Analytics is often seen as a big, scary maze by many businesses and marketing professionals because it can be so overwhelming for people who are not familiar with analytics platforms or how to read and interpret the data.
As a result, it can often be overlooked, or only high-level vanity metrics are reported on–which can be just as harmful as not reporting at all.
Businesses are fortunate to be operating in a time where we have an abundance of data available at our fingertips to help us understand our business and customers better and make more informed decisions.
Data is so powerful that we are seeing global companies and leading media agencies around the world create divisions dedicated to data. French company Publicis Groupe announced last month that it saw a 7.1% organic increase in revenue, which it attributed to its data and digital units.
For many businesses, though, there is a world of free data available to you that can help you to improve your marketing efforts and achieve business objectives.
The most common sources of data from a digital marketing perspective are provided by Google Analytics and Meta Business Manager. These platforms provide lots of data specific to your business, and one of the first mistakes people can make is looking at these dashboards without understanding what questions they are wanting to answer.
So, start by clearly defining what your business objectives are: Is it to drive product sales? App downloads? Event registrations? Or perhaps your objective is to be a leading source of information in your industry. This will dictate the metrics important to your business.
Once you know your business objectives, you need to understand which metrics you should be looking at to determine if your digital marketing is or isn’t helping you to achieve this. Here is a table with some common objectives and the digital metrics you can use to measure success.
- Reach – how many individuals is your brand being seen by?
- Impressions – how many times is your content being delivered to people?
- Frequency – how many times is a person seeing your post or advert? It takes 7 times for a person to take an action.
- Shares and comments – are people sharing your content with others?
- Follower growth – are people resonating with your brand and following you to stay up to date?
- Follower growth – are people resonating with your brand and following you to stay up to date?
- Reactions – how many likes and reactions are your posts receiving?
- Shares and saves – are people sharing your content with others?
- Comments – are people getting involved in the discussion?
- Reviews – how do people feel about your product or service?
- Response rate – how quickly are you responding to private messages?
- Website clicks – how many people are clicking through to your website?
- Bounce rate – how many people are leaving your website without making any clicks?
- Abandon carts – how many people are leaving your website before making a purchase?
- Website purchases – the number of purchases made on your website
- Purchase value – the total value of purchases made on your website
- ROI – what is your return on investment? (Net income / Cost of investment x 100)
- Conversion rate – (Action/Impressions x 100)
- Click-through rate – (Website clicks/Impressions x 100)
- Cost per result – how much does it cost you per result?
Reviewing bounce rates and abandon carts specifically can help you to identify pain points in the customer journey which may be impacting purchase opportunities.
- In-app leads – how many people are signