One of my favorite sayings is, “What gets measured gets managed.” This quote from Peter Drucker was in relation to management principles, but it also applies quite nicely to your marketing. That’s one of the things I love most about digital marketing: the ability to measure its effectiveness.
There are key performance indicators that every business should be tracking to determine how well their marketing is working. What these metrics are and how often you look at them is going to vary greatly depending on your individual business, your customer, the industry you’re in, as well as your goals.
Speaking of goals, you should always start by first determining what your goals are. A goal is like a destination on a map. If you know where you’re going and you know what the landmarks are along the way, you can tell when you’re getting closer to your goal. Your metrics are like those landmarks.
I am going to share five meaningful metrics that you should be measuring at minimum, on a monthly basis.
Unique visitors
You need to have optics on how many individual people are visiting your website. Is the number of potential customers coming to your website growing or decreasing? In order to understand the direction you’re heading, you should also have a month-over-month comparison as well as year-over-year. While many businesses may have month-over-month downturns for a number of reasons (including seasonality), it’s important to compare the same time period over the previous year.
Depending on your specific business needs you can also create filtered views in Google Analytics to show only the most relevant stats. For instance, you could have a filtered view that removes visitors in other countries or other states. Maybe you want to filter out your blog traffic to see if the traffic to your core pages is increasing.
Conversions
A conversion in digital marketing refers to a trackable action that you want the user to take on your website. This could be filling out a request for quote form, a contact us form, downloading a resource, joining a newsletter, taking a quiz, viewing a coupon code, making a purchase or even watching a video. If you can think of another action you want your customer take, chances are you can track it as a conversion.
Do you want to track when a user gets directions to your store, views a key page on your website or even uses the click to call feature on your mobile optimized website? You can do that!
When we take over a client from another marketing agency we find that most of the time they aren’t tracking many of the important metrics. It’s critical that you have these properly configured goals from the beginning so you can make decisions based on good data. The good news? Google Analytics allows you to set up twenty of these different “goals” at no charge.
Phone calls
Having a potential customer call them on the phone is the most desired action for many local businesses. They understand that this level of engagement will convert at a much higher rate than people submitting a contact form and moving on to research other vendors. Yet the vast majority of businesses aren’t tracking their calls.
When I say tracking their calls, I’m not just talking about the number of calls each week or month, but which media channels are generating these calls. If you’re running ad campaigns, you’ll want to know if they’re producing phone calls. Is organic search driving phone calls? How many calls were driven by social media or that paid campaign? How can you optimize where you’re investing your time and money if you’re not tracking this?
Engagement
Engagement will be defined differently for each business. It’s probably going to be a combination of metrics that give context to how engaged your users are or how engaging the content on your website is. These can be metrics like time spent on your website, bounce rate, video play time, scroll depth, percent of returning visitors, number of pages visited and a number of other factors.
Revenue
If you have an online e-commerce store, you can set up e-commerce tracking that allows you to pull in data from each sale. This will allow you to see how much revenue is being generated by each marketing channel. Which channels produce the highest number of sales, average sale amount by channel, which products people purchased, as well as the devices people are using to make these purchases can all be tracked.
However, if your sales aren’t made directly through your website, it can be much more challenging to tie revenue to the specific metrics. In the industry, we refer to this as the attribution gap. We’ve developed some pretty cool ways of being able to close this attribution gap, but it often requires advanced integration with your CRM (Client Relationship Manager) software or other manual workarounds that can help as well.
I hope you’ll utilize this information I’ve shared with you and start tracking these metrics. They can mean the difference between the success or failure of your business. When you’re spending time and money on marketing it’s very important that you have a plan in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
Kevin Getch is the founder, CEO and director of digital strategy of Vancouver-based Webfor. He can be reached at Kevin@webfor.com.
