Have you ever heard the saying, “baking is a science, while cooking is an art?”
The premise is that there’s not much of a margin for error when baking – it’s important to measure everything accurately. Get one little thing wrong, and you can mess up the taste, texture or consistency of your recipe.
Marketing is much the same as baking. Measuring a range of ingredients involved in your marketing process is essential to ensure you get the results you are after!
But how do you choose the right metrics to measure to begin with, let alone understand how they work together to affect the success of your business?
That’s what we will tackle today. Read on to find out why it’s so vital to measure your marketing efforts, and get my top five tips on where to start.
Why Your Digital Marketing Metrics Are Important
Why Measuring Your Marketing Is Important
Let’s roll with the baking analogy above. Imagine you are having a lazy day and decide to attempt to bake something new. But you can’t be bothered measuring your ingredients properly, so you just throw it all together, hoping it will work.
Unless you get really lucky, your final product is unlikely to come out as you intended. It may be downright inedible, which means you’ve wasted your time and money.
Or maybe by some random chance it came out even better than you hoped – it’s the best cake you ever made! How will you ever recreate it if you didn’t accurately measure or record the ingredients that went into it? That success will be very difficult to replicate.
This is how it works with digital marketing metrics – but on a much more complicated scale than home baking!
What Does Measuring Do?
Measuring and analysing takes the guesswork out of your marketing efforts. With time and practice, you will be able to see precisely what is working and what’s not. You will see where your marketing money is going to waste and where you should invest more of it to maximise your success.
By measuring a wide range of metrics from all your digital marketing channels, you can connect the dots and find out how to improve your return on investment (ROI), save money, grow faster, and gain valuable insight into your audience and customers.
5 Tips to Measure Your Digital Marketing Metrics Now
If you are just getting started with measuring your marketing data, it can feel overwhelming. There are hundreds of possible data points to dive into, so where to start and how many to track?
The answer is to keep it simple and start small. Collect only the information that will give you the unique insight your business needs. Your overall marketing strategy can help you decide what that information is.
Here are five key areas to consider:
1. Analytics from your website
As the hub of your marketing efforts, you need to make sure your website is operating optimally. How many visitors come to your site every day/week/month? How are they arriving at your site (i.e. from Google, social media etc.)? What can you learn about your site visitors? How long do they stay on your site, and what pages do they tend to remain on the longest?
Whether you are selling directly from your site or not, you also need to look at conversions. If the goal of your site is to have customers contact you, sign up to your email list, or make a purchase, how often does this happen?
Your website has a fascinating story to tell. The insights you learn from analysing your website data show you exactly where you need to improve or alter your digital marketing efforts.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to get all this info for free using Google Analytics.
2. Insights from social media platforms
There’s much more to your social media metrics than the number of followers you have and the amount of likes. Although these things are part of the picture, you should be looking at how people are interacting with and talking about your brand.
What kind of posts do well? Is one platform more successful than another? Which sends the most people to your website? Which content gets the most shares?
Consider metrics like reach, engagement, influence, and share of voice.
Each platform typically has its own comprehensive tools to help you measure and understand your metrics, although there are specialised options available that can help you dive a little deeper.
3. Email Metrics
Did you know that email marketing has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel? But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to keep track of how it’s going. Email still needs to be optimised and tweaked to ensure you are using it optimally.
Look at things like clickthrough rate, conversion rate, list growth rate, sharing/forward rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Understand where your subscribers are coming from (e.g. website, social media) and how engaged they are with your brand.
Because email can be personalised and targeted, all these metrics are particularly useful in boosting your digital marketing success!
4. Conversion
There are so many different conversion rates you could opt to track. You don’t have to measure all of them. Just choose the ones most relevant to your current strategy.
One of the most critical conversion metrics is your cost per conversion. This summarises how much it costs you in marketing dollars to make a sale.
You will also want to know your overall conversion rate, as in how many visitors turn into buyers and paying customers. You can calculate this by taking the number of completed conversions and dividing it by the total number of website visitors.
5. Sales Revenue
Last but never least – this is the number you are dying to know! How much money are you making? How has this grown (or decreased) over weeks or months? What products or services are selling well, and to whom?
Having a system like Xero in place helps you to track your financial metrics. At a glance you can check your profits, revenue, costs and so much more.
Your digital marketing metrics tell you a story unique to your business. They help you understand your audience and create a better journey for your customers, ultimately leading to more success for your business! But surprisingly, 74% of marketers cannot properly measure the impact of their marketing efforts on their business.
Get ahead of them by learning the story told by your metrics today.
And if you need help nailing those marketing metrics, jump on a discovery call with me today!
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