The Top Metrics to Evaluate Marketing Campaigns
Your marketing campaign metrics serve as the golden compass that guides your brand’s success. No matter the strategy, it’s crucial to identify and track key metrics and performance indicators to ensure business goals are met. In this way, effective marketing is at times less of an intuitive process and more of a scientific discipline driven by facts and figures.
Marketing metrics vary according to a brand’s needs and priorities, so it is important to constantly evaluate the performance of your campaigns and refocus on various metrics as required. In this article, we share expert tips for identifying and capturing the most impactful metrics for your business.
Understanding Marketing Metrics
Marketing metrics refer to the data that is used to effectively monitor the progress of specific marketing campaigns. Marketing metrics complement a comprehensive strategy, as they ensure accountability to both long-term success and key business objectives.
Selecting Relevant Metrics
Choosing the right marketing performance metrics for your strategy depends on two critical factors: your goals and focus. These factors help you shortlist the metrics required to drive the desired results for your brand without going off-track. As such, you can allocate the right amount of resources and effort for cost-effective results.
Your brand should focus on specific metrics that progress toward a business goal. Digital marketing metrics should be measurable, achievable, and specific (i.e., achieving X amount of Y within Z time frame). You should divide goals into smaller and more doable milestones for complex marketing objectives. For instance, if one of your brand goals lies in boosting the number of signups for your customer loyalty program, it is important to break down the process into key steps, such as increasing the customer value for your existing buyers and streamlining the process for signing up for the program.
The Top Metrics To Consider
While every brand implements a unique combination of goals toward achieving marketing success, there are some metrics applicable in almost every scenario. The following metrics are some of the top metrics for guiding and achieving your marketing goals.
Marketing Costs
It is important to calculate the cost of your marketing efforts to gain an accurate assessment of your overall profitability. Costs may come in various forms, including cost per lead, cost per conversion, and cost per customer acquisition. For example, if your brand runs a $1,000 mobile app campaign that achieves 50 leads, you invest in $20 cost per lead.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Your marketing ROI provides the data to back up the effectiveness and viability of any marketing initiative. There are multiple methods of measuring your marketing ROI depending on the groups of prospects involved, channels monitored, and project scale/complexity.
An organized assessment of ROI provides your marketing campaigns with multiple benefits, such as balancing your budget, balancing omnichannel deliverables, and guiding competitor analysis. Additionally, one of the most business-critical uses of ROI involves justifying creative projects and innovations. ROI helps you determine the practicality of a marketing concept or idea. Rather than rejecting or accepting a team member’s proposal based on opinion, you can tap on the available ROI metrics to make decisions in the best interest of your brand.
Website Traffic
A website is integral for sustaining an effective and engaging digital marketing campaign. Analyzing your website traffic helps you identify the number of site visitors, how long they stay on each page, and the channels from which they access your site, such as social media, or email marketing links.
Understanding these metrics enables you to build more responsive web strategies to increase traction without guesswork. Google Analytics and SemRush are two popular tools applied by businesses for comprehensive tracking of web page performance.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Returning customers tend to spend 67% more than new buyers. As such, CLV is a powerful metric for assessing your brand’s effectiveness in converting loyal customers for long-term marketing success. You can calculate your CLV by multiplying customer value (average value of sale multiplied by the average number of transactions) with the average customer lifespan (specifically, how long they remain an active customer of your business).
How to Determine if a Marketing Campaign is Successful
Essentially, the success of your marketing campaign depends on targeted outcomes and meeting them based on relevant key performance metrics. You can achieve this by the values of your marketing campaign performance metrics with benchmarks based on industry, communication channels, and other niche categories. Competitor comparison tools (e.g., SemRush), social media analytics sites (e.g., Hootsuite), and marketing agencies offer reliable sources of data to help you benchmark your performance based on real-world standards.
Boost Your Marketing Success With Relevant Metrics
The process of selecting relevant metrics for your marketing campaigns relies on continuous monitoring and timely data reviews. Ultimately, your marketing metrics are a living document that should adapt in response to the latest customer trends, industry practices, channels, and business priorities. Through consistent monitoring, you can prepare against volatile market solutions and maintain robust control over your marketing trajectory.
