If your team thinks of their marketing goals as their north star, then metrics are the components inside your compass.
Marketing metrics help teams prove the effectiveness of their campaigns. By plugging relevant marketing metrics into various goals and KPIs, your initiatives will be clearly oriented toward well-defined, valuable goals. Depending on your chosen marketing metrics, they can help you measure your campaign across channels using a variety of different dimensions – such as brand value or overall revenue.
However, there are many metrics that marketers need to track. Finding the right ones to focus on can be an arduous process. To make your research a little easier, we’ve put together a list of 35 highly valuable metrics for you to review.
The Best Metrics for Marketers to Focus On
Don’t have time to read the whole list? Here’s a shortlist of metrics to consider when you’re putting campaigns together.
Brand awareness
Customer engagement
Conversion rate
Clickthrough Rate
Cost per Lead
Marketing Qualified Leads
Sales Qualified Leads
ROI
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Types of Marketing Metrics
Web & SEO Metrics
In this section, we’ll break down several marketing metrics pertaining to six key media channels: Web & SEO metrics, branding metrics, email metrics, social media metrics, pay-per-click metrics, and event marketing metrics. Let’s take a closer look.
When consumers are looking for products, 87 percent will begin their search online. For that reason, it is vital to keep track of your web and search engine presence. Here are a few metrics to get you started:
- Total visits
The total visits metric helps marketers measure how many users have visited their web properties. You could examine the entire website, or just a single page. This metric will help you get insight into the popularity of the chosen web asset. - Unique visits
Unique visits functions similarly to total visits, but only counts each visitor one time. So, if a single user visits your website on five separate occasions during a specific time period, it will count as one unique visit. This allows you to track one visitor’s activity across your website, instead of looking at all visitors holistically. - Returning visitors
Returning visits will help you find how many users came back to your website after an initial visit. This metric can help you see how effective your web content is when building audiences and is essential to tracking brand health. - Pageviews
This metric tracks the total number of views a particular page has garnered. This can be used to measure the success of your customer-facing assets, especially when it’s repurposed into a metric like conversion rate. - Conversion rate
Conversion rate describes the percentage of users that took a specific action after entering your website. For example, if one hundred users read a blog post and five of them asked to be contacted by your sales team, your conversion rate for the blog would be 5 percent. - Session duration
This metric calculates how long a user spends on your site during a single browsing session. As they jump from page to page, you can estimate how long they spent reading and/or interacting with the page. The timer will stop when a user exits the page or idles for a pre-determined amount of time. - Keyword rankings
Marketers should pay close attention to how well key pages rank for certain keywords in their preferred search engine. Many people won’t go past the first page when conducting a Google search, so keeping a close eye on rankings is essential to driving continued traffic
Brand Metrics
Brand metrics can be difficult to track, and even more difficult to tie to revenue. In fact, proving that your brand campaigns drive value often requires a purpose-built solution. Regardless of whether your marketing team has brand optimization technology, it’s important to keep a close eye on the following metrics to track your brand equity.
- Brand awareness
By conducting surveys and extrapolating from information like social media engagement, marketers can keep track of their overall brand awareness. Understanding and maximizing your brand awareness is essential to growing long-term marketing value. - Repurchase ratio
Your repurchase ratio answers two important questions: How many customers only purchase from you once, and how many customers purchase again and again? Since retaining customers is often more fruitful than counting on sporadic sales, marketers should try to keep this ratio as high as possible. - Brand salience
Brand salience is a qualitative way to measure if customers remember your brand. For instance, an automotive brand would want to ask customers to name as many manufacturers as possible, then see if their name is on the list – and how long it took a customer to remember them. - Brand sentiment
Tracking your brand sentiment over time will help you understand whether your brand has a positive, negative, or neutral reputation among certain groups. If customers like and trust your brand, they’re more likely to purchase from you on an ongoing basis. - Share of voice
Share of voice shows how much of the market your brand controls when compared to your competitors. It adds another dimension to your overall brand awareness, and helps you find your biggest competitors. - Branded keywords
Branded keywords help you determine how many people are searching for your company or products directly. For example, instead of Googling “electronic keyboards,” a customer may google “Casio electronic keyboards.”
Email Metrics
Email marketing lets you send promotional messages to a wide variety of consumer groups. Research has shown that the best email campaigns generate $38 in revenue for every dollar spent, making it an excellent channel to generate sales. Getting one of these excellent email campaigns can be a challenge, however. Here are a few metrics to help you make the most of this channel.
- Open rate
When you send an email to a certain audience, your open rate will explain how many subscribers opened a certain email. This can help you figure out if your subject line is compelling and can be compared alongside metrics like clickthrough rate to measure email effectiveness. - Clickthrough rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR) measures how many people clicked on a link in your email message after receiving an email. This helps you determine how compelling your overall email copy and strategy is. - Hard bounces
If you send an email to an invalid address, you’ll receive a hard bounce error. These emails should be removed from your list as soon as possible, as many hard bounces will negatively impact your reputation and overall deliverability rate among email providers. - Soft bounces
Soft bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered to an otherwise valid address. This may occur because a mailbox is full, the email server is offline, your message has been caught by an antivirus measure, or a variety of other reasons. If an email regularly soft bounces, they should be removed from your email list to protect your deliverability. - Unsubscribe rate
This metric allows you to measure the number of users who no longer want to receive email communications from your company. A few unsubscribes are inevitable, but a large spike in unsubscribe rates may indicate an issue with your overall email strategy. - Email ROI
Email ROI is similar to marketing ROI. It helps you determine how effective your email strategy is by tracking the efficiency and profitability of one of more campaigns. The formula to calculate email ROI is (Revenue – Marketing Cost) x 100 / Marketing Cost.
