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The business world loves numbers. For the corporate worker, anything that can’t be measured in percentages and returns is not worth time and effort. Return-on-Investment (ROI) is one of the factors placed on a higher level of importance, especially when we’re talking performance and income success.
The same is very much true for marketing, which is a big driver for sales in any business. With the growth of the digital marketing trend, we are bombarded with countless metrics, like the famous “engagement rate” and reach. However, as fancy as these words sound, they do a lousy job at painting a clear picture of how well your strategy is going.
With the hundreds of metrics we are asked to analyze on a monthly basis, it’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed.
How do you know which ones matter? We filtered out the metrics you need to understand versus those that are better off as a side note.
#1. Cost-Per-Lead
Leads are valuable to every business, When you create your online platform, whether it be website or social media, one of your goals is to gather leads. Some incorporate this into their landing pages and websites, others invest in plugins such as a LinkedIn lead generation tool like linkedprospect.com.
As such, your team needs to evaluate how much you’re spending to get each lead. One indication of a good strategy is if each lead translates to a higher return over its cost.
#2. Monthly New and Returning Visitors
Returning website visitors point out that you put up valuable content.
When marketing your brand, one of the worst you can do is feed an echo chamber, and stop at that. Monitoring your new visitors will help you gauge the effectivity of your content in generating new and maintaining old customers.
#3. Lead-To-Close Ratio
At this point, we’re familiar with leads and how significant these are to marketing. Additionally, another metric that plays a huge role is the lead-to-close ratio, or the percentage of leads that convert into sales (hence, close).
#4. Bounce Rate
What your audience does on your platform matters. Bounce rate tells you the number of people who visit your site and exit almost instantaneously.
If your consumers visit and close the browser window without any meaningful action, it’s a sign that you might need to do a bit of content strategy revamping.
#5. Customer Lifetime Value
Much like any business offline, retaining customers is an in important task for every digital marketer. Old customers are just as important as new customers. When you build your relationship with your consumers, you generate consistent profit after the initial sale.
For this reason, measuring your Customer Lifetime Value plays a huge role in evaluating your ROI.
#6. Cost-Per-Acquisition
Your Cost-Per-Acquistion is the rate you spend for every successful sale. Not only will this help determine whether you’re putting your budget in the right places, but it can likewise back-up any decision you might want to make regarding your marketing efforts — whether it’s to cut or increase budget.
#7. Conversion Rates Per Channel
A marketing plan that crosses several platforms — website, social media, email — is not only expensive, but also tedious. It’s crucial to measure which of these channels generate the most traffic, so you can pinpoint where to focus your strongest campaigns.
#8. Total Site Visits
Evaluating your total site visits will give you a bird’s eye view of how your overall channel is doing. Ideally, this rate should be growing consistently. Otherwise, you’ll need to spend some time figuring out what might be causing the slump.
#9. Traffic by Channel
Once you find that your site visits aren’t performing well, the next step is to check which pages are contributing to the downward curve.
Measuring your Traffic by Channel is useful when you want to redesign your content and see which ones from your current execution work best.
#10. Total Conversions
Otherwise known as the ultimate success metric for every marketer, your Total Conversions rate show you if you’re doing well in achieving your marketing goals — whether it's to close a sale, gather visitors, or generate leads.
Conclusion
Crafting your monthly or quarterly report is tedious, and truthfully, no one enjoys the task. But it’s good to keep in mind that executing marketing strategies is a game of trial and error. It’s the concrete numbers that tell you which efforts are effective and which ones need improvement.
Numbers are well-loved in the business industry, and for good reason. Ultimately, your digital marketing strategy is only as good as the value it brings back to you.