[Webinar] Metrics & KPIs Every Marketer Should Track

Marketing metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) are specific numerical data that are calculated by every marketing team to measure the alignment of their growth with the goals to achieve. In other words, we can say they are used to check the performance of any set goal. Metrics can be related to content marketing, SEO progress, social media marketing, or reports of any online running advertisements of the organization depending upon the online marketing strategy.

Digital marketing managers generally have a lot of data available while creating an online marketing strategy. This data is often detailed and inter-related, which makes it a bit difficult to form a productive approach. However, every information will not be necessarily useful; you need to know what to measure, why to measure, and how to use it to make informed decisions about your online marketing.

Benefits Of Measuring Metrics And KPIs:

1. Enables you to use your digital marketing budget efficiently and allocate funds accurately among different campaigns and channels.
2. Using insights, you can set goals and expectations to achieve from a campaign.
3. You can have a check on what's going wrong for your campaigns if they are not working as desired and improve it by decoding a success formula.
4. If campaigns are working well, then, in that case, you know what should be continued.
5. Makes your sales activity more productive by improving your conversion rates and help you choose the right channels to reach your target audience.
6. Helps you make more effective campaign decisions. Therefore, it will help you improve your return on investment too.

Classification of Marketing Metrics

Marketing metrics can be classified into three categories:

• Traffic
• Conversion
• Revenue

These marketing metrics are sequential and represent the simplified flow of any marketing campaign.

• Traffic Metric

Traffic metrics measure the number of visitors that you are getting to your page or website. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which part of the site is working best or if there are any particular cycles, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a specific country.

Types of traffic metrics:

1. Total Visits

It measures the total number of visits that have been made to your webpage. It is the most basic and integral number that should be monitored and tracked over time. It will give you a basic idea of how successful the campaigns are at driving traffic to your webpage. You can follow these numbers after some specific periods to compare the performance. As a marketing manager, your goal should be to make this number better every time.

2. Website Traffic Sources

This metric tells you the source of the above mentioned total visits. It segments your web traffic depending upon different sources. It will help you to understand which channel is performing best for you by pinpointing sources with maximum traffic. You will have a fair idea of underperforming channels too so that you know which source needs attention. Some types of multiple sources that bring traffic to your sites are:

• Direct traffic: It includes visitors who have come to your website by typing your URL into their browser.

• Referral traffic: It comprises visitors that visit your site by clicking on a link from another website or webpage or blog.

• Organic search traffic: Visitors that discover your website by their search query on Google, Bing, or Yahoo are included in this category. Any click on your listing from SERP will be counted as organic search traffic.

• Social media traffic: Visitors arriving on your website from your social media platforms falls in this category.

3. Cost Per Click (CPC) And Click Through Rate (CTR)

CPC is defined as the cost paid by the ad generator to the search marketing platform like Google, every time an internet user clicks on your paid ad. CTR is the number that is going to determine the financial success of your paid search campaigns in relation to the cost of Ads (includes CPC) paid by you.

The cost of an ad is a whole different concept. It depends on several factors; some of them are:

• Choice of keyword or keyphrase: Different words have different CPC depending upon the popularity and demand of it in the market.

• Quality score: It is measured by the number of clicks advertiser receives on their ads per number of impressions. CTR somehow influences it. Higher the CTR, higher the quality score, lower is the CPC.

4. Mobile Traffic

Mobile internet has reached all-new levels. The statistics of internet users on mobile are much higher than the internet users on the desktop. Therefore, they deserve much more attention from digital marketers as they can open new doors for more excellent and more diverse revenue sources. It will be a loss to neglect mobile users because they are going to increase only in the coming years. Higher up your chances of increasing conversions with mobile users by understanding the type of content they are consuming.

Tip: Make your website mobile responsive.

5. Interactions Or Page Views Per Visit

This metric gives you an idea of how many actions people make on your site in one visit. By looking at how many actions a visitor takes and what these actions are, you can better understand their path to conversion. Look for the variables such as how many pages a user visits, how long they stay on an individual page, and what they do on each page (for example, leave a review or comment). The goal is to not only increase the number of interactions per visit but also to figure out which of these interactions helps in converting leads.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics means how you convert your traffic into leads then potential customers and ultimately the user. High conversion rates will bring sales and later profits.