Social Media Metrics
The idea of brands having a social media presence was unheard of just 20 years ago – but now, participating on social media is a near-necessity for brands. They provide a great vehicle to promote brand awareness, connect with customers, and even directly encourage sales. Because of this, brands should pay close attention to a few social media metrics.
- Reach
Social media reach allows you to find how many people have seen your advertisement, regardless of whether they chose to engage. This is important for calculating engagement rate, conversion rates, and more. - Impressions
Impressions tell marketers how often their content is shown to users. This differs from reach because the metric focuses on the content – not the user. For example, while a post may have reached ten customers, each customer may have seen the ad twice, resulting in 20 impressions. - Engagement rate
Your post’s engagement rate details how many users interacted with a post after seeing it in their feed. Measuring your audience’s engagement is essential to brand tracking initiatives, as it provides one dimension to measure a consumer’s connection with your brand. - Follower growth rate
Follower growth rate is another important branding metric for marketers, as it details how many consumers have a favorable view of your brand. To calculate it, divide how many followers you gained in a certain timeframe by how many followers existed at the beginning of the timeframe. - Brand mentions
Every time your brand is mentioned, a consumer or fellow business is trying to begin a dialogue with your brand. Tracking brand mentions on a granular level can help you uncover your overall brand sentiment and track its popularity over time.
Pay-Per-Click Metrics
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements are massive drivers of revenues for brands of all industries and sizes. This digital marketing tactic allows you to show your advertisements to a wide audience, and only pay if a member of the audience clicks on the ad. However, it’s not as straightforward as paying for a placement and reaping in the leads – there are a few crucial metrics necessary to track your PPC success.
- Clickthrough rate
When you launch a PPC campaign, your clickthrough rate (CTR) is linked to both your success and your overall campaign expenses. Depending on your chosen platform, a high CTR can have a variety of benefits, including lower cost-per-click and a better position for your advertisement. - Cost per click
Cost per click (CPC) details the amount you will spend for each click on a PPC advertisement. Your cost per click may be variable and determined through a bidding process for a certain keyword, or agreements may be reached to obtain a fixed rate CPC. Regardless, it is best to minimize CPC while keeping lead quality high. - Cost per lead
If you’re measuring the success of a PPC initiative, you can’t rely on clicks alone – you need to measure how those clicks turn into leads. If a customer clicks through on an advertisement, they would only be considered a lead if they took a specific converting action – typically, providing a method of contact. - Total marketing qualified leads
Based on a consumer’s demographics and psychographics, you can predict whether or not they’re likely to buy your product. For example, if a lead matches your target demographic, they are likely a marketing qualified lead (MQL). Once you’ve identified what encompasses an MQL, you can calculate how much it costs to get one. - Total sales qualified leads
Sales qualified leads (SQLs) have even more qualifications than a marketing qualified lead. Oftentimes, these customers are ready to set up a meeting with your sales team, or they are highly motivated to purchase. These customers are very close to converting, so it’s worth identifying and measuring how many SQLs you receive. - Return on advertising spend
Return on advertising spend (ROAS) tells you how much revenue you received for every dollar spent on your PPC campaigns. This metric is crucial for measuring the overall success of PPC campaigns, and is considered one of the most important PPC metrics.
Event Marketing Metrics
Events provide a terrific way to connect with your customers directly. However, their overall impact on brand loyalty, revenue, and more can be a bit of an enigma. Thankfully, there are a few metrics that can help you better understand the impact of your event.
- Total registrants
Tracking the total number of registrants who promised to come to your event is an important baseline metric for any event. Once you have this number, you can better predict how many registrants turn into actual attendees, providing a leading indicator for future event KPIs. - Total attendance
Total attendance refers to how many people actually went to your event. Like total registrants, this number means very little on its own but is a fundamental input for more advanced calculations. For example, determining which promotional assets turned the most registrants into attendees. - Net promoter score
Net promoter score (NPS) outlines an attendee’s general satisfaction with your event, usually outlined on a scale of one to ten. Typically, anything from a 1-6 is seen as negative feedback, 7 and 8 are ignored, and only 9 or 10 are considered positive. Calculating NPS will require you to subtract the total percentage of positive responses from the total percentage of negative responses. - Qualified leads
Whether you hosted an event or held a panel at an event, it’s important to sift through all of your leads to determine which ones are worth pursuing. Try to focus on leads that match your target audience, or who actively requested a meeting with sales. - Total customers acquired
After you’ve given yourself sufficient time to follow up with all your leads, examine how many of your attendees or leads became customers. Once you have this number, you can compare it with your total event costs to determine the cost per acquisition for your event.
Conclusion
There are many metrics that marketers need to track, making marketing performance measurement a rather difficult task. Not every metric can be given the same weight, and the impact of each metric depends on your individual organization’s goals and priorities. This is massively problematic – marketers need a reliable source of truth in order to trust their campaign results.
If you’d like a hand with measuring marketing impact, a marketing performance measurement solution with brand tracking and optimization capabilities may be what you’re looking for. With a highly flexible solution that tracks all of your marketing data in a single location, it’s easy to extract and track important metrics for a faster assessment of your overall marketing strategy. In the end, this has the potential to grant you a massive competitive advantage, even in the most crowded marketplace.
Marketers will find it much simpler to interact with their customers and improve ROI once they have the technology, knowledge, and motivation necessary to choose the most impactful metrics.
