Metrics
Metric is a measure that would facilitate the quantification of any particular characteristic or a product or an entire business. To ensure whether a project is going in the right direction towards its goal, keeping track of the achieved milestones is absolutely necessary. And, anything that confirms the success of the business would be considered as a metric or a business metric.
Every business unit of a company requires specific performance metric to monitor its progress such as social media metrics to track marketing or customer acquisition cost metric to track software as a service business. It can also be referred as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which are the performance metrics measuring the effectiveness of a company trying to achieve its business objectives.
One of the most important business unit responsible for taking out the product to its customers is Marketing! Most established brands in the market advertise their products with mission and usefulness to the consumers. This advertising is crucial in building a market reputation. Digitization has simplified marketing in a way that reaching out to the users is easy and quick. However, tracking the success rate has become more convoluted than ever before. Having a relevant set of marketing metrics is fundamental to understanding the success or failure of a campaign by the marketing team within an organization. It displays dedicated effort and results that a marketing team achieves to the company’s executives, which is also used by other business units as the basis of all decision making.
Marketing Metrics
To understand the pattern of investment and its return, concrete marketing metrics are useful in analyzing the cost – revenue structure that provides insight to overcome unpredictability. These measurable metrics aligns a company’s progress towards its target goal that ultimately leads to more customer satisfaction, increased loyal customers, a better product and ultimately more revenue.
1. Social Media Metrics
These metrics measure the performance of social media campaigns that help in driving users to their own channels of product delivery. Social media teams use a number of social media channels to contact their customers which sometimes make it difficult to track the success of campaigns since the data and results are found in multiple locations. These metrics help in identifying right social media channels and optimizing strategies to gain large user base.
Metric | Measure | Result |
Social Networking Followers (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) | Keeps track of user engagement based on key demographic | Measures the popularity of an organization |
Followers Growth | Measures the number of new followers gained on social media over a specific period of time | – Understanding your followers
– What works for marketing on social media and what doesn’t |
Social Events | Monitors events on social media streams (likes, reposts, mentions) | – Growth of organization
Engage more audience More sophisticated channel for interaction |
New Visitors & Lead Generation | Measures the effectiveness of social media campaigns in driving visitors to the product’s website | Justifies return on marketing investment for social media campaigns |
Social Media Ad Campaigns Performance | Measures campaign performance for the selected dates | Verifies right audience is being approached via ads
Controlling expenditure for ads |
Social Media Shares/Likes/Retweets | Measures the effectiveness of social media campaigns at fostering positive engagement
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Maps social media interactions to marketing goals
Increased and sustained user engagement Marketing content becoming viral |
2. Digital Marketing Metrics
Having specific digital marketing metrics makes it easy for marketing teams in determining a right methodology to reach targets and, improve performance by aligning strategies towards users interest.
Metric | Measure | Result |
Unique Visitors |
Tracks the number of ways users become aware of the website/product and the level of engagement. | Average Time Per Visit & Number of Pages Per Visit
Clear understanding of traffic sources that are driving high-quality traffic |
Returning Users | Tracks number of users returning to product’s website multiple times
Effectiveness of Content Marketing Efforts |
Average Browse Rate (pages per session) & Average Time on Site
Increased loyal customers
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Website Traffic Lead Ratio | Measures count of visitors converted to leads
Traffic Lead Ratio = Leads : Website Visitors |
Quality of website traffic
Provides website performance
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Net Promoter Score | Measures customer’s willingness in promoting your product or service to colleagues or friends
NPS = Proportion of Detractor Scores – Proportion of Promoter Scores |
Enhances focus on customer satisfaction
Promotes customer referrals, retention and expansion rates Optimizes performance over time |
Brand Awareness | Value of the brand on social media and search engines | Ranking of your product in the market
Growth in number of fans/followers |
Device Tracking | Tracks device being used by users to visit the website | More focus on optimal user experience
Easy division of advertising budget across devices |
Online Conversion | Measures effectiveness of converting online audience into paying customers
Conversion Rate (%) = (# of Conversions / # of clicks) *100 |
Awareness of which features/content/ products are not working well
Concrete measure of number of users within purchase funnel or prospect paid customers |
Cost Per Lead | Measures cost-effectiveness of marketing campaigns while generating new leads
CPL = Cost of Generating Leads / Total Leads Required |
Accurate estimate of money to acquire new leads
Return on marketing investment data Monitors AdWords, banner ads campaigns, social ads or sum of marketing efforts |
Web Traffic Sources | Tracks the traffic sources that drives visitors to the website, providing comparison of all those sources
1. Direct 2. Referral 3. Search 4. Campaign Traffic |
Provides granular information of web traffic
Ability to maintain multiple traffic sources Minimizes risk of website decimation if other sources fail to drive traffic |
External Website Links | Measure hyperlinks on other domain referring to your product’s website against competitors | Clear picture of Website Ranking
Traffic Volume Improvement |
3. Search Engine Optimization Metrics
These metrics measure the performance of a product’s website for organic search results. Tracking search engine metrics regularly helps a marketing team in understanding search marketing performance and identifying top search keywords, high performing pages and which parts of company’s website needs optimization for search.
Metric | Measure | Result |
Landing Page Performance | Tracks traffic generation sources leading to more traffic to product’s website | Targeting right target customers
Setting clear expectations
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Website Linking | Measures number of hyperlinks from other websites navigating to your own product’s website | Improves page rank
Acquiring quality backlinks/inbound links Driving relevant traffic to the website |
Click Through Rate | Measures the effectiveness of your listings at prompting clicks or
Number of times website/other listings generate clicks on Search Engine Result Pages |
Optimization of search keywords and meta description
Forecasting data to help in rationalizing budgets, resources, and time commitments |
Keyword Ranking | Measures search engine rankings for targeted keywords and analyzes trend with time | Information on website ranking on Google
Identifying positive and negative impact of search engine optimization efforts Selecting right keywords |
Organic Search Traffic | Identifies natural placement rank on organic search engine result pages | Improving website link popularity
Awareness of competitors ranking Improvement in search keywords |
4. Email Marketing
To measure the performance of email marketing efforts, monitoring campaigns closely is important. By understanding what’s working and what isn’t can help drastically improve email marketing results. Having an understanding of campaign performance through email marketing metrics helps in real-time improvements of marketing efforts.
Metric | Measure | Result |
Email Statistics | Tracks the performance of current campaigns and ways to improve ROI on other campaigns | Ability to create targeted content
Better understand subject, content of emails Number of leads generated from email |
Email Subscriptions | Tracks reach of email’s content, demographic of subscribers | Identify active, bounced, unsubscribed, subscribed, unconfirmed, deleted users |
Email Engagement | Tracks open and click rates of published emails by users | Indicates if content resonates with email users and message relevance |