Improving your performance should be the number one focus of your marketing strategy — and you can’t improve without measurement. You have to know how your campaigns are performing in order to ensure they perform better next time. For marketers who are looking to take their marketing strategy to the next level, it’s time to start focusing on the most important metrics and getting the most out of these reports.
There are so many metrics to measure that it can be a headache to decipher which ones have the most value. Many companies take a stab in the dark and end up with numbers they don’t really know what to do with. But there are three tried and true metric types that can benefit pretty much any business, no matter what size.
1. Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are one of the most obvious and most important metrics that marketers can report on. The number of conversions you get measures how many customers have taken a desired action on your website — these actions should be unique based on your business objectives. For example, if you are sales-driven, purchases will be your conversion metric. If you are building a thought leadership position in your industry, downloading an e-book might be your top conversion metric.
2. Engagement Metrics
In addition to tracking how many people are performing the desired actions on your site, it’s also crucial to track their general engagement so you know how your campaigns are performing. Sometimes a campaign can be considered successful if users are actively engaging with your brand and your content. That means that your content is getting shared and talked about among the right audiences. It’s easy to measure how many shares and likes your content is getting using tools like BuzzSumo.
3. Website Traffic
Traffic to your website and blog is also a critical metric for marketing success. This metric helps you make sure that your inbound marketing efforts — blogging, connecting with influencers, social media activity, etc. — are giving you a good return on investment. You want them to result in more Unique Page Views so that you know your content is getting in front of new eyes. Be sure to isolate your website pages and your blog page so you can determine which one is driving more traffic and where to place your best content moving forward.
Follow these three top metrics and start gaining the insights you need into your marketing campaign performance.
Sources:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/10/measuring-marketing-effectiveness-metrics/