Understanding and tracking key marketing metrics helps businesses and organizations analyze and improve their tactics to support them in reaching their goals. To track them, you must first understand what they mean. Below is an in-depth list and explanation of the top marketing metrics for a variety of areas and platforms.
Overall Brand Metrics and Business Development Metrics These metrics focus on your overall brand identity. They focus on how business is acquired, how they flow through your sales funnel and their relationship with your business.
- Brand Awareness: How familiar your audiences are with your brand’s product or service.
- Business Development: Is your hustle of meeting and networking paying off – how many new connections per a given amount of time do you have?
- Client Acquisition Cost: How much did it cost you to earn one customer.
- Return on Investment: How much profit was generated in comparison to what was spent on marketing.
- Growth: What does your growth over time look like?
- Conversion Rate: The % of whatever action resulted in a desired action (example: a landing page or a purchase button).
- Leads Generated: The raw number of leads brought in by marketing.
- Customer Lifetime Value: How much revenue you will generate per client over their lifetime.
- Customer Satisfaction: If your client is happy, and you continue to keep them in your marketing funnel because they are pleased with your work, it is worth knowing if they are satisfied to keep them there.
Website Metrics If you have a website, which you should, these metrics will tell you important information about the who, what, when, and where of traffic on your site.
- Total Users: The total number of visits in a given amount of time.
- Acquisition: Website traffic that is referred to your site via another source (a search engine like Google, a third-party website referral like Yelp, your social media platforms, a news media site, etc.).
- Direct Acquisition: Traffic that came to your site directly by typing in your website address.
- Paid Traffic: Results from digital ads you have placed to drive traffic to your site.
- Click-Through Rate: Search engine results that lead to your site which result in a click to your site.
- Time on Page: The average amount of time visitors spends on a given page on your site.
- Bounce Rate: At what rate people click off your site after viewing X number of pages.
- Downloads: The number of downloads from your site (templates, e-books, etc.)
- Pageviews Per Session: The number of pages a visitor views before leaving your site.
- Pageviews: The total number of pages that have been viewed on your site.
SEO Metrics Much like the metrics above, this information tells you how relevant and how competitive your site is in the world of Search – like Google and Bing, for example.
- Domain Authority: A search engine ranking score that predicts how well your site will rank on search engines.
- Page Authority: A search engine ranking score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines.
- Keyword Rankings: How high a specific keyword from your page ranks search engines.
- Search Traffic: The amount of referral traffic that is being sent to your sites via search engines.
- Total Backlinks: The number of links directing audiences to your website from other sites.
Email Marketing Metrics If you are spending the time trying to market your services or products via email or an e-newsletter, below are the metrics you’ll want to understand and track. If you are using a popular platform like MailChimp or Constant Contact, these metrics are fairly easy to acquire.
- Signups: The number of people who have signed into your email list.
- Subscribers: The number of people who subscribe to your email list.
- Engagement: How people are engaging with your email/e-newsletter (clicks and opens).
- Opens: The number of people who opened your email.
- Clicks: The number of people who clicked a link in your email.
- Bounce Rate: The number of emails that, for whatever reason, were not delivered.
- Forwards: The number of times your email was forwarded to someone else.
Social Media Metrics Although these vary per platform, below are the heavy hitters of the social media metrics. It’s important to not just focus on page likes and followers; digging deeper will give you a better sense of success and areas which need focus and refinement.
- Page Likes/Followers: The number of new people who have liked/followed your page.
- Page Views: The number of times your page has been viewed by logged in and logged out people.
- Posts Shared: The number of posts shared during a given time period.
- Paid/Organic Growth: How many likes you receive as a result of paid Ads vs organic (non-paid).
- Reach: The number of people who were served any activity from your page.
- Engagement: Engagement is defined as post clicks, likes, shares and comments. When people do one of these actions.
- Impressions: The number of times users saw your post or story.
Media Coverage These metrics may take a bit of time to research, but it is worth it. Tracking these will help you determine what stories seem to have value to the media world, and which may not.
- Press Releases: How many releases that were distributed about your brand, products, service, etc.
- News Showcase: Where your information was shared (broadcast tv, radio, online articles and mentions, newspapers, publications).
- Contact Rate: How many times were you contacted as a result of your efforts to secure coverage?
Do not let this list of potential metrics overwhelm you. It should serve as a starting point which you can build upon. If much of your energy goes towards website and social, focus on tracking the metrics there first. As you familiarize yourself with these and have a system in place to track, start adding in other focus areas. Happy tracking!