Why Do In-Depth Marketing Metrics Matter?

Marketing metrics lay the groundwork for any successful marketing strategy.

Also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), they allow you to plan, measure, and optimize your activities. You’re able to make educated decisions, which are rooted in facts and figures.

But, there’s one issue. Selecting the right metrics across a multitude of channels can be tricky. They have to be telling and tangible, as well as make sense in a specific business context.

It’s not all about sales, brand awareness, and leads either— that’s just the surface. What you need is an in-depth approach, which successfully uncovers your strengths and weaknesses.

So, get ready to build an invaluable treasury of business intelligence. It holds the key to getting the most bang for your buck with your marketing.

Getting to the Bottom of It

The ocean of big data is getting vaster and analytics tools ever more sophisticated.

When developing campaigns, there’s little sense in relying on gut feeling. In fact, if you mean business, not even rudimentary tracking cuts it. You have to dig deeper than ever before.

We have all the resources at our disposal to make it happen. They let us closely observe how and if our marketing efforts translate into an improved bottom line.

Data is an essential ingredient that informs your planning and strategy deployment. You set realistic and measurable goals to organize your resources and structure campaigns.

You can rely on them to establish whether you’re going in the right direction or potentially wasting resources. This is nothing short of a game-changer on the level of decision-making.

The tricky thing, however, is there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Social media favors engagement, while PPC lives and dies by the clicks. As for SEO agencies tactics, they hinge on domain authority and ranking movements. You get the point already.

Marketing Metrics: From Theory to Practice

More often than not, it’s less-than-obvious where to dedicate our attention.

Email marketing, for instance, involves a heap of possible metrics.

The list includes:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Hard and soft bounces
• Unsubscribe rates
• Delivery rates

Open rates give a general idea of how you’re performing. This indicator tells you exactly how many people opened your email. However, you don’t know why they did or didn’t do that.

Employing additional metrics extracts deeper insights. You might discover that people not only failed to open but unsubscribed from your newsletter altogether. This is a red flag you would have to investigate further.

When it comes to websites, conversion rates are the main telltale sign. Poor results usually indicate one thing: faults with online user experience (UX).

Perhaps your call-to-action isn’t clear and compelling enough. Navigation options might be confusing and web design outdated. Whatever the underlying reason, you can’t ignore it.

Grasp the situational message and value that each metric holds.

A Holistic Overlook

Let’s now address another staple tactic, content marketing.

Most marketers focus on lead generation as end-all and be-all. Yet, this metric doesn’t tell us how many visitors convert and actually lead to making a purchase. And to stand any chance at optimizing content, we need to obtain more actionable data.

We can look at:

• Average session duration
• Pageviews
• Pages per session
• Bounce rates
• Social signals
• Percentage of new visitors

These points paint a more comprehensive picture of content marketing. Together, they enable you to pick up on the quality of interactions, not just their quantity. On the other hand, having tunnel vision would be a risky proposition.

A Multi-Faceted Approach to Tracking

Looking at a single metric tends to give you a false sense of success/failure.

Observing them in pairs of groups tends to provide less misleading information. For instance, having a lot of traffic flowing to your landing pages doesn’t account for much unless you’re able to convert it.

And to do that, you would need additional insights, such as where the traffic originates from. Demographics are of immense help as well.

The thing is that these days, you can never know too much about your customers. So, do yourself a favor and create a database of all customer accounts and prospects. Then, segment it properly to set the foundations for personalized, cross-channel marketing.

Try to find the right tool for marketing database reporting, which offers a complete and centralized view. Sureshot Command is worth considering, as it allows you to compare the quality of segments and detect trends and baselines.

The data quality metrics foster smarter campaigns. Moreover, data dashboards facilitate tracking and monitoring over time. It’s a win-win.

For Good Measure

Always follow the path data takes you on.

Refrain from favoring the indicators that are easy to track and quantify. Ditch various vanity metrics and prioritize those that tie into your market performance. Evaluate how they fit into the big picture— your sales funnel and marketing strategies.

In particular, pinpoint where people enter and leave the funnel. Conversions, for example, are the result of many incremental wins on your part. They could stem from navigation, content, engagement, interactions, or something else.

You should monitor these little moments and how they add up. This fine lens helps you demonstrate the effectiveness of campaigns to decision-makers.

Figure out what specific campaigns, channels, and assets generate the best result. Look for new ways to build on what you’ve achieved. If you fall short of your main objectives, pull a break.

Get back to the drawing board and carry out course-correction.

Remember that marketing fine-tuning is an ongoing acidity, which is never really done. It’s time to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and outpace the competition.

Step up Your Marketing Game

Picking suitable marketing metrics for each campaign and channel you use is a daunting task.

You have to understand the “why” behind your decisions and keep an eye on the business context too. It’s also necessary to avoid approaching surface-level metrics in isolation.

So, put a system of data collection, monitoring, and analysis in place. Gather as much evidence and details as possible. Integrate them across all stages, from planning to execution and back.

Make sure to learn from your mistakes and shortcomings. Learn to tackle unpredictability and uncertainty that plague marketing activities head-on.

Following these steps, you should be able to smartly allocate your resources where they make the most impact. It’s time to boost your competitive intelligence and take your tracking efforts to the next level.

Feel free to contact us in case you need cloud-based marketing technology. We can help you supercharge your strategy and thrive in a data-driven economy.