Marketing Metrics That Matter

When you put a lot of time and effort into creating a marketing campaign, you want to know whether or not it performs well. Understanding your campaign ROI can help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and gain insight into improvements you might want to make to future campaigns.

The first step is to determine the benchmarks you will use to measure the performance of all your digital campaigns. Here are a few to consider:

Online Metrics:

Conversion Rate. This is perhaps the most important metric and it is defined by the goal of your campaign. Conversions are often, but do not have to be, sales. Think of your call-to-action in your email or landing page – what is the purpose? Do you want people to download a whitepaper, sign up for an event, volunteer to work, or become a new follower on social media? Taking action on any of those calls-to-action is considered a conversion. You need to be able to show that your campaigns are delivering results. Here’s how to calculate your email conversion rate:

Landing page conversion is calculated a bit differently:

Social Media Reach. Use the free internal tools within the various social media platforms, or in your email service provider (if they offer that feature) to measure how your posts perform. Before a campaign begins, establish what is most important to you — is it clicks, shares, likes, engagement, follower growth, event responses, conversions? It’s important to keep an eye on these numbers for each campaign you run on social media so you can determine what resonates best with your audience.

Paid advertising on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will yield very granular reports for any campaign you run. If you have Google Analytics enabled, you can see referrals, sessions, and conversions for more in-depth knowledge.

Web Traffic.The main datasets to watch on your website fall into one of two categories: sessions or channel.

• Sessions. Track the total number of sessions, and within that, how many visitors are new, how long the visitor stays on your website, and their bounce rate (the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages, but then leave without clicking anywhere else on your website).
• Channel. Track where your new visitors originate. Is it organic search? Paid? Social media? Do you work with affiliates? This information indicates where you should allocate more (or less) money based on how each channel wins new traffic and customers.

Email Marketing Metrics

List Growth. Before starting a new email campaign, calculate your monthly list growth so you have a baseline of average gain. Then, as you ramp up your campaign, use this metric as a way to see if you are producing content and promotions interesting enough to increase the rate at which you are growing your list. Here’s how to calculate your list growth rate:

Non-Openers. As a metric, this group is often overlooked, even though they present great opportunity. Non-openers are the low-hanging fruit of the email marketing world. Simply select an email, segment out the non-openers, and then resend the same email (with a different subject line). We find that resending emails can deliver open rates of up to 50%.

Advanced Email Opens & Clicks. Email opens and clicks do not exist in a vacuum; they work together and with other metrics. Think of them as a way to measure your email success as a whole. High opens mean you have a recognizable “From” address and an interesting subject line. But what if you have high opens and low clicks? That can indicate that there’s disconnect between your subject line and message content, or the message content isn’t engaging or persuasive enough.

Unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are worth mentioning on this list because contrary to popular belief, they are a GOOD thing. Decreasing the number of uninterested people on your list allows for higher engagement and an overall healthier list. Additionally, this is a good metric to keep your eye on if you begin a new campaign. Low unsubscribes mean your topics interest your audience; high unsubscribes mean that maybe that topic doesn’t fit the expectations of your readers. Use this formula to calculate your unsubscribe rate:

While data and metrics aren’t the most glamorous part of digital marketing, they are the only true measure of campaign performance and ROI. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions about which strategies work best, which may need improving and which techniques are just not delivering for you. Given all the great tools available today, chances are you don’t even have to do math – just aggregate all the data in once place to see overall performance of all your online channels

This article originally appeared on iContact and has been republished with permission.