How to Measure Marketing Performance

Why You Have to Track Your Performance

No one has unlimited time or resources. Generally, a marketing department can zero in on one or two key areas to improve at a time. Maybe that’s fine-tuning your social media ad strategy to get your cost per result down. Or you might have to switch up your keyword strategy on Google to try to capture more Web traffic. But before you can set goals, you first need to know where you stand. And that’s where metrics come into play. 

The first step is to figure out what you need to track. To help you create your marketing scorecard, we’ve created a list of effective marketing metrics for various marketing channels. 

General Marketing Metrics

These are the high-level metrics that help you gauge how impactful and cost-effective your marketing efforts are. 

Customer Leads

Pretty simple: the total number of leads attributed to your marketing efforts. A good basic metric to track, but don’t get too hung up on simply going after more, more, more. Above all, you want to make sure that you’re bringing in quality leads. What is a 'quality' lead? Someone that's likely to do business with your brand.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

A prospective customer who has engaged with your marketing. For example, this could be someone who has downloaded an ebook or clicked on a social ad. 

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

A prospect who has shown an intent to buy and is ready to talk to a salesperson. 

Cost per Lead (CPL)

Calculated by dividing the marketing spend by the number of new leads generated.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

The cost of a prospect taking a particular action or the amount of marketing spend it takes to acquire a paying customer. Calculated by dividing the advertising spend by the acquisitions generated.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of prospects who take a desired action after interacting with a marketing campaign. For example, the action could be signing up for emails from your company to making a purchase (or any other objective you want your audience to complete). Calculated by dividing the total conversions by your total audience and multiplying by 100.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The total revenue a business can expect to earn from a customer during the entire business relationship. Calculated by multiplying the average order value by the average number of transactions per year and then multiplying by the average customer retention (in years).

Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

The amount of money your marketing efforts generate compared to their cost. To calculate, subtract your marketing cost from your gross profit, then divide this number by the marketing cost and multiply by 100.

Social Media Metrics

These high-level social media metrics can help you gauge if your marketing efforts in this ever-changing mix of platforms and strategies are paying off. 

Views

The overall number of times a piece of content is viewed. Everyone loves to see views skyrocket, but we view a lot of stuff on social media every day. Just because someone views your content doesn't mean the person is even in your target audience. So—don't put too much stock in views. The next metric, engagements, is much more important.

Engagements

The number of times someone has liked, watched, opened, or otherwise interacted with a piece of content. 

Improving engagement should be one of the top goals of your social strategy. If people people aren't engaging with your content, your content could be off the mark. Or, it may not be clear what your brand stands for. Or, a focus on social media may not even be the correct strategy for your brand. On the other hand, if people are engaging with your content—leaving comments, sharing your posts—you're building a closer bond with your social audience and are one step closer to making them customers. And high engagement is a good sign that your brand and its message resonates with your audience.

Likes

The number of times someone has hit the ‘like’ button. Likes are an important basic measurement of your content’s appeal and relevance to your audience. 

Comments

The number of comments on a piece of content. A comment means that someone is engaged enough with your brand to take time out of their day to interact with your content. And you can mine comments for valuable insights into your customers and their preferences. 

Be sure to capitalize on your audience's comments: Respond to them and start a dialog. At the very least, give them a thumbs up. And, you could even ask for permission to repost the pictures people drop in comments. Every social audience loves user generated content; the more you can feature on your page, the better.

Fans/Followers

The number of people who have followed/liked your page. 

It's great to see this number grow, but it's important that you try to gain an understanding of what the number of fans or followers actually means for your business. For example, you may have a very attractive social page—and people may like your content enough to follow you—but a number of these people may not even be in the market for your products or services. For example, someone who loves looking at pictures of baked goods may follow and engage with a Chicago bakery that posts beautiful pictures of pastries every day. But this person may live in Dallas, so she's unlikely to actually buy anything from the bakery.

This is why it's important that you also develop methods for tracking why people reach out to your business to buy. Did they see your ad or posts on social? Or did a friend tell them about you? This is the only way you're going to know if your social (or other) efforts are paying off.

Average Engagement Rate

An indicator of how well your social audience likes your content. Calculate by dividing the total interactions by total followers and multiply by 100.

Website Metrics

These metrics are the classics when it comes to measuring the performance of your website. Not only should you track these metrics, but also the sources (organic social, paid social, PPC, etc.).