Few of the conversion metrics are mentioned below:

1. Conversion Rate

It is the percentage of visitors on a website that completes the desired goal out of the total number of visitors. That desired goal can be subscribing to newsletters, filling a pop-up form, sales, buying a membership, download product, etc. A higher conversion rate indicates successful marketing and easy website flow and will bring sales. It will give you a clue that people like what you are selling and how you are selling.

2. Conversion Funnel Rate

It is a detailed version of the conversion rate metric. It determines the rate of which leads move through the marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is a filter where leads go through a process from lead received to converted. It is calculated as the percentage of the number of leads moved to the next stage in the funnel.

3. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

It is the most basic metric to measure and track the cost-effectiveness of your business marketing campaigns in generating new leads. It is the total cost involved in generating new leads by the total number of users.

For example, if your company spent $500 on a pay per click campaign and acquired 50 leads, then CPL would be $10.

The cost per lead metric acts as a data point to calculate the return on investment for your marketing campaigns. The aim should be to gather as many leads as possible through any campaign and reduce the cost per lead to increase the ROI.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate determines the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site without performing any action like a click. It is calculated as the total number of bounces divided by the total number of visits on a page. It helps identify the effectiveness of website content and design in case of bringing engagement. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing like poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.

5. Rate Of Returning Visitors

Returning visitors are the visitors that keep coming back to access more of what you are showcasing on your website. That means it gives the percentage of visitors who have returned to the site. Amount and kind of traffic a website draws is not enough to judge its popularity. One must keep in mind the rate of returning visitors too. Insights into the rate of returning visitors can give an idea about how you can improve your content to attract the returning site visitors to convert to leads finally and then sales.

Revenue Metrics

These are recurring revenue metrics that are derived from maintaining profitable customer relationships during the process of lead conversion.

Some revenue metrics are as follows:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost/Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

It is defined as the total cost spent on a customer to convince him to contribute to the revenue of the company. CPA includes both sales and advertisement/marketing cost spent till date to get the customer on board.

You might have a very low CPC or CPL, which means you are successful in getting customers to your website. But it is not necessary that the CPA will also perform well. Customers may come to your site but may not buy anything or help in any conversion. High CPA means there are very few customers who are paying for your service, and that number needs to be increased. So we can say CPA is linked to revenue on many bases.

Formula: CPA is expressed as (Total marketing and advertising cost divided/The number of customers paying for your service).

Every paid marketing channel is worth it only when it helps you bring down your CPA. In short, when you focus on the CPA, you'll be getting a complete picture on your campaign's success or failure.

2. Return On Investment

ROI is used to determine the profitability of any campaign, and it is the essential requirement of any business if they want to grow. Besides, it is also vital to study ROI metrics to remain stable in the fast-growing business market.

Formula: ROI is expressed as (Revenue - Investment/Investment) X 100

For example, CPA is $50, and the average revenue per user is less than 50$ then you have an unfavorable ROI, and that's alarming.

3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV measures the amount of gross profit that is generated from a customer over the entire time they do business with a company. It helps you understand what the total business is, a customer brings to the company throughout their lifetime.

Formula: It is expressed as (Gross margin (%) x Length of a lifetime in pay periods x Revenue per subscription period).

For example, if you are offering a service that requires subscription every 2 years and the revenue per subscription period is $500. So in their lifetime of 40 years, we can have 20 pay periods, and if we assume the gross margin as 50%, then customer lifetime value becomes $5000.

Conclusion

Metrics and KPIs give us a clear picture of how we are performing, which channel is performing well for us, and if there are any optimizations required in the current campaign. You can easily track the progress of your marketing campaigns with a proper understanding of metrics and KPIs.

Tip: Choose metrics wisely and don't randomly select them for any campaign.

Therefore, it is recommended that digital marketing managers should keep an eye on the required metrics for team growth.

Apart from these metrics, social media metrics are also very important for a good marketing strategy. Social media metrics like engagement, post reach, demographics are as crucial as any other metrics. These metrics will help to achieve the social media goal with ease and efficiency. Know and understand your audience and the content they like with reporting section of Statusbrew. Moreover, Statusbrew's content performance insights would also ease it out for you to strategize your marketing goal. You can try your 7 day free trial now!