Each and every business, big or small, has its own goals defined in an extensive business plan. Setting goals is important for business growth and development. It is obvious that each and every business wants to grow and get more revenue, but there are distinct ways of looking at growth itself.
Goals can go from “grow my business from 10 to 50 employees,” “go international with my business before 2025,” “Triplicate my revenues before 2024” or “Become a sustainable business.” All of those are general and broadly defined goals. You need systems and stepstones to ultimately reach them.
If you want to become a sustainable company, what are the steps you have to take in order to do so?
With marketing, it’s no different. Marketing is one big aspect of a business plan. It ultimately depends on how you’ll present your company to the outside world and how you’ll sell your service and your product. Your marketing strategy should be tightly linked to your company’s growth strategy, and thus, understanding marketing metrics is crucial.
This article will give you an in-depth overview of marketing metrics and how you should work with them. If you are looking to understand marketing metrics better, this article is for you!
What Are Marketing Metrics And What Are They Used For?
Marketing metrics are specific metrics that allow you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Again, they are specific and measurable.
For each of your marketing efforts, you will determine a specific goal, which can be measured with the help of marketing metrics. This helps to understand if your marketing efforts are actually working out.
Although they are frequently used in performance marketing, those metrics are not only made for those. Each and every marketing campaign should be measured and evaluated based on specific metrics. Like this, you will be able to adapt and change parts of your strategy in order to achieve your goals.
Metrics vs. KPIs: Are They The Same Or Are They Different?
A common misunderstanding surrounds Metrics and KPIs. They are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Understanding the difference between them will help you in working successfully with marketing metrics.
Let’s look at KPIs first. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. As the name implies, it’s an indicator to see if a performance is successful or not. In other words, KPIs determine and measure what needs to be done for your business to reach its long-term goals.
All KPIs are metrics, as they obviously measure something. But not all metrics are KPIs. Confusing? Let’s understand this better.
KPIs are related to strategic activities, while metrics are related to tactical activities. A KPI, for example, could be used to double your revenue in a certain amount of time. A metric can measure numbers of downloads, numbers of sales, clicks etc.
Everything you track is a metric, that makes sense, right? In marketing, you can track many different things as they might give you interesting insight. But not everything you track is directly related to a business goal. It might be important data, but it’s not going to directly influence your businesses’ growth. You will still want to track certain things, as they can be helpful in understanding what might be going on overall.
You’ll need to work with both these types of metrics.
What Are The Most Important Marketing Metrics?
There are many articles out there about the most important marketing metrics you have to track right now. But let’s be clear here. It should have become clear by now that marketing metrics should support your overall campaign goals.
In order to achieve a bigger goal, you will have to create many different campaigns which can be tracked with specific metrics.
There are tons of marketing metrics out there, not just the common ones you have surely heard about, such as impressions and clicks. Picking the right one depends on what you want to achieve, as well as your specific marketing campaign.
For social media marketing, the metrics you will want to track are different from paid media, SEO or E-mail marketing.
How To Analyze Marketing Metrics
Marketing has a lot to do with experimenting. There is no specific solution for all of your efforts. This is why measuring and analyzing your efforts is important. It’s the way for you to understand what works for your business and what doesn’t. Besides, what worked today might not work tomorrow.
With Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can track the most important metrics related to your marketing strategy for free. Most social media platforms also have an insight page where you can have a look at the metrics for the past month, sometimes even longer.
To work with those metrics, you will have to track them over a period of time. Consistency is key and you need to have data to compare them to. You can look at data from your industry to understand what the average for a certain metric is. This gives you a good idea of where you stand. But first and foremost, you have to look at your metrics over a period of time to understand if you are moving in the right direction.
You can simply create an excel sheet with your most important goals and objectives, and include the metrics that will help to measure those objectives and data over a period of time.
Nowadays, it’s not necessary to insert all the metrics into an excel sheet. There are many tools that allow you to have an overview of metrics. But I find the good old excel sheet a good way to have all metrics in one place.
Once you have a clear goal and have decided on which metrics can best help to measure it, keep overseeing these metrics for a period of time, while putting the necessary efforts into reaching your goal.
Always tie the metrics to your goals and to your business story.
When it comes to metrics, you will also want to look at them in relation to one another. As we will see below, there are certain metrics that, when combined with others, are a good indicator of how well things are going for you.
So let’s dive into some marketing metrics. We will be looking at content marketing metrics and paid marketing metrics here.
Content Marketing Metrics
In content marketing, your main goal is to deliver interesting content to your customers that will lead them to be aware of, develop an interest in, and ultimately engage with your brand or product.
One big aspect of content marketing is leading people to your website to get more information about your brand. Creating content for a blog is therefore a widely used strategy since you can provide useful information regarding your topics.
Goals for content marketers usually include driving more traffic to a website and improving engagement and awareness.
If you are a content marketer, you spend a lot of time reading, researching, creating, and publishing content across several platforms. How do you know if they are working?
Here are some of the most common content marketing metrics you should look out for:
1. Pageviews
This is the total number of pages viewed. It counts loaded and reloaded pages.
2. Avr. Time On Page
It’s the average time someone spends on a page. This one is interesting, since spending time on a page indicates that the content on it is interesting and helpful to that person.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is shown as a percentage and it’s the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting only one page. Ideally, you will want people to scroll further through your website, accessing other content. A bounce rate can be an indicator that your content is not what they are looking for. Formatting, slow loading, and pop-ups can also contribute to people bouncing off. Therefore, having your pages optimized is key.
