Metrics take the guessing out of the effectiveness of marketing strategies and the measurement of the overall growth of your business.
It’s tempting to just look at revenue from month to month, but that doesn’t tell you where it comes from and what marketing approaches are the most effective.
There are dozens of metrics and each one has a specific purpose. So which ones should you focus on?
Here are some of the top marketing metrics to track and tips on how you can improve them.
Sales Revenue
Although this is the most important growth indicator to track, don’t just rely on grand totals. Look at where your revenue is coming from, especially if you are marketing on multiple platforms. Taking a closer look at this number may lead you to beef up your marketing in your weakest area or invest more time and energy into the area that gives you the most return.
You can also look at how promotions, discounts, and special offers affect sales by comparing sales generated during promotions to sales made without them.
Studies have shown that two-thirds of consumers have made unplanned purchases simply because there was a discount or coupon. If you haven’t tried running a promotion, this is a good tactic to try to see how it affects your sales.
Organic Traffic
The goal of any business is to have most of its traffic come from organic Internet searches. As a matter of fact, 61% of marketers say that growing their organic presence is their top priority. Organic traffic is ideal because the customer is seeking the business out rather than the business attempting to generate interest through advertising. This even benefits brick and mortar businesses because 88% of US consumers research online before they go to a store to make a purchase.
Add to this that this type of traffic is free and organic traffic is the premium traffic you want. If your organic traffic metric is low, you may need a major revamp of your SEO strategy. It’s not enough to just tuck a few keywords into your text or even your metadata and watch out for the stampede.
For effective SEO, you need to look at how much your visitors engage with your content, how long they stay on your site, how easy it is to navigate your pages, and a host of other considerations.
Search engines are more concerned than ever that the user finds your content useful and satisfying rather than just doing a direct match to keywords. Satisfaction is now the number one ranking factor in SEO.
Just adding a video can increase the chances of your page appearing on the first page of search results by 50%. Because over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices now, mobile-friendliness is becoming a more and more important aspect of user satisfaction and a prioritized ranking factor to search engines.
Traffic from Social Media
Having a strong social media presence not only helps with backlinks and page rank for your website but also creates traffic independent of organic search engine traffic. Social Media can seem like a major distraction and a poor use of your time, but this is only true if you use social media as a source of entertainment.
53% of consumers say they are more likely to consider a brand based on its transparency on social media. Ambitious, resourceful marketers become familiar with the algorithms of each major social media platform and use them to their advantage to grow their businesses.
You are probably already familiar with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but the second most downloaded app of 2019 is TikTok. TikTok has over 1 billion users and the top 50 creators have more followers than the populations of the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, and Australia combined.
Already, enterprising marketers are using the platform to promote their brands and generate traffic. This is because one viral video on this platform has the potential to outperform all of your other marketing efforts.
Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
Although overall traffic is an important metric, the traffic-to-lead ratio is even more important. Traffic only gets people to your website, but your traffic-to-lead ratio tells you how effective your page or site is at converting your traffic into potential customers.
Even millions of unique visitors would be meaningless if none of them converted to leads. If your traffic-to-lead ratio is low, you need to take a look at the copy on your home page or the efficiency of your website navigation and start tweaking things until you see this number improve. Studies show that informative articles increase conversion rates by 31%.
The same study shows that video increases conversion rates by 44%. You want a positive user experience and clear, easy-to-understand text with an engaging layout.
Conversion Rate of The Landing Page
Depending on your marketing approach, this metric might be different than your traffic-to-lead ratio. The home page of your website may not be your landing page, especially if you are doing pay-per-click campaigns directly to a landing page with sales copy. Most average landing pages have a conversion rate of around 1 to 3%.
If your landing page is getting a lot of traffic, but a low number of leads, you need to start A/B testing to see what individual changes make the most difference. You can try changing the colors, layout, the length of the copy, adding testimonials or reviews, etc. until you find the winning combination that gives you the biggest conversion rate.
Cost-Per-Lead
One reason this metric is vital is that if the revenue potential for one customer is less than the cost per lead, your business will consistently lose money no matter how much revenue you generate. For a small, home-based business, most of this cost will be in advertising. As for larger businesses, you have to take into account manpower and overhead as well.
One way to improve this metric, besides the methods already suggested, is with more effective advertising. Rather than create one ad and let it run, you want to A/B test multiple ads and even various versions of those ads until you find one that is the most effective.
You not only want to test the ad itself but also test various platforms and target audiences as well. You can do this testing with a low budget, then sink a larger amount of money once you’ve found the most effective ad.
Overall ROI
You may have a lot of irons in the fire for your marketing strategy which might include pay-per-click ads, social media ads, and even more traditional forms of advertising such as print ads and radio.
Although it is a good idea to track the effectiveness of each individual campaign, you also want to track your entire marketing campaign as a whole. This is known as Return On Investment (ROI). You can calculate ROI by taking your Sales Growth, subtracting your total cost of advertising, and then divide by your total cost of advertising. Only 21% of B2B companies claim to be successful at measuring the ROI from their content marketing.
This is the type of number you want to check each month so you can measure your progress and the overall effectiveness of your combined marketing efforts. Ideally, as your organic traffic and social media traffic increases, your ROI will increase even if you maintain the same advertising budget.
Wrapping Up
You don’t need a whole team of marketing analysts to pore over your data to keep your business running as profitable as possible. You just need to spend the time to take a good look at the metrics that tell you how your business is growing.
Make sure to check these metrics regularly so you can clearly see what you need to do to help your business grow to its full potential.
