The Marketing Metrics That You Might Be Missing

You put your best marketing foot forward. You take the time to craft awesome campaigns and send them to your customers and prospective customers. Then, the data comes back. You see the whole picture, or so you think. You round up the usual stats–opens, clicks, and conversions. Is that it? Are you overlooking some of the most important marketing metrics?

If you aren’t able to paint an entire journey landscape with the data you analyze, you are missing out on so many opportunities to learn and optimize your marketing efforts as well as simplify your own work.

Here are some overlooked metrics that you could easily pick up this week:

• Engaged readers: When it comes to content and web pages, you may already measure time spent, but this is not the best way to track engagement. You should be tracking who is reading for how long, but also make note of those that finish scrolling on your page. Why? Because those that finish reading your blog post or scroll all the way down your page are clearly more interested in what you have to offer. Bonus! Engaged customers are your best bet when it comes to conversion. Engaged consumers buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction according to Rosetta.  You can use google analytics to do this. Full instructions here.   

• Traffic source: So you send an email, it gets some clicks, and then you get some increased traffic. You figure that you can attribute the bump to your email campaign, but Sally over in social is also running a campaign that drives traffic to the same page as your email campaign. Were you tracking traffic source? If you were you would know which campaign each visitor came from.
  This is where UTM parameters come in handy. All you have to do is add them on to the end of your link that you put in the CTA in your email campaigns or in the link that is in Sally’s social campaign. The information from every visitor gets passed from the corresponding campaign to your analytics dashboard.

• Dwell Time: Mentioned first a couple years back, dwell time is the actual length of time that a visitor spends on your page before returning to the SERPs. It is used for SEO purposes most commonly, but it can also give you some key understandings about your customer when used in all facets of your marketing.
  Measuring Dwell time on a website can tell you if the content you are creating is relevant to the user that finds it. When you use it in conjunction with a heatmap, you can even tell which parts are more relevant than others. Not to mention, dwell time is a key indicator in how engaged your customers are, and by now you know that engagement leads to higher customer fidelity.

• Website visits: The total number of people who visit your website. You can track this statistic in a number of ways, including analyzing visitors by channel, or looking at an overview of all visitors. Examining this data will help you determine which channels are most effective to reach an interested audience.

• Subscriber List Growth Rate: By tracking the growth rate of your newsletter subscriber list, you’ll be able to ensure you’re continually feeding your funnel with new recipients. It’s a great way to determine the effectiveness of your email newsletter and make changes to better connect with your audience.

• Digitally-influenced sales: The percentage of sales that were influenced by the digital channels. It is useful to track in the long-term. If your digitally-influenced sales aren’t growing year after year, it’s a warning sign that you may need to rethink key strategy elements.

• Conversion Rate: Your website and email communications should be driving your customers to participate in form fills, pay for products and services, or conduct some other business transaction. Whatever your call to action is, tracking the recipients that followed it and determining the rate of customers that converted is key to understanding what marketing tactics work and which don’t.

• Resource cost: The average cost of a technological resource. It is useful to track how much of your budget is being used on a certain service or product. Once you’ve established the resource’s cost, you can begin to track sales or conversions to measure the resource’s usefulness.

• Project satisfaction: It’s key to send post-project surveys to your customers to identify areas of possible improvement. Collect all post-project surveys from the relevant business partners and establish an average overall satisfaction metric on a numeric scale.

Data isn’t sexy, but the things you can do with it are. Make sure you’re getting your claws into the best, most useful metrics because the lessons you learn from them could either lay the foundation for success or put the final nail in the coffin of failure.