Understanding and tracking the performance of your marketing efforts is essential in order to grow your business. While there are dozens of metrics you can use to measure the success of your campaigns, some are more important than others. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of the ten most important marketing metrics that everyone should be aware of, and most likely tracking on a weekly basis.

(Before we dive in, if you want a shortcut to building your growth marketing scorecard that tracks all of your most important metrics in one place, you can steal our growth marketing scorecard here >>)

With the understanding that every business is different, and a couple of these metrics might not make sense for you to track, here are the top 10 metrics most Heads of Marketing should track:

#1: Unique Pageviews

Unique pageviews measure how many times a webpage has been visited by individual users over the course of a designated period. This metric helps you understand which content resonates with your audience and how often they view it. It also provides insight into user engagement and helps inform decisions about what kind of content to prioritize in future campaigns.

#2: % New Visitors

% new visitors measures how many unique visitors have come to your website for the first time during a given period. This metric is helpful in understanding whether or not you’re successfully reaching new audiences with each campaign and can help inform decisions about where to allocate resources for maximum impact.

#3: Video Watch %

Video watch % measures how often people watch a video all the way through, as opposed to how many times it’s been viewed or clicked on. This metric gives you an indication of user interest and helps inform decisions about whether or not your audience is finding value in your videos or if they’re being ignored.

#4: Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the number of clicks on a particular link compared to the number of impressions (how many times that link was seen). A high CTR indicates that users find the link interesting enough to click on it while low CTR numbers suggest there might be improvements needed within the content itself or its placement within a webpage or email message.

#5: Open Rate

Open rate measures how often people who receive an email open it, as opposed to leaving it unread in their inboxes, also known as “opens” vs “bounces” rate. Understanding this metric helps marketers decide whether their messages are engaging enough for readers to take action on them and can help inform decisions about subject line wording, email length, and other aspects related to emails sent out through campaigns.

#6: Leads Generated

Leads generated measures how many individuals expressed interest in learning more about a product or service by taking an action such as filling out a form or signing up for an event. Tracking this metric is important for evaluating the effectiveness of various channels and campaigns used for lead-generation activities.

#7: Revenue

Tracking total revenue generated from campaigns provides insight into overall performance and ROI from those efforts. It also helps marketers understand which channel offers more significant returns so they can adjust their strategy accordingly.

#8: Number Of Lead Magnets Downloaded

Lead magnet downloads measure how many individuals downloaded a valuable piece of content offered by a company in exchange for contact information such as name, email address, etc. These metrics provide insight into user engagement with various lead magnets created by organizations so they can evaluate which ones resonate best with their target audiences and create more effective strategies going forward.

#9: North Star Metrics Performance

North Star Metrics are one high-level key performance indicator (KPI) designed to keep organizations focused on achieving their long-term goals regardless of short-term successes or failures — measuring performance against these metrics paints an accurate picture regarding progress towards achieving desired results over time.

#10: Upsell Take Rate

Upsell take rate measures conversion rates when customers are presented with opportunities to purchase upgraded versions/features after purchasing initial products/services — understanding this metric helps companies identify areas where they could improve customer experience and increase the chances of customers taking advantage of upsell opportunities available.

The post Top 10 Metrics Most Heads of Marketing Should Track appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There’s so much data, from so many different sources, with so many different reporting tools, that you could just drown in reports, attribution, and meetings. With so much noise out there, it’s important that you look at the data in a certain way. There’s important information hidden in the metrics that will help direct your digital marketing strategy.

In this article I’m going to walk you through this technique that I’ve been using for 25 years, called MAA.

Metrics, Analysis, Action

MAA stands for metrics, analysis, action.

Let me show you how powerful it is when you use this technique on any kind of data set you have. It could be SEO data, website data, email data, conversion data, shopping cart data.

The Data Doc is in…

Think of this as if you are a surgeon in the emergency room. You must follow these three steps.

• Collect vitals.
• Diagnose.
• Treat.

First you collect the vitals. It could be heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, x-rays things like that. These are the numbers that clue you in to the cause of the problem.

The second phase is the diagnosis. In this phase you interpret all the vitals that you collected. Based on the data, you make the determination of a heart attack, broken bone, virus, etc. The key point is that the diagnosis is based on the data.

From that diagnosis, you create the treatment plan. The plan might include surgery, medications, a recovery plan, etc. But the list of things to be done to make the patient healthier is based upon the findings and the diagnosis.

The marketing analytics data you collect leads directly to analysis of the problem. That then leads directly to the action. What I will show you in this article is a number of examples from a variety of digital marketing projects. This works whether you’re working on a large or small project.

Data vs Analytics

Lots of people think that they have analytics because they have Google Analytics installed on their website.

But let me tell you a dirty secret.

There are no analytics in Google Analytics. It’s just Google charts. It should be called Google Chart-Maker.

Marketing analytics is figuring out what’s actually going on. It’s the interpretation of the data. Interpreting the data tells you why sales went up or down. It helps you discover why conversion rates went up or down. Analyzing the data answers questions like:

• Why did people buy or not buy?
• Why did a competitor take a certain action?
• Where are we losing customers along the customer journey?
• Is our content hitting or missing with our customers?

Analytics is more than making charts and collecting data. And action is the next step after marketing analytics.

The way we see it, if you are not taking action based on the analytics, which was based on the data, then whatever you’re doing is random.

Returning to our analogy, not everyone should take the same pill. If you’ve got a broken bone, you shouldn’t take the same medication as someone who has a headache. So the action that you take, the optimization, should be contingent upon the analysis, which should go straight back to the data that you gathered.

Most people make the mistake of just trying to look at lots of data. This Metrics Analysis Action framework is the easiest way to figure out what you really need to do versus what’s noisy.

MAA Framework Case Study: Ecommerce

If you are in ecommerce, lead gen, or any kind of performance marketing, then you’re going to start with the action, mapped back to the analysis, and back to the metrics.

Because the actions are all the things that you could do.

So make a list of the things that you could do.

• You can play with the website.
• You can change your budgets.
• You can change ads.
• You can optimize creatives.
• You can work with influencers.
• You can buy another tool.
• You can change bids.

Think of all the actions that you could take. Start with the end in mind.

Once you decide on the action, look for the trigger. In other words, when analyzing the data, what diagnosis will cause you to take that prescribed action?

That’s where you have automated rules on Google, Facebook, or Shopify. Wherever you’re looking at data, you can set up these rules.

For example, if your cost per acquisition goes above $50, then turn the ad set off. If someone leaves a positive review on Yelp, then reach out to them to say thank you.

So if a certain thing happens, then here’s the particular action.

Then there’s a limited number of things that you could do, so you don’t have to look at everything. And then if you need to determine if that triggering condition is true, then what data do you need?

Data, Analytics, and Attribution

On the far left of this image, we have plumbing. Plumbing is collecting the data from different tags in tag manager, UTM parameters, pixels that are firing, and other events inside an app.

These are the things that people are doing. For example, opening an email. When that happens, you get plenty of email marketing data. But the data doesn’t mean anything unless you can tie it to a goal.

How do you tie data to a goal?

Here’s a lifetime value example…

Seeds of Life sells flowers to people who’ve experienced the death of a loved one. The lifetime value (LTV) of a customer is $150. What can they do to increase the LTV?

They might offer a referral bonus, free shipping for orders over a hundred dollars, etc. Their goals, checked against the marketing analytics, will determine the direction of their next marketing campaign.

The important thing is to define the goals and measure them against the data. If the data doesn’t tie to the achievement of a particular goal, then you have to ask, “why are we even collecting that data?”

We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack, here. Although, that’s what most people do with their reporting.

Most people log into Google analytics, or whatever they use to pull in all the data from all the different places. And then they just hunt and peck and wander around and look for interesting things.

They look at the data then filter down to this date for that particular segment and this part of the country. It’s like the lotto, like the power ball where you choose six random balls to try to win the million dollar jackpot.

You want to have your goals before you figure out the plumbing.

Don’t Make the Same Mistakes with Analytics

Large and small companies make the same mistakes. They tend to go after impressions or click through rate or secondary metrics when the primary metric, the business goal, is more important than a diagnostic, secondary metric.

I love looking at cost per mille, or CPM, in advertising. For example, how much are you paying per thousand impressions? What is the trigger or check engine light, to let you know whether the algorithm is penalizing you for having a low click through rate, low quality score, low relevance score, etc.

