Marketing Campaign Success via Metrics

Digital marketing is not magic. It's science. This involves measuring results, tracking data and analyzing it. To develop successful marketing campaigns, it is essential to identify the most important metrics.

Digital marketers often rely too heavily on basic data such as website traffic and lead volume. These are essential elements, but a deeper analysis is required to uncover the key insights that will improve your marketing plan.

Let's start with the basics of KPIs and marketing metrics. Then, let's dive into the key metrics that you need to use to measure the success of your campaigns.

What are Marketing Metrics?

Marketing metrics are quantifiable data that can be used to measure success of a marketing campaign. They provide a visual representation of how campaigns are tracking for Key performance indicators (KPIs) and allow marketers to develop a clear picture and continuously improve their strategy.

While the best marketing metrics for your company will differ between campaigns, they will all have the same basic purpose: to measure your business's success. These are your KPIs.

KPIs can be sales-generated or incremental for one campaign. KPIs can be a key element of any campaign and provide marketers with an accurate picture of their strategy's performance. Marketers can track these KPIs to see which elements are working and what isn't, and then make adjustments as needed.

Marketing metrics not only help you and your team to improve but also communicate the value that your department brings to the company in terms that all stakeholders can understand. These metrics are crucial for everything, from annual budgets to headcounts. Marketing metrics are essential for the overall health of any company and its strategic direction.

What are the most valuable marketing metrics?

Different marketing metrics provide unique insights. Marketers need to choose which metrics they will focus on in order to make a campaign successful. Email opens and clicks can be used to measure engagement, while unsubscribe rates can help determine if your content is interesting and useful. Video views and ad impressions can help you measure the reach of your campaign. You can track the effectiveness of your campaign by using cost-per-action.

There are many tools and services that can help you organize your metrics. HubSpot's Marketing Analytics & Dashboard software is one example. These are the most common metrics that marketers use to inform budget decisions and optimize campaign strategies.

Email Marketing

• Open Rate: The number of people who open your marketing emails. The most common expression is a percentage. This is calculated by subtracting the total number sent and the number of opened messages.
• Click-through Rate (CTR: Number of subscribers who click on a link or image within your email, out of all the emails sent.
• Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage users who unsubscribed from your mailing list or opted out after receiving an email campaign.

Digital Marketing

• Click-through Rate: The proportion of users who click on an ad relative to the total viewers.
• Cost per Action (CPA: Tracking and pricing model that refers to the user's completion of a specific action such as a submission, download or sale.
• Impressions The number of times that an ad has been viewed or displayed on a webpage.

Social Media

• Followers While a high number of followers is great for brand reputation, your follower growth rate is an even better indicator of how a business's reach is expanding.
• Impressions & reach: Impressions refers to the total number people that your content is visible to. While reach refers to the number of people who see it and interact with it via likes, comments or shares.
• Engagement Rate: The amount of interaction social media content receives relative to reach and other metrics such as comments, likes or shares, saves messages, mentions and click-throughs.

Website

• Website traffic data This displays trends in your visitors' browsing behaviour.
• Page views Counted each time a browser loads one your web pages, including refreshes.
• Sessions: This tracks the interactions that visitors have with your site, such as page views and form submissions.
• Bounce Rate: A percentage of visitors who arrive on a page and leave it.
• Entrys: The total number of sessions that have been initiated from a page.
• Exit Rate: The percentage of sessions that ended on a page.

Content

• Traffic: Content traffic is vital to any digital marketing strategy. It can be blogs, landing pages or guides, whitepapers, case studies or other content. This information will help you understand where your traffic comes from, how they search for it, and what they value as you optimize your marketing campaigns.
• Downloads How frequently users download a piece.
• Shares The number of times that users share your content. Users are more likely to share your content if they find value.
• Qualified leads How many people have completed and submitted a lead generation form.

Sales

• Follow up time: This is the average time for a sales representative to follow up on a lead once they have self-identified through a form submission or content download.
• Sales call volumeProvides insight into the total number of calls that were handled over a period.
• Call tracking for sales: Track calls-per hour, call outcomes, times per day, conversions and calls by landing page.

Revenue

• This is how much you make over all expenses. It's the main statistic that you want to be able to report to executives or stakeholders.

SEO

• Keyword rankings This is a leading indicator of your ability to improve existing search rankings and rank for new keywords.
• Keyword Search Volume: How many times a keyword has been searched within a given time period.
• Organic Traffic: Traffic that you get from appearing on search engine results pages, without having to pay for placement.

The Right Way to Measure Marketing Metrics

You can measure many data points but it is equally important to understand what you are measuring and why. Employees are less productive when they focus on the finer details of processes and metrics.

Get help from professionals who deal with statistics every day to take the pressure off of your business and get clarity about what is most important. Sagefrog provides marketing analytics and industry intelligence. This includes web activity, conversion analysis, aggregated industry information, and the ability to determine what is working and optimize your buyer's journey to maximize your program's success. Find out how to take your business further using effective marketing metrics.