To be successful, every marketing campaign needs meaningful and accurate metrics. Without good metrics, your efforts to improve will be guesses at best- and if your messaging is too far off the mark, you may not know it until your profit margin dips deep into the red zone.
There are always fads in the world of marketing. Some, inevitably, are bad- and worse- sometimes those rotten marketing trends hang around longer than one would hope.
Misleading Metrics
Many marketing trends that companies are grossly over-using are flawed and misleading.
First registration encourages marketers to attribute a purchase to an earlier registration- which makes it easy to deliver a measured result. But it doesn’t take into account all of the influences the buyer encountered between registration and purchase. This fad is rapidly on its way out, and not a moment too soon.
Consumer Advertising, Last Click, and Multi-touch Attribution are more examples of seemingly easy and accurate digital metrics that lead marketers astray. Marketers tend to assume the data point created represents a precise moment of inspiration leading to a purchase. The fact is that observable user behaviors like these do not tell us how many things the user viewed before conversion.
These metrics represent data that needs deep analysis, they are only really useful in massive amounts- that’s good news for social science researchers- but for marketers, it’s a letdown.
Driving New Business Reliably
To measure the progress of your ad campaign reliably and get meaningful data, you’ll need to pay attention to a range of metrics and have the ability to read them for their collective meaning. This takes time, and inspiration- and it’s not the kind of easy tech-driven answer that is so appealing.
Here are five indispensable metrics that you should be following to shine a light on the success of your brand outreach.
1. Organic Traffic
This is traffic that comes straight from Google searches. If you’re getting plenty of organic traffic, you are on the right track.
2. Change in Sessions
This is the total visits to your site from all avenues of delivery. It’s not as telling as organic traffic, but it’s close.
3. SEO Ranking
Perhaps the one most basic metric for growth- popular search terms for your industry. Managing SEO is a full-time job. Our advice is to be, or hire, an SEO expert who is willing to spend 50 hours a week analyzing your SEO ranking, and working with content makers to make your SEO profile what it should be.
4. Mobile Users
More than 70% of all online sales are made via a mobile device. If mobile users are visiting your site, you’re doing well.
5. Page Load Speed
Many marketing teams forget technical aspects like this. If your page is loading slowly, you will lose Google rank points- and you will definitely lose conversions.