Total Traffic

The number of users visiting your website. This is the most basic website metric, and it's important to dig deeper into your website statistics if you want a clearer picture of your website's effectiveness.

Engaged Sessions

The percentage of sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, have a key event, or have at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.

It's always a safe bet to focus on improving website engagement. Higher levels of engagement suggest content that's appealing to your audience or that your message is clear. Low engagement might suggest that your message is unclear; your audience may not understand who you are and what you have to offer. Or, maybe your product or service isn't appealing for one reason or another.

Average Engagement Time per Session

The average time a user spends on your website.

Keyword Rankings

A report of relevant keywords for your business and your ranking for each.

Paid Channel Metrics

Your paid channels can range from Google ads to Facebook ads—any channel in which you pay to receive attention. 

Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

Tracking ROAS will help you compare the effectiveness of different types of content or strategies in your paid campaigns, usually expressed as a ratio (ex. 5:1). Calculated by dividing the ad campaign revenue by total ad spend.

Email Metrics

Make sure your email campaigns are supporting your marketing efforts. As with other marketing channels, improving your metrics here may involve experimenting with different types of content, various send cadences, and even customer list segmentation. 

Subscribers 

Contacts who have opted in to receive your emails. You should only be sending emails to people who have subscribed to your emails. Always respect someone’s desire to unsubscribe. 

This is a good number to know and track, but your goals should go beyond just trying to increase your subscriber numbers. You want to curate an email list that's packed with people who are in your target demographic. Padding numbers here won't drive any long term results.

Open Rate

The percentage of recipients who open an email compared to the total number of emails sent out. Low open rates could be a sign that you’re sending irrelevant emails.

One caution with open rates: Some people open and email, scan for two seconds (or less) and hit the delete button. Open rate, by itself, isn't an accurate picture of how well people receive your email marketing.

Click-through Rate (CTR) 

The ratio of users who click on a specific link in your email compared to the number of total recipients who have opened the email.

When people click your links you have a better sense of who’s actually engaged with your brand and what content these people find most appealing. You can study your click-through rates by content/link type to point your marketing efforts in the right direction. Always give people more of what they like and less of what they don't like or find valuable!

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

There are a few metrics that marketers commonly use to gauge customer satisfaction. However, there’s also another one that’s not a formal metric at all: the information that your employees gather during every customer interaction. Are customers providing feedback? What are they saying? Do your customers commonly mention other interests? What other clues about their preferences can you uncover?

Reviews

While not necessarily a formal “marketing” metric, reviews are important to track and promote to support your marketing efforts and overall company success.

It's great to collect positive reviews, but to truly leverage reviews in your marketing efforts, you need to mine them for information. What are positive reviewers mentioning the most? This will tell you what your customers most value about your brand and where to focus your marketing efforts. You can even use negative reviews to your advantage. Take time to write a sincere, personalized reply. (Whatever you do, don't use stock responses for every positive or negative review. It shows that you're actually disengaged with your customers and can hurt your brand's reputation.)

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A method to capture and measure customer satisfaction. Scores range from -100 to +100 and are determined based on customers’ response to the following question: On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? 

• Customers who give a rating of 0–6 are considered Detractors.
• Customers who give a rating of 7–8 are considered Passive.
• Customers who give a rating of 9–10 are considered Promoters.

Based on the score that is given, a negative score (-100 to 0) means you need to make improvements. A score of 0 to 30 is considered good. 30 to 70 is great. And a score above 70 is excellent.

These surveys often give respondents the opportunity to write a short message as to why they chose a particular rating. Surveys such as these are helpful in guiding your marketing strategy and messaging, as customers will tell you what they love most about your brand. 

Your Roadmap to Improving Metrics 

You may have a few questions at this point. What metrics should I focus on improving? What channel(s) should I be watching the closest? What are the critical numbers for my specific company, goals, and budget? 

First, if you’re tempted to dig through the internet to try and find what your benchmarks for each metric should be, stop. It’s more important that you begin tracking your metrics and establish your own plan for improving them. “Average” metrics can vary greatly depending on your industry. 

If you want help sorting through the data, call Lead Marketing & Design. We’ll set up a 30-minute consultation to get the conversation started. If you want to start growing your brand and improve the effectiveness of your marketing, we’re here to help!