Analyzing a marketing campaign in this way may show that something else is wrong.

Please don’t make the same mistake thinking that a secondary metric like click through rate, cost per click, quality score, or CPM is more important than the main business metric.

Profit, lifetime value, or cost of acquisition should be the goals that tie to your content and targeting.

Plumbing, Goals, Content, Targeting, Amplification, Optimization…

Here’s an example (above) of a marketing campaign we ran for our friend, Brennan.

At the very top are the financial metrics, specifically profit. There’s some kind of margin with or without cost of goods and services or overhead.

Then we have revenue minus costs.

Revenue is driven by factors like conversion rate, LTV, and how well you use things like recency and frequency to increase revenue.

Then there’s costs: people costs, ad costs, software costs, other kinds of costs.

On the revenue side, units (high price vs low price) multiplied by volume (clicks and/or conversion rate) is your revenue.

On the cost side, let’s say you run all your digital marketing campaigns on a cost per click basis. You can break that down to different fixed and variable costs. So we know if we double the number of clicks we’re buying from Google, we’re going to pay twice as much. Multiply the cost by the number of clicks you get for the overall cost of that campaign.

This decomposition pyramid helps you figure out the data you need to collect using secondary diagnostic metrics.

Start to think about how those different metrics will help you uncover the main issue to focus on right now.

MAA Framework: Case Study

Let’s look at how this actually applies when you’re looking at tabular data.

In this example (above), we’re looking at a lot of information. There are 132 ad sets here. That means we have all this information for 132 projects…

• Data
• Campaigns
• Ads
• Landing pages
• Messages

This happens to be a set of Facebook campaigns, but it could easily be any social media platform or other traffic source.

We use a concept called “Top N” to select a manageable number of ad sets to work with. Why? Because it’s intimidating to try and look at ALL of them to diagnose the problem or issue.

You don’t have time to look at every single keyword, creative, or landing page. The idea of Top N is to look at the top, best- or worst-performing ad sets and ignore the rest. This is just another way of using the 80/20 rule or prioritizing your work.

I find that when you use the Top N technique on any large dataset you can quickly zero in on the most important thing.

In this case, we can see that this very first ad spent $10,000 out of $43,000. That means 25% of all of the money being spent is inside that one ad out of the 132 ads total.

Look a little more closely and you’ll see the top five already account for 60% of the total spend.

That’s not uncommon. In lots of cases the top three to five ads will account for about half of your ad spend.

Applying the Top N Method

I like to start by doing Top N on spend, because that’s where I can identify a “bleeder” (a high-spend ad with very low return).

Then I look at what drove the most revenue or had the highest number of conversions. Because then I can find where the winners are.

Then I look at clicks, leads, or other metrics that are important to the business.

Using this method, I kill the losing ads and amplify the winning ads.

Let’s say you were to sort just by conversions or revenue. If you do that, then you could have an ad that’s wasting lots of money that doesn’t make it into the top four or five for your most important metrics.

So I use Top N for three or four metrics in succession. Each time it reorders the ad sets or ads or creatives or whatever it is that you’re looking at.

You can use this method to determine ad performance in just three minutes.

Find and Fix the Issue

If something’s out of whack, it could require a big change or it could be something wrong with the tracking.

It could be iOS 14, or the pixel wasn’t on that landing page. It could be the data didn’t come through and it’s delayed. There’s all kinds of things that could play into why numbers aren’t adding up.

A lot of people freak out when sales are way down. Understandable. But many times it’s because of some silly issue. So before you pull the fire alarm, just think, does that really make sense?

I like this particular ad here.

There’s no way we spent this amount of money with no return. So we know there’s an issue. And we know with social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, their systems often will not show data.

We know that because of the iOS 14 update, impressions and clicks are reported on different frequencies. So you might see a bunch of spend show up before the conversions show up or vice versa.

Make sure it’s statistically significant. Also make sure that you have enough data, so you don’t jump to any conclusions.

We’ve seen these systems spiral out of control. For example, let’s say you decide to reduce the bid amount on a marketing channel when the ROI falls below a certain amount. That seems logical. But if you’re only looking at revenue, not conversions, you might kill off a marketing campaign that was actually working quite well.

