can use the data from multiple sources to evaluate different types of marketing metrics, such as digital marketing metrics, brand awareness metrics, advertising metrics, and more. In this post, find out all about marketing metrics, their importance, and the top 40 key marketing metrics to keep your marketing campaigns and business ahead of your competitors.
Table of Contents
What are Marketing Metrics?
Marketing metrics can be described as measurable values used by marketers to measure the impact and effectiveness of their campaigns across all the channels. There are different key marketing metrics for different marketing channels which makes it easier for the marketers to gain complete information on their offline as well as digital marketing KPIs. With the help of various marketing metrics, marketers can determine whether they have reached their intended goals and whether they have been able to justify the time and efforts put into the marketing campaigns.
These metrics can also be used to understand how well you have reached your targeted audience and whether you need to make any changes to the campaign in order to achieve the desired results. With access to the amount of data we have today, it is possible to measure any value; however, when it comes to marketing metrics, you need to ensure that you are targeting only the key marketing metrics of your campaign.
Marketing metrics definitely have a broad scope, and it can be overwhelming to measure so many different KPIs, analyze them, and understand the findings. But with the help of the right tools and software, such as marketing automation software, marketers do not have to worry about handling this massive area of work.
Importance of Marketing Metrics
There are several reasons why marketing metrics have become extremely vital for marketers and businesses. Here are the top three reasons why marketing metrics are important.
- The topmost reason why marketing metrics are important is that they help marketers determine the effectiveness and success of their campaigns. This in turn allows them to understand how well the campaigns are aligning with their business goals.
- The second reason behind the importance of marketing metrics is that it enables marketers to evaluate whether they have been able to reach specific goals, such as increasing brand/product awareness, reaching new customers, increasing sales and engagement, lead generation, etc. They can also use the results derived from the metrics to figure out which aspects of their campaign are working, and which are not, and make changes accordingly.
- The final reason why marketing metrics are important is that it allows the marketers to provide tangible information about the impact their campaigns and advertisements are making for the benefit of the organization. This is extremely vital when it comes to the allocation of budget for marketing and advertising.
Top 40 Marketing Metrics
Now that we have understood what marketing metrics and their importance are, let’s focus on some of the top key marketing metrics that are useful in measuring the success of your campaigns.
Website Metrics
Your website is the face of your company as anyone who wishes to know more about your brand, company, products, services, etc., will check out your website first. It is vital that you measure the website traffic to understand the number of visitors and whether the website is engaging enough for them to continue going through. There are several website metrics that you can measure, such as:
- Total Visits – This metric helps in figuring out the total number of visitors to your website. You need to pay attention to any significant trends, such as if there is a spike in the number when you are introducing a new campaign, you can find out what worked well. You can also use it to determine if there is a decrease in the number of visits, especially when a new campaign is introduced, and fix any issues.
- Unique Visits – This metric displays the number of individual visits to your website. So, if a person visits your site multiple times, it will be considered as one visit only. However, these metrics can be slightly misleading if the same user visits your website using different browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc., as each visit will be counted as a new individual visit.
- Pageviews – This metric is used to find out how well a specific page on your website is being received by the visitors. If you notice that a particular page is receiving higher page views, you can analyze what is working well and apply it to your other pages as well.
- Average Time on Page – Ideally, the average time a user should spend on a page is about 2-3 minutes. If they are spending less or more time than this, then it means there is an issue with the content quality on your page.
- Retention Rate – This is one of the key marketing metrics which provides insights about recurring visitors which in turn indicates that they are interested in your content or buying products.
- Sessions – A session is the amount of time starting from the time the user logs in to the website till the time they exit. Using these metrics, marketers can determine the amount of time the user has spent browsing various pages in a session which indicates their interest in your content.
- Bounce Rate – When a user visits your website and leaves immediately without taking any action, it indicates a ‘bounce’. There are several reasons why this may occur, such as slow load time, poor UX, lack of interesting content, placement of the content, aesthetics, CTAs, hyperlinks, etc. Ideally, it is good to have a bounce rate of less than 40%.
- Conversion Rate – This metric allows you to identify how well your CTAs are working. It is not sufficient only to have visitors on your website, you also need to measure how many of them are taking the intended step, such as making purchases, requesting demos, subscribing to your page/service, etc.
- Content Downloads – Your marketing team may put a lot of time and effort into creating creative assets, but their success can be measured only when you measure the number of downloads, the amount of interest generated in a topic, etc.
Email Marketing Metrics
Emails are considered one of the best communication channels to reach your targeted audience. You can make use of the below email marketing metrics to determine their success:
- Email Open Rate – The email open rate refers to the ratio between the number of people who received your email and the number of people who opened the email. A higher open rate indicates that you are on the right track and the key to achieve this high rate is to ensure that you have a compelling and interesting subject line.
- Email Bounce Rate – Email bounce rate refers to the number of email addresses who did not receive the email. There are two types of bounces – hard bounce which results because of a fake email address or fake domain name and soft bounce which is caused by temporary issues like full inbox, size of the file, etc. The expected benchmark for email bounce rate is less than 2%.
- Email Click-through Rate – To check whether your copy, email, or newsletter is enticing enough, you need to capture the email click-through metric. This will give you information about how well-designed your emails are. To achieve a higher email click-through rate, ensure that your CTAs are prominently displayed.
- Unsubscribe Rate – Having a high amount of unsubscribe rate is definitely a cause of concern, but it will also help you to focus on those who are genuinely interested in your content. This in turn can give you some deep insights into your target audience.
- New Subscribers – It is important to measure the number of new subscribers to your newsletters as it will help you identify an overall growth in your emailing list and also bring forth various trends using which marketers can design their new content, try out successful promotion strategies, etc.
- Email Marketing ROI – There is no doubt that this is one of the key marketing metrics as it is extremely vital to measure your campaign’s return on investment.
- Unengaged Subscribers – Having unengaged subscribers are of no help and in fact, can also give you a false picture of brand success. Hence, using this metric, marketers should cleanse out their subscriber list on a regular basis and remove unengaged subscribers after a certain period of time.
Social Media Metrics
Social media is one of the best platforms that marketers can use to build better and deeper customer relationships. However, there is no point in having thousands of followers if they are not active. Marketers can use various social media analytics tools to understand and measure how well their social media campaigns are working. Here are some of the top social media metrics:
- Engagement – This is one of the key marketing metrics for social media and can be measured by analyzing the likes, dislikes, comments, shares, tags, etc. that you receive on your posts.
- Reach – This metric refers to the unique number of people who have viewed your content – the more the views, better the reach.
- Impressions – This metric is related to the number of times your content appears in any of the social feeds. It is one of the ideal metrics which can help you understand whether your campaigns are too much or too little for your audience.
- New Followers – As the name indicates, through this metric you can gain insights into how many new followers have you accumulated in a specific period of time. This is especially helpful when you release a new campaign, and if you do not observe any new growth, it indicates that you need to tweak your campaign.
- Follow Growth Rate – Marketers can use this metric to measure the growth rate of their followers which in turn helps them understand how successful their campaigns have been.
- Traffic – Apart from helping you build an online presence your social media platforms should also be able to drive traffic toward your website. Hence, you must measure the traffic generated through your social media platforms to understand their effectiveness.
- Brand Mentions – This metric comes handy when you want insights about the different platforms/channels where your brand is being mentioned.
SEO Metrics
The role of SEO has vastly increased and with the help of specific SEO metrics, marketers can understand how well their blogs are performing in comparison to other similar blogs. Here are the top SEO metrics to know about:
- Keyword Ranking – When it comes to searching on Google, the majority of the people check the results only on page 1. In order to ensure that your page is also ranking among the top ones, it is important to measure the placement of your keywords.
- Unique Domains – In order to understand how important others think your content is, it is necessary to measure the number of backlinks that you earn. Receiving backlinks from high domain authority is a great way to improve your SEO efforts.
- Domain Authority – The domain authority is measured on a scale of NA to 100 and having a high domain authority indicates that your site is well trusted by Google. Hence, marketers should monitor and measure the trustworthiness of their pages.
- Traffic Sources – By measuring the traffic sources, i.e., the different sources through which users are finding your website/blog, you can create more effective campaigns that suit the channels the best. There are four major traffic sources – direct visitors, organic searches, referrals, and social media.
- Page Speed – One of the key SEO metrics that marketers should focus on is page speed. Having a slow loading page can prove extremely harmful, so ensure that your visitors do not have to wait for more than 3-4 seconds for a page to load.
Paid Advertising Metrics
When you put in a lot of money and effort to create various forms of paid advertising, it is important to measure their success as well. Paid advertising includes social media ads, banner ads, television ads, etc. Here are the top paid advertising metrics to measure:
- Click-through Rate – To measure the click-through rate, you need to divide the total number of clicks on your ad by the number of views on the ad. By measuring this metric, you can make effective changes to your ads and ensure that they are successful.
- Cost Per Click – To understand how much your company pays on average each time someone clicks on your advertisement, you need to measure the cost per click.
- Cost Per Lead – The motive of every campaign is to generate new leads and this metric will help you determine how many new leads have you attained and how cost-effective are your paid advertisements.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) – A MQL is someone who has demonstrated some interest in your brand and the various products and services. You can get a clear idea of your MQLs by measuring how many people have signed up on your landing pages, how many of them have subscribed to your newsletter, how many of them have downloaded something, etc.
Event Marketing Metrics
Apart from measuring the various digital marketing metrics, marketers who invest in setting up events should also measure various event marketing metrics. Some of the ways to measure the effectiveness of your marketing events:
- Registrants – When it comes to event marketing metrics, one of the most important metrics to measure is how many people have registered for the event. You can use this information to compare how many people actually turned up for the event, tailor your event to suit the actual audience, etc.
- Event Attendance – By measuring the exact number of people who actually attended and comparing it to the number of registrations, you can find out why there was a gap in these numbers, what made people not attend the event after registering, etc.
- Social Media Mentions – You can measure how socially active your attendees are by monitoring your brand mentions on various social platforms by the attendees. You can also use the information to ensure that your events are more social media-friendly, thus, ensuring a better success rate.
- Satisfaction Survey – One of the best ways to measure or gain information about your event is to send out a post-event survey. With the amount of data you receive, you can improve any shortcomings for future events.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – An NPS score helps to determine how satisfied your attendees were and how likely are they to recommend it to others. It is recommended to get a score of 9-10 on a scale of 1-10.
- Gross Revenue – This is considered one of the key marketing metrics to determine the success of your event. By identifying the gross revenue, you can calculate whether you have been able to reach your intended targets.
- Number of Qualified Leads – For marketing events where the purpose is to invite attendees and encourage them to interact with your sales team, it is important to measure how many qualified leads have attended the event.
- Actual Customers – Along with determining the number of qualified leads, you also need to measure how many of those leads have actually turned into customers.
Conclusion
Focusing on key marketing metrics is extremely crucial in understanding the success and effectiveness of your online as well as offline campaigns. Marketers should also remember that not every metric is equal; hence, they should focus on those marketing metrics which are apt for their campaigns.
Check out SaaSworthy today to know more about various marketing software that can help you run your business more effectively and successfully.
