In marketing, everything is moving a million miles a minute. It’s great to know how to get a campaign up and running, but that’s not enough to sustain it and make it effective over time.
Every great campaign typically needs adjustments over time, and you’ll know what to adjust by measuring your metrics.
Whether you’re just getting started or need a refresh when it comes to digital advertising metrics, you can’t just take a “set it and forget it” approach to advertising. Here’s why and how.
Ready, set, measure.
What are Marketing Metrics?
Marketing metrics are a great way to track performance and gauge success for a campaign. They are measurable, quantifiable values and can be used to monitor progress. Marketing metrics can take many different forms depending on the platform and goals.
Keep in mind that you can’t measure everything – start with what’s most important, and build your goals accordingly.
Why are Marketing Metrics Important?
Marketing metrics give direction to marketers. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you ever get there?
By showing a quantifiable value, marketing professionals are able to create goals and drive growth for their company. Not only will they help to scale growth, but marketing metrics also give marketers a good idea of their Return on Investment(ROI) for their campaigns.
Basically, you should be able to tell a story about how beneficial, or not, a marketing campaign is. This will ultimately help drive informed decision-making, which you can use to improve campaigns.
Types of Advertising Metrics
There is an overwhelming amount of marketing metrics out there. You can find data for anything from engagement to total views to clicks and more. Don’t get overwhelmed!
The most important metrics for you will depend on your business and your goals. Do you want more people to see your advertising campaigns? Or do you want to optimize the advertising costs for each new lead? These types of questions can help you choose the best metrics moving forward.
Here are some of the tried-and-true marketing metrics out there:
Total Visits
This metric will document the total number of visits to a website. It makes it easy for digital marketers to see an overview of how many, and how often, people are visiting the website. This metric does not take into consideration new or repeat visitors, it is the sum of all visits.
Clicks
The number of clicks will tell you just that. It is a metric that quantifies the total number of users taking a specific action on a website, ad, or social media platform. This is a helpful metric because it can help you understand how and if your audience is responding to a digital advertisement, a CTA on a landing page from that ad, etc.
Reach
Reach is particularly helpful for social media content and advertising, but can be used for other forms of digital marketing as well. Reach is the number of total unique people that viewed the content that you’re measuring. For example, a social media marketer might want to measure how many different accounts viewed an advertisement.
Gross Revenue
Gross revenue is a helpful metric on all sides of business. It can show how well a company is developing and can indicate any spikes in revenue, both good or bad. Moreover, gross revenue can be helpful to marketers because it can help to determine if an ad campaign is showing success on a larger scale of the entire business. You can also use gross revenue and compare it to the cost of an advertisement. This will provide a helpful ratio to understand any profit or loss that occurred.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates record the percentage of users that completed the desired action. This desired action could be a simple ad click-through, or it could be email sign-ups after following the ad. Conversion rates are a great tool for digital marketing because they can help a marketer gauge if a specific media channel is working better than others. Perhaps email marketing has a much higher conversion rate than banner ads for your business. This could help you to hone in on the most successful types of digital marketing.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate for digital marketers is definitely a metric to keep an eye on. The bounce rate describes how many people landed on a website, but performed no action and left. A high bounce rate could indicate a few things: poor user experience, target market mismatch, or low-quality content. If you see a high bounce rate, start by testing one element at a time, like tweaking the wording of a CTA or the amount of information on a form fill. If you change everything at once, you won’t know what made the difference!
Engaged Time
By tracking engaged time, you know how much time users are paying attention to the content. It does not include idle tab time. It can indicate how valuable your content is to your target market.
Yes, advertising metrics can get complicated, so remember to start with SMART goals and don’t try to measure or update everything at once.
For example: If you’re looking to raise awareness about a new product, then don’t focus solely on sales conversion metrics, think more about total visits and reach. Make sure you know exactly the action you want your viewers to make with any ad. You’ll soon discover how to practically apply these metrics within various campaigns like a pro.
It’s time for actionable ways to put these metrics to good use. Are you ready?
Learn more about successful digital marketing practices here: Guide to B2B Marketing Strategy: A Framework You Can Implement