Imagine if it all boiled down to a hiccup in the data that caused the downward spiral. Not good. So be careful about that.

Now, if you see that a metric is out of whack and the data looks good, then ask yourself why that campaign isn’t performing as well.

Data and Instinct for the Win

Don’t let everything you do be completely automated and dependent upon rules. A successful marketing strategy requires a human touch.

Don’t set so many rules that the software automatically terminates your ads.

Instead, take a moment to look at how far out of bounds the ad performance is. It could be that you launched a new campaign and you’re doing an AB test or some kind of split test. The winner stays on and continues to win, even when other ads are losing, because you’re trying to find another winner to take its place.

If the cost per acquisition is high, then you can break that down using the metrics decomposition pyramid.

For example, the cost per acquisition will double if:

• the conversion rate is cut in half and the cost per click is the same
• the cost per click doubles and the conversion rate is the same

The cost per acquisition remains the same if either factor doubles while the other one is cut in half.

Always look at your marketing analytics when the cost per conversion goes up. Determine whether it’s because of the cost per click or the conversion rate.

When you run ads using objective-based bidding you don’t have to worry as much about cost per click, click through rate, or conversion rate because the artificial intelligence behind the ad platform is going to seek your target metric.

If the target metric is out of whack, you can decompose it into the underlying metrics.

That’s true for organic traffic. But it’s not as true for paid traffic because the systems are getting smarter and can optimize for the objective you set. Either way you should still look.

Balancing Metrics

This method gets you to look at metrics that matter according to our business goals. It gets you to think about and analyze why the data might be good or bad. And it gets you to outline the actions you’re going to take when goals aren’t being met. Over time you’ll find that the same pairing of metrics change alongside each other. So let’s talk about what these balancing metrics are.

One company we were working with was spending a hundred thousand dollars a month on advertising. When they were unhappy with the return, the analyst on the project adjusted the Google ad campaign. All of a sudden the cost per conversion dropped from $20 per lead to $7 per lead.

But I wanted to know how and why it dropped so dramatically. I found out that this person went into the Google ads campaign and turned off all the campaigns except for the brand search terms. Of course it was going to convert super well!

But the balancing metric was volume. When the analyst “fixed” the cost per conversion, the number of leads dropped from 5,000 leads a month to maybe a thousand leads a month.

The key takeaway here is that if you optimize one metric blindly, you can fool yourself into thinking everything is better when in reality another metric took a nosedive.

Analyzing Like a Scientist, but NOT a Rocket Scientist

Metrics don’t matter, unless there’s a clear analysis that can come from the information. Remember, you’re seeking a diagnosis.

Think like a surgeon or scientist. Start with a hypothesis. If a certain thing happens, what will you do to correct it and what outcome do you expect? If there’s no potential action based on some metric, there’s no need to gather the metrics.

I see companies spend most of their efforts collecting data. No one even knows why they’re using the data. Be strategic and ask, “what are we doing with this data? Is there some meaningful action we’re going to take?”

Maybe there’s another metric that would measure the goal better.

The point of analytics is to figure out whether something is worthwhile. Most of the data you thought was important, doesn’t even matter.

I’ll give you one example. Our client was a large company, but this works for small companies, too.

We were working with an airline, taking one database and matching it against another. They wanted to know things like whether a customer that goes skiing has kids and what their income was.

They wanted predictive models to uncover which customers would be most likely to sign up for their credit card or buy flowers or upgrade or travel to new destinations.

We went all in on the idea that more data is better. After all the time and money spent on sophisticated data models, what we found was that the best predictor of people flying more was past purchase behavior. Not a surprise, right?

In this case, purchase behavior predicted purchase behavior. And the fact that they drove a station wagon, or liked to eat Haagen-Dazs ice cream, might be interesting but it had very little impact on their flying behavior.

Moral of the story, you might find that the most obvious thing is the best place to start optimizing in your business as well. Start thinking about what kind of “if-then” logic you can implement. And don’t dismiss the really simple idea just because it’s simple.