If you have a high bounce rate, try measuring your website’s loading speed and optimizing it. If this is not the issue, have a look at the overall content and its formatting. Consider working with images, graphics, and headings to make the content more visual and easier to understand.
Make sure your information is concise and that you have a clear call to action — one clear message for what the user should do.
4. Behavior Flow
A Behaviour Flow report is something you can access via Google Analytics. It essentially shows how users travel from one page to another page on the same website. This is an extremely interesting metric for those looking to improve their website and content since it shows which pages people have accessed and how they navigate through your website.
5. Time On Page
This is the time a user spends on a specific page. Together with the behavior flow, it can give you a good overview of what content/pages are keeping people engaged and which aren’t.
UX design plays a huge role when it comes to how people experience your website, and consequently, it can influence the time they spend on your page. You might want to have a UX designer have a look at your website.
6. Return Rate
As the name suggests, it indicates returning website visitors. If your return rate is high, it means that people liked what they saw and they are coming back for more. It’s as simple as that.
A great way to make people return to your website is to create a newsletter, and thus, keep them in the know about the latest developments on your website. Social media can also help with reminding people about your website and having them come back. Whenever you have a new article or product update, let people know about it! Once they see it on social media, they might want to check it out.
Paid Performance Metrics
Paid marketing refers to your overall advertising campaigns. This can include digital advertising, as well as print. It’s an essential part of every marketing strategy. Due to the fact that our world is becoming increasingly digitized, online advertising has gained significant importance. One unique feature of digital advertising compared to print, is that we can target an exact audience, as well as have the chance to measure a campaign’s results.
As organic exposure is becoming increasingly difficult, having the right mix and using paid advertising can be an important step to growing your business. It can also be a great way to raise awareness about your business, ultimately helping you to reach your desired goals.
Metrics play an important role in understanding whether your campaign is working well or not and whether it is contributing to your overall objectives.
Let’s have a look at some key paid performance metrics:
1. Impressions
With online advertising, we can measure impressions, which is the number of times an ad is displayed. This metric quantifies your ads’ appearances in search results, on social media, or on other websites. It’s important to monitor impressions because they show you your ads’ baseline visibility. If your ad isn’t showing up anywhere, people definitely won’t be clicking through!
Impressions also help to build brand awareness. We all know those brands that have ads all over our feed. They probably have a high impression rate — the percentage of impressions one brand has compared to its competitors. The percentage is based on keywords and if yours is too low, you might need to adjust your budget.
2. Click-Through Rate
The Click-Through Rate or CTR is the number of people who clicked on your ad divided by the number of impressions. It’s a percentage that indicates how enticing your ad is to potential customers. If your click-through rate is low, you might consider adjusting your ads’ text or appearance to make it more interesting or eye-catching.
But, you don’t have to do this alone! You can use Nanos’s AI technology to test out different creatives, optimize your budget automatically, find the most effective platforms for your ad, and more! If your ads aren’t performing well, you can let Nanos do the work.
3. Cost Per Click and Cost Per Acquisition
Everything costs money, right? Big advertising campaigns can be expensive. In order for your business to be successful, it’s important to monitor where your money goes and what it’s doing.
Your CPC is the average amount each click costs you, which is important. But if you don’t have any business as a result, it’s not doing much for you. This is why you should watch out for both your CPC and CPA (how much you spend to get someone’s business) closely. Think about these numbers within the unique context of your business. One website might tell you that if you have a $50 CPA, you’re good as gold. But if your average sale is $20, you probably aren’t seeing much profit. If these numbers are unbalanced, you might need to take another look at your budget.
4. Return On Investment (ROI)
This metric measures the profitability of a certain investment. It can indicate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign for instance. It is calculated as seen below: The net return divided by the cost of the investment, multiplied by 100.
Simply put, if you invest 1 Euro in your overall marketing activities, you will want to have more than 1 Euro return. This usually means having more than 1 Euro in sales or revenue.
5. Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS)
Similar to ROI, ROAS also indicates the effectiveness of marketing, but specifically of your digital advertising campaign. For each Euro you invest in your advertising campaign you want to generate more than 1 Euro in return.
6. Traffic
If you are placing an ad campaign on Facebook Ads, for instance, you can pick between different campaign types, one of them being a traffic campaign.
Like the name says, the main goal of a traffic campaign is to drive traffic to a certain page. Each and every good ad campaign will have a call to action and a landing page where it drives the traffic to. Having a look at how your traffic increased during the overall campaign time is a good indicator of how it is working.
If you combine this with for instance the bounce rate, you can have an idea of what you have to work on. If you managed to increase traffic significantly to your website with a campaign, it means that the ad itself appears interesting to people, but if the bounce rate is also high, it could mean that the actual page doesn’t convey what you promised in your ad.
I Am Not A Marketing Expert — Now What?
All the information above was a great tip into the topic. But if you are not a marketing expert, nor do you have the time and resources to take care of all of this by yourself while running your business, we understand.
We have a list of many helpful marketing tools for businesses, and if you are specifically looking to invest in digital advertising, we suggest you have a look at Nanos. Nanos is a great alternative when it comes to advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
Nanos does not only monitor metrics for you, but it also chooses all the best options for your ad. Our technology evaluates your ad’s performance in real-time and can make any needed changes for you. With our budget optimization tool, Nanos automatically reshuffles your budget based on ad performance. It will find the best, most cost-effective balance for you. With Nanos, you have less work and you will spend less money for more advertising success!
