Creating and running a digital marketing campaign isn’t difficult, measuring it is complicated. Some 50% of B2B marketers say that their inability to measure content metrics is a major challenge they face. A whopping 89% of leading marketers use strategic metrics to measure their marketing campaigns.
Yes, marketing metrics are the key to measuring performance.
But what are marketing metrics and what are the key metrics that you must be tracking?
What are Marketing Metrics?
Marketing metrics are defined as quantifiable variables that are used to monitor, record, and measure the progress and performance of marketing campaigns over time. For example, the impression is a metric that is used to measure ‘awareness’ that is a qualitative variable. The metric quantifies the variable and then helps you measure it:
In the absence of marketing metrics, you won’t be able to track and measure marketing performance and ROI. You won’t be able to identify best-performing campaigns and this means you will use your judgment to allocate marketing budget for different channels.
Why Marketing Metrics Are Important
I’m sure you’ll know the importance and usefulness of marketing metrics. Just like we have units to measure everything else that we have such as time, weight, height, temperature, mass, etc., metrics are the standard units to measure marketing campaigns.
But you don’t have to use these metrics for the sake of using them. Here are the top benefits of marketing metrics that will help you better understand their importance and why you must use them:
Marketing Performance
Metrics are important because they let you measure marketing performance.
Just like everything else, you have to measure marketing performance so that you can prove ROI and show the impact of the marketing campaign on overall business success.
Marketing metrics let you do this.
Consider the following example.
You have been consistently writing 3 blog posts per week to drive organic traffic to your blog. It’s been over a month now and you have published some 12 blog posts. How will you know if your tactic is working?
You’ll use your analytic tool (e.g. Google Analytics) to monitor and track relevant metrics such as sessions, new users, bounce rate, etc.:
These metrics (and others) will help you track the performance of your blog posts, how well they’re doing, and whether you should continue creating new blog posts.
This applies across all marketing channels and campaigns. You can track performance easily and quickly with marketing metrics.
Standardization
Marketing metrics are standard and understood by marketers all over the globe.
This simplifies tracking, reporting, analyzing, and sharing metrics. For example, CTR and CPM are understood by marketers and even non-marketers around the globe.
The same is the case with other marketing metrics. These are standard variables with formulae and definitions that you can easily find on the internet.
This simplifies communication, collaboration, and reporting across organizations.
Decision-Making
When you are running a marketing campaign, you have to make several decisions. There are two ways to make decisions:
- Based on your judgment and gut feeling
- Based on data (derived from metrics).
For example, you are running two search ads on Google for a month. You now have to pause one of the ads and continue with a single ad to optimize the advertising budget.
You can pause the ad that you don’t like because it uses a phrase that you don’t like. Or, you can look at the metrics like CTR, conversion rate, CPC, ad position, etc. and find the ad that performs better:
Metrics help you make data-driven decisions that are extremely useful in conversion rate optimization (CRO) when you have to create hypotheses for testing.
What Marketing Metrics to Track
There are hundreds of metrics. You can’t track all of them all the time. The best technique is to track the most appropriate metric.
For example, if you are measuring blog post engagement, the appropriate metrics are average session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Other metrics aren’t useful for measuring engagement.
The key to success is to identify the right metrics and track only them.
The best way to do it is by linking metrics to your campaign objective. Here is an example:
If your campaign’s objective is to drive conversions, the best metric to track is CTR that will track the number of clicks on the main CTA on your landing page that results in conversion.
Here is a list of key marketing metrics and when you must track them:
Conversion rate: You need to use it to measure the conversion rate for marketing campaigns that are aimed at lead generation, sales, and clicks.
Impressions: You need to use it to measure brand awareness and reach objectives.
Customer lifetime value: It is the the lifetime revenue expected to generate per customer. It is ideal for measuring campaigns that are used to generate sales and leads.
Customer acquisition cost: The cost your business pays to acquire a new customer. Use it for all types of marketing campaigns, especially ones that are aimed at generating sales.
Return on ad spend: The revenue generated against the amount spent on an ad campaign. Use this metric to measure the performance and revenue of your PPC campaigns.
Return on investment: Probably the most used marketing metric that measures revenue generated per dollar spent on the marketing campaign. Track this for all your marketing campaigns.
Final Words
These are the key marketing metrics that you must track. The actual list of metrics is potentially very long. As mentioned, you don’t have to track all the metrics all the time. Pick the ones that are appropriate and make the most sense.
Now that you know what are marketing metrics and why these are important, it is time to start using them. When you create a marketing campaign, identify marketing metrics right then. Selecting the appropriate metrics when you are planning your marketing campaign is the best approach.
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