Choosing the Marketing Metrics to Power Your Campaigns and Grow Your Audience
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To gauge the success of your marketing campaign you must choose what results to measure and what constitutes success in the field your business operates in. You need to collect data about your campaigns and the resulting responses and activity from your audience. These marketing metrics play a vital role in optimizing both your marketing channels and the product or service you offer.
The goal of every marketing campaign is to grow the audience of the advertised product and convert visitors into customers who add value to your business.
What constitutes a valuable interaction with your business will vary depending on your industry and how your product is monetized. Choosing the right marketing metric is vital to ensuring your marketing resources are allocated optimally, rather than wasted on the wrong audience or promoting interactions that do not benefit you.
The investment you make into collecting and analyzing marketing metrics should result in both a growing audience and a growing understanding of that audience.
By paying attention to carefully chosen, well-tuned metrics, you can focus on the marketing channels that are providing the best results, and tune those channels and your product based on your customers’ reactions.
What are marketing metrics?
Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns allows you to modify them to better reach your intended audience and discover new audiences. Monitoring feedback from users who have discovered your product through campaigns allows you to ensure their expectations have been met once they have been converted to customers.
Sources of marketing metrics
Marketing metrics are collected from a number of sources, including:
| Source | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Website analytics | Analytics collected through web analytics platforms from visitors to websites and through online advertising campaigns. |
| Mobile apps (including mobile attribution) | Data provided through mobile applications, including interactions that can be attributed to individual users. |
| Email analytics | Feedback from emails, including whether an email has been delivered, whether it was opened, and whether links in the email were followed. |
| Product analytics | Similar to the data provided from mobile apps, measure the interactions of your customers in product-specific ways. |
| In-house data sources | In-house data collection methods and services that can be combined with other marketing metrics to improve your insights. |
Marketing metrics and the marketing funnel
The marketing funnel is a representation of a potential customer’s journey from being exposed to your product through advertising to becoming a paying customer.
Marketing funnels must be regularly adjusted based on feedback from your audience. This ensures that the resources invested in maintaining them are not wasted and the right growth strategy is being implemented.
Marketing metrics inform the decisions you will make about your marketing channels. Effective marketing often requires a significant investment, so it is important to base these decisions on the metrics that matter to your business.
Types of marketing metrics
The best metrics to measure a profitable interaction for your business are unique to you. By becoming familiar with the types of metrics other online businesses and marketers measure, you will be able to identify which metrics are likely to be the ideal indicators of a successful marketing campaign for your own product.
There are two metrics that are universal to any marketing campaign:
| Marketing metric | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Conversions | A conversion is when a visitor is converted to a customer after being exposed to one of your marketing channels. |
| CLV (customer lifetime value) | The value of a customer. It’s the amount the customer has spent or is likely to spend in total, minus the cost of acquiring them. |
All marketing campaigns aim to convert their audience into valuable customers, and every business must weigh the lifetime profit gained from their customers against the total cost of acquiring them.
Key marketing metrics—cost/consumption based
Online advertising platforms profit by running advertisements that are displayed to end users as they browse the internet. To do this, they must monitor how, when, and why your marketing content is interacted with.
These key metrics are usually made available to you through the online advertising platforms themselves – it’s the data used to measure the performance of your advertising content.
| Key marketing metric | Meaning |
|---|---|
| CPM (cost per mille) | The cost per thousand ad impressions (i.e. times your ad was displayed on screen). These are generally billed in bulk. Also known as CPT (cost per thousand). |
| CPV (cost per view) | The cost per time your video ad was played. |
| CPС (cost per click) | The cost per time someone clicked on your ad. |
| CPL (cost per like) | Specific to social media marketing metrics, the cost per like/positive interaction. |
| CTR (click-through rate) | The number of times your ad was clicked on, divided by the total number of times it was displayed. |
| CPA (cost per action) | Rather than pricing based on clicks, the cost per profitable action, like a purchase or a subscription. |
While these metrics are primarily measured by online advertisers so that they can bill you, you can extract your own value from these basic metrics. Seeing how visible your marketing campaign is, and whether that visibility converts to people clicking on your ads, can provide insight into how well your campaign is performing with your target audience.
Product-specific/tailored metrics
While the above key marketing metrics are useful measures of campaign performance, they are not universal. They may not accurately represent the success of your campaign if that success cannot be measured based on views/clicks alone.
Consider how your marketing campaign operates, the actions you wish for those exposed to take, and how those actions can be measured. Product-specific metrics and metrics that reflect real-world success with your customer demographic are arguably the most important and relevant metrics.
| Marketed product | Relevant metrics / user actions |
|---|---|
| Building an app? | Number of downloads and/or in-app interactions. |
| Sending an email newsletter? | Number of new subscribers vs. unsubscribes. |
| Running a blog? | Number of visits, time spent on page. Content marketing metrics also measure backlinks, click-throughs, and social shares. |
| Promoting a brand? | Number of followers, brand mentions, sales. |
| Holding an event (online or offline)? | Bookings, attendance, how many people left early. |
| Selling a physical product? | Sales, product reviews, returns/refunds. |
| Running SaaS? | Monthly subscriptions, service usage, marketing opt-outs. |
By identifying the actions you want your customers to take and the marketing channels that are leading to those actions occurring, you can ensure your marketing budget is spent on the channels that provide the best outcomes.
Not coincidentally, the metrics above all in one way or another measure customer satisfaction, which has been identified as one of the most important metrics for indicating the success of a product and the marketing campaign behind it.
Growth metrics
Satisfied customers encourage growth. If you can retain your existing customers and keep your product up to date with their demands, they will, in turn, attract new customers via word of mouth, while being less likely to leave you for a competing product.
This runs somewhat contrary to focusing on raw sign-up numbers, ad impressions, and clicks. Customer satisfaction is also more difficult to measure, so you must identify what it is about your product that is retaining your users, so those product attributes can be enhanced and promoted to potential new users.
This requires a re-think of the traditional marketing funnel, with a focus on user retention and a conscious avoidance of meaningless growth. Avoid celebrating the success of a metric that doesn’t actually translate to tangible success for your business.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that indicates the prevailing customer sentiment. It is popular due to its simplicity and potential impact. It calculates a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction from a user’s response to a simple question: On a scale of 1-10, how likely are they to recommend your product to others?
Any metric can be easily misused to misrepresent the reality behind the numbers, intentionally or unintentionally. You must understand the process used to create your NPS metric and ensure the question asked of the customer, and the feedback received, is properly interpreted and applied.
Measuring metrics
The data behind these metrics exists whether you choose to record and measure them or not. If you don’t measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns or learn what it is that drives your customers to your product, you are wasting valuable data that could be used to create actionable, profitable insights.
Collecting and analyzing the wrong metrics can paint an inaccurate picture of what is behind the triumph of a particular marketing campaign and give a false sense of success—causing resources to be mis-allocated and wasted. You may be paying for marketing channels that do not yield real results, even though they are scoring highly on a per-view or per-click basis.
There may also be channels driving the growth of your product that you have not identified or fully utilized. Evangelical users who are enamored with a particular feature of your service may already be extolling it to new customers. If you are not engaged with your users and how they are using and talking about your product, you cannot focus on ensuring you are ahead of the competition in improving those areas.
Identifying, measuring, and analyzing the right marketing metrics provides the basis for ongoing, targeted, and effective marketing campaigns.
Sustaining growth with effective marketing campaigns
Identifying the metrics that matter to your business is the key to optimizing your marketing channels. Mighty Digital are growth marketing experts who will work with you to understand your business and your customers. Our growth team will help you identify the metrics most valuable to your business and the marketing channels that reach your intended audience.
Growth is best achieved by understanding your audience. Marketing metrics provide insight into which of your marketing channels your new users are most responsive to. In conjunction with tools such as mobile attribution, customer data platforms (CDPs), and an understanding of your high-value users, a growth strategy can be built that fully exploits the data you collect and promotes the benefits of your product to maximum effect.