The MAA Framework is Not Just for Advertising

Collecting data allows you to put if-then sequences in place across your business. In Google and Facebook you can set up automated rules using if-then logic. For example, one might be for conversions. If conversions fall below a certain number, then an automated action would be taken or an alert might be sent to whoever’s in charge of that area to let them know there is something that needs their attention.

Here is a table of common if-then scenarios we’ve come across. Start small by looking at just a few of these things.

You’ll find a lot of value when you look at the patterns. For example, look at posts with the highest engagement versus posts with the lowest engagement. What can you learn? What do the high-engagement posts have in common? Is there a cross-over with the low-engagement posts?

Don’t spend all your time messing around inside the tools. Even Google’s head of analytics said that 90% of every dollar you spend on analytics should be on people and 10% should be on the tools.

We see a lot of businesses do the opposite. They spend 90% on tools and 10% on people. The hard truth is, the most sophisticated tools are useless without someone who knows how to make sense of the numbers.

To ensure success, set the framework in place. Make it clear that everyone is accountable for the results.

Summary

I hope the metrics, analysis, action framework I’ve just introduced you to encourages you. Data and analytics aren’t really that technical. You don’t have to collect a ton of data, build regression models, or feed your AI any recipes.

Customers buy this over that. It’s not math. It’s not huge databases. It’s not engineering.

The MAA framework is all about understanding the numbers in the context of business performance and goals. Tracking metrics should always begin with the business strategy in mind. 

The post Digital Marketing Data and How to Optimize Like a Champ appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There’s one thing that every business owner has in common: they want their business to succeed.

It doesn’t matter what industry they’re in, what product they sell, or what problem they solve. Every business owner wants to rise to the top…

…But how?

Most people know what success feels like… but what does success look like?

Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t have to be super complicated to figure out. Because, although success could look slightly different depending on what you do, almost every business can track success with one thing: the right metrics.

It’s a methodology for tracking growth that Monique Morrison, Co-Founder of Jeronamo Digital Solutions and a DigitalMarketer ELITE Coach, uses for her clients every day. She spoke at her recent DigitalMarketer workshop about the power of metrics, and how to use them to project and achieve growth for your business.

Why High-Level Success Metrics Are Important

Using the right metrics to track how your business is doing is a surefire way to tell if you’re growing your business. They’re trackable, concrete, easy to understand, and they take the guess work out of the process.

You can track where you are right now and how that compares to this time last month or last year. And, most importantly, you can use those numbers to project what success will look like a year later.

When we map out what went right and what went wrong with our business, looking to the past is great. But none of it matters unless we figure out how to take what we learned from the past and apply it to the future. Tracking the right metrics gives you the milestones and checkpoints your need to hit by helping you evaluate exactly what you were able to do in the past.

Reliable ways to quantify success can’t be undervalued. In an evolving business world where you are always looking for an edge on your competition, it can often be better to look inside instead of outside. Tracking your success metrics allows you to bring something concrete to the table when you are figuring out what worked really well and what didn’t work so well at all.

And the best part is you don’t have to spend a dime to track your own metrics. It only takes time and a little bit of effort.

What Metrics Matter

Truthfully, there are lots of metrics that could matter for your business.

But there are some general metrics that are helpful for every business to keep track of. But that also largely depends on if you’re a project/service-based business or an ecommerce/retail business.

Project and Service-Based business will need to track:

• Revenue month-by-month
• Sales count month-by-month
• Lead conversion rate
• No-show/cancellation rate
• Landing page conversion rate
• Average cost per click and click-through rate

Ecommerce and retail businesses will need to track:

• Revenue month-by-month
• Sales count month-by-month
• Unique visitors by month
• Average ad cost per click and click-through rate

These are the stats that matter the most for your business, because they are the ones that will give you the bird’s-eye view of when things are going right. These metrics are very broad, and account for a culmination of all of the work that you’re doing. Which means they all translate to whether there is money trickling into your business’s bank account.

Let’s do a deep dive as to why these stats are important.

Revenue Month-by-Month

Revenue month-by-month is the metric that every business should be tracking, regardless of industry or niche, to measure and project growth. It’s literally the number that tells you how much money is flowing into your business, and one that you definitely already have your eye on. Without tacking it, you’re going to be underprepared to do even basic business analysis.

There is only one part of this metric that could use explanation: the timespan. Although some companies may elect to do a formal evaluation of their revenue on a yearly basis, monthly evaluation is more effective. That way you can see the way your revenue fluctuates with different promotions or marketing strategies, and then you can learn how to analyze and adapt those strategies in a timely manner.

If you try to track it on a weekly basis, you’re going to risk overreacting to inconsequential shifts. And the last thing you want to do is drive yourself insane.

Monthly tracking is the way to go. As for finding those numbers, you need to look no further than your books or your bank statements. If you have a designated accountant, ask them. It’s that simple, but it really is important.

Sales Count Month-by-Month

Similar to revenue, this is important for every business to track. Your sales count lets you see the how many sales you’re making and the money you’re bringing in, but it also adds important context to your revenue number.

That’s because this metric is analyzing the number of sales, not the amount of money. It’ll allow you to look at your revenue and understand if you’re converting a bunch of small sales, or a few really high-dollar sales. That will let you analyze the kind of audience you need to be targeting, letting you optimize your marketing plan.

You can also use it to find the customers giving you those high-dollar sales, so you can send them an exclusive deal as a little thank you.

To find this number, you can look in your ecommerce platforms or keep a manual count if you’re a brick and mortar business.

Average Ad Cost per Click And Click-Through Rate

Both of these metrics will let you gauge the effectiveness of your online advertisements. It tracks not only the amount of money you’re paying to have them seen, but also how often people actually click and interact with them. It’s important because digital advertising is one of the cornerstones of any great marketing strategy and knowing how to optimize your ads is essential to achieving growth.

To find these numbers, look no further than the platforms that you’re advertising on. Facebook and Google, as well as any other platform that you may be on, will provide these statistics for you. All you have to know is what they mean.

Unique Visitors by Month

Tracking unique visitors is an important task for ecommerce businesses because their business is entirely online. It’s the same reason brick-and-mortar businesses like to keep track of how many people are coming in and out of the store. If you can’t get people through the (virtual) door, you’re never going to have a chance to sell anything.

Knowing your unique visitor count can also help you gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and SEO, as well as the persuasiveness of your landing and product pages. If people aren’t visiting your website, then you know there’s probably changes that you can make to help generate more traffic and, in turn, more sales. If your number of visitors is high but your sales are low, then you’ll know that your advertising and outreach aren’t the problem.

You can find this statistic on the dashboard of your website, as well as through Google Analytics and even some of your advertising platforms.  

Lead Conversion Rate and No-Show/Cancellation Rate

Although these stats are different, they’re also one in the same—mainly because it’s easy to track them both at the same time.

For project and service-based industries, a large portion of your job is lead generation. Your goal is to create leads and then convert them into customers, and these statistics will help you determine exactly that. Are you turning leads into customers?

Of course, you want your lead conversion rate to be high and your cancellation rate to be low. But it’s important to keep track of both because it will paint the most complete picture.

By comparing them side by side, you’re going to be able to see the rate in which you convert. Then you can use that to project roughly how many new clients you can expect to get over any given period of time doing what you’re doing. Then you can have a baseline when you try new things to raise that lead conversion rate.

As for finding this data, you can find it in your Google Analytics or turn to your CRM software. Anywhere you track or organize potential clients, you can track how effective your lead generation (and closure) is.

Wrap-Up

Remember that these stats are important because they not only show what all you’ve been able to accomplish, but they also let you project what you’ll be able to accomplish in the future.

And having a good idea of where your business is going is one of the most powerful tools you can have.

Numbers don’t lie—that’s why metrics are your business’s best friend. They take all of the guessing out of growth and tell you exactly how well your business is doing. And as you can see from the metrics above, there are all sorts of numbers that tell you helpful things about your business.

Then you can use all those numbers to paint a completely honest picture of your business.

And once you have that, you can start to make changes that you need to achieve growth. Then, you can see if you were able to do it by simply comparing your current numbers to your previous numbers.

It really is that simple, but it’s also really that powerful. You can impact your business’s success in real time, all by taking the time to figure out what success actually looks like. And although that includes money in your bank account, metrics show you that success goes so much further than that.

Track metrics and take control of your business. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

The post The Metrics that Matter for Your Business (And Where to Find Them) appeared first on DigitalMarketer.