Marketing

How to Measure Marketing Metrics for Your Business?

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By Jennelle McGrath

4 min read

Data is your best tool for measuring your marketing, but it can be a challenge figuring out what to measure and how to measure it. Marketing measurements like monthly web traffic can give you a brief glimpse of success or failure, but you'll have to dig deeper to truly understand what's working and what isn't.

Data: conclusive, irrefutable, and enlightening.
Businesses rely on data to make decisions about almost everything. Launching an ad campaign, investing in new R & D, or redesigning a website all take careful consideration of the numbers. Digital marketing data is just as informative as data from any research study. Measure marketing metrics in real time to understand your data.

If your business has a website, you probably have access to these types of marketing measurements. Business people sometimes glance at them during the day to see how much traffic they’re getting. Marketing data can offer us more than a brief insight into who's on our website, however. By identifying which marketing measurements matter and checking them regularly, you can measure marketing metrics to save time, energy, and money.

What to Measure

Among global respondents to a CMO Council survey, most professionals measure marketing metrics like conversion rates, page views, and form submissions. You may want to measure these metrics and others. However, the metrics you measure should be informed by your marketing goals and objectives. For example, if your goal is to get more traffic on your website, then your number of visitors per month might be a good choice. Here are a few marketing goals that most businesses strive for:

Boost Lead Generation

Before you turn someone into a customer by making a sale, you have to get them to lead status. To see if you’re reaching your lead generation goals, you can measure your number of completed forms, content downloads, email subscriptions, and blog subscriptions.

Increase Awareness

Brand awareness represents the likelihood that potential customers recognize the availability of your company. Website traffic, page views, content shares, and social media engagement reveal levels of brand awareness. You can also create unique pay per click campaigns that target specific groups of individuals. Measure the reach of these advertisements and you'll have a good indicator of your exposure.

Get More Engagement on Social Media

The more people you have engaging with your posts on social media, the more likely one of them will convert. Increasing engagement also builds brand awareness. Measure it by tracking your shares, likes, blog comments, and followers.

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How to Measure

Once you’ve decided on your marketing measurements, work out a plan for how you’re going to measure them. Depending on the size of your business, this could be a simple as nominating a member of your team as the metrics person and meeting with them regularly, but a better strategy might be to involve your entire team. There are a few steps you can take to get the most out of your marketing measurements and not waste time in the process:

Collect Data Automatically

The way in which you collect marketing data may depend on the tools you use. Some tools allow you to collect data automatically in a dashboard format, but other tools might require individual oversight. If you can, establish graphs and measurements automatically using metrics tools. Automated data won’t need to be presented as a slide presentation if it is easily accessible online. If you can’t automate, you can have a team member collect and format the data so that it can be absorbed by the rest of the team.

Analyze Data regularly

You can make constructive decisions about your marketing efforts if you know what your marketing measurements mean. If you intend to measure marketing metrics, you have to take the time to analyze the data you’ve collected. Do it regularly. For example, schedule a weekly or monthly meeting to look at data with your team. Additionally, you could assign this job to a single person. If there is a change in one of your marketing trends, you’ll want to know about it as soon as possible.

Use Data to Take Action

One you’ve measured your data and analyzed it, you should have a good idea of how well your marketing efforts are performing and where they may need to improve. Armed with a clear view of your campaign, you’ll be able to take necessary steps to make it work for you. Taking action and making changes based on your data analysis should be an integral step in every marketing campaign. Just like your regular analysis sessions, taking informed action should happen regularly.

Sometimes the changes you need to make are small ones. For example, if your data is telling you that you are getting a large number of page views on a blog post but no one is clicking on the CTA at the bottom, there could be a problem with the body of the blog post or the CTA itself. You could make a small modification, like changing the CTA’s color and design, and see how it fares. Perhaps the CTA just isn’t right for that blog post, or perhaps the content within the post itself doesn’t relate enough to the content that the CTA links to.

Use Marketing Measurements to Improve Your Business

According to a survey by the American Marketing Association, over a third of U.S. marketing professionals said it was a challenge to measure marketing metrics and use the data constructively. The challenge lies in learning what data to measure, how to measure it, and how to use it to increase ROI. By capturing relevant marketing measurements and analyzing it regularly, your company will know how to use your metrics to make impactful marketing decisions.

Your data can also teach you about big picture issues. If you’ve made sweeping changes to your marketing approach or you plan to in the future, consult your metrics. If you conduct two separate but similar marketing campaigns over time, your metrics will show you which one was more effective. Further investigation will disclose what made the campaign successful, which can help you create better campaigns in the future.

Marketing Measurements Can Save You Time, Energy, and Money

The right marketing measurement tools can help your business track anything from website and social media metrics to the success of digital ad campaigns.

What are marketing metrics?

Marketing metrics are sort of like report card grades that marketers use to measure their success in different areas. For example, a marketing team might want to measure things like:

Website traffic - How many visitors a website draws over a certain period of time.
Lead generation - The number of leads generated by a certain campaign.
Social media engagement - How many likes, comments, or shares a social media campaign pulls in.

While these are just a few examples of broad marketing measurement metrics, it’s also possible to get far more specific. You can track anything from social media brand mentions to your financial return on ad spend (ROAS).

How to measure marketing metrics

There are now several great tools that allow you to measure marketing goals across multiple digital channels. Here’s a look at some of the most popular and what they have to offer.

Google Analytics

The upsides of Google Analytics are that it’s both free and capable of tracking up to 200 website, ad, and social media metrics. The downside of its attempt to offer every metric ever is that it can take some time and effort to master.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM platform that can track multiple sales and marketing metrics all in one place. From website and social media metrics to email or ad campaigns, HubSpot allows you to track everything from a single user-friendly dashboard.

Key Marketing Metrics to Track

The best marketing metrics to track can vary widely from one campaign to another. For instance, if you wanted to track your website’s performance, you might use metrics such as:

Website Traffic - the overall amount of traffic your site enjoyed during a certain time frame.
Users - the number of unique viewers that visit your website.
Page Views - How often each page on your website is viewed.
Bounce rate - How many users leave your website after arriving on a certain page.
Conversion Rate - The number of visitors who completed a desired action like submitting a form, signing up for an email list, or downloading a piece of content.

If you were measuring the success of a social media campaign, however, you might use metrics like the following.

Reach - The total number of unique users who saw your content
Impressions - The total number of times your content is displayed
Engagement metrics - Things like likes, posts, and shares can help measure how engaged your audience is.

Start by familiarizing yourself with commonly used metrics for the type of campaign you’re planning. But what if you want to use marketing measurements to track a cross-channel campaign? In this instance, it’s best to compose your own blend of metrics that align with your overall goals.

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