Many elements help determine whether your marketing campaign is a big hit or a disappointing flop. It can be incredibly confusing to decide whether or not your content marketing efforts are truly worth the time, money, and effort. And while it’s revolutionary that businesses now have so much data at their fingertips, making sense of that data is another story.
For a standard marketing campaign, metrics roughly fall into two categories: primary and secondary. Secondary data or “fluff†is nice to know, but it doesn’t communicate any definite answers on whether a campaign is successful or not. Primary data includes the precise metricsOpens a new window you want to focus on – those that will give you “yes†or “no†answers to decide what needs tweaking in your campaign. In other words, all data is helpful and contributes to a greater understanding, but only certain kinds of data should get your attention and guide your decision-making.
Secondary Metrics
Let’s face it – We all love seeing a flood of new likes, follows, comments, or shares on our social media channels. It’s rewarding to see progress in our open rates, landing page views, or overall social reach. However, all of these metrics can become a distraction from your main objectives and goals. In the worst case scenario, they can throw you so far off track that you spend your days chasing followers and obsessing over things that don’t matter. Yes, it is generally good to observe open rates and aim to steadily increase them – but believing that this is all you need to do is what drives well-meaning marketers into the ground. These metrics can be addictive to track, but they’re too vague to provide the bigger insights you need. So what are the main metrics that matter most?
Primary Metrics
At the beginning of any marketing campaign, one question should reign supreme: What do we hope to achieve? It’s an obvious question, but oftentimes marketers struggle to identify a distinct answer. All businesses launch marketing campaigns to boost revenue and heighten brand awareness, both those are big-picture goals. For a successful marketing campaign, it’s crucial to have more specific objectives.
Marketing Channels
Obsessing over every social media metrics is overkill, but knowing what channels drive the most traffic is important. Tracking which avenues are driving traffic to landing pages (or wherever you want visitors to end up) helps you understand your demographic better. In addition, it shows you where to direct most of your efforts and where to back off.
Click Through Rate
Tracking click through rates (CTR) is the simplest way to start understanding your audience’s motivation. Certain elements of your campaign may generate higher CTRs. For example, one call to action may grab attention better than another. While it’s not the most specific metric, it will provide a general idea of how many people have a shot at converting to paying customers.
New Visitors/Returning Visitors
This is an eye-opening metric to track because it reveals repeat interest. Again, numbers can be deceiving. It’s better to have a handful of returning customers than a flood of one-time visitors who don’t truly support your brand. Tracking new and/or returning visitors helps you know whether the majority of your visitors are familiar with what you offer. If you see more returning visitors than you expected, it may be time to change content or add more relevant content.
User Demographics
You can’t effectively market products and services to a stranger. More importantly, you can’t develop a meaningful relationship with your audience if you have no idea who they are, where they’re from, their age, income, gender, interests, etc. Metrics that provide insights on your audience are useful. These may even include times of day your typical audience member is online. User demographics can help direct your marketing aims and tell you when to fire.
Session Duration/Bounce Rate
Session duration is the amount of time a visitor spends on your page. Bounce rateOpens a new window is the number of visitors who leave your page quickly without looking around much. These metrics are some of the strongest for measuring interest. If bounce rates are high and session duration is low, it’s a big indicator your page is lacking. Whether the page doesn’t have enough content, appears too salesy, or is poorly designed – you at least know that something has to change.
Sales/Signups
As we mentioned earlier, having a clear objective (not just a broad goal) is key for a successful marketing campaign. Thus you need to track the specific objective of your campaign, which is often sales. How many sales did the campaign directly create? If sales weren’t the objective, it may have been signups for an email list or program. If so, how many signups resulted? In other words, how many people took the action intended for this campaign?
Observing and understanding data trends is an important chunk of the marketing process. But without the ability to take specific actions based on these insights, your data isn’t truly serving you. Marketers need to master the art of separating specific pieces of data from the whole story. By perfecting this campaign cycle of launching, observing, tweaking, and post-campaign assessment, you can create a powerful, progressive marketing strategy that serves you for years to come.