There are a lot of metrics that business owners need to pay attention to, to assess and analyze how effective their marketing is. When you aren’t using analytics and data as part of your larger marketing strategy, you’re missing out on key insights and opportunities for improvement.
Marketing metrics are used to monitor and measure progress over time. The metrics can vary from platform to platform, and a marketer has to determine the particular metrics that are going to best help them track their successes and also their failures.
Marketing metrics help you identify data to support informed decision-making, find the channels providing the highest ROI, and justify budget allocations. You can also learn how to improve results across the board and find where you can maximize lead conversions.
While, again, there are many metrics, and they vary depending on the platform, below are seven of the most important for many modern organizations and marketing professionals.
1. Cost-Per-Acquisition
Cost-per-acquisition or CPA is how much you’re spending to gain one new customer. This varies depending on the channel and campaign and even factors like what time of year it is. This metric is especially important in the digital marketing era.
To measure your CPA, you want to look at your expenses in marketing and your sales data. You can then calculate it by dividing your campaign cost by the number of customers acquired, which are your conversions.
You can use this metric to assess the financial impact of your marketing efforts. A targeted number isn’t really feasible to say from industry to industry, but instead, it’s better as a goal to lower your CPA over time and sustainably.
2. Qualified Leads
A qualified lead or prospect is a possible client who matches the ideal customer profile for your business, even if they haven’t contacted you yet. Every business defines its own qualified lead, but in each case, it’s someone with a high likelihood of making a buying decision.
Qualified leads are, simply put, the people who are most likely to buy your product and service. A campaign might give you a lot of leads but might qualify a few. A more successful campaign would have maybe just a few leads, but the percentage of qualified ones would be much higher.
The creation of personalized campaigns is one of the best ways to improve your percentage of qualified leads.
3. Time Spent On Site
If people are interested in your products or services, they might spend more time on your website. If you can see that people are reading the page you send them to and also checking out other pages and content, then that shows they find it valuable.
If you aren’t already monitoring the traffic on your site, it’s something you should start doing as soon as possible. You can use simple tools like Google Analytics, so you can see how much time people are spending on your site and where.
If you have pages that are performing a lot lower than others, assess them. Try to see why that might be and how you can make changes. You can use this insight not just to improve that page’s performance but your entire site.
4. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value or CLV is how much a typical customer will bring to your business over their lifetime in terms of revenue. A customer might make a one-time purchase for you only, but others might spend thousands over the years. You can add together your revenue and then divide it by your customers to get your CLV.
5. Organic Traffic
Your organic traffic is free, and that’s why it’s such an important metric for all-things marketing and your business as a whole. Traffic that goes to your site either comes from you showing up in search engines or from people who know your brand, so they come to you directly.
The other option is that they’re coming to you via ads, and you’re paying for each click. High levels of organic traffic can indicate that you’re developing helpful, valuable, and informative content on your site that your customer base finds relevant.
If your organic traffic isn’t what you’d like it to be, you should create a content marketing strategy. Content marketing involves creating articles, videos, and other forms of content that aren’t meant to be a hard sell. Instead, they’re meant to provide information, educate your readers, and position you as a trustworthy authority in your industry.
6. Customer Retention
You’ve probably heard that it’s less expensive to retain current customers and cultivate their loyalty than it is to get new ones. That’s why customer retention is an important metric to track. You want those long-time customer relationships which don’t happen by chance.
A big part of understanding customer retention begins by gaining an understanding of purchasing habits. For example, what’s your customer churn like? Customer churn reflects when your customers stop shopping with you or buying from you.
What are your customer revenue growth rates and your repeat purchase ratios? What about product return rates and time between purchases? These are all individual metrics that can fall into the larger category of customer retention to help you gain a complete picture.
7. Email Marketing
When you use email marketing, you need to be assessing metrics here as well.
One of the most important email marketing metrics is your open rate.
How many recipients are actually opening your emails? This metric tells you what people think of your subject lines and whether people are even interested in what you’re sending at all. You also want to look at how many people are unsubscribing versus new subscribers.
Finally, what’s your click-through rate? You want audiences to open your email and also click on your calls-to-action, so they’re then converted into customers. You can look not just at your click-through rate here but also your conversion rate and number of clicks.
These are metrics that are going to tell you if you’re creating emails that are in line with what your audience will find interesting, relevant, or helpful or if you need to change your strategy.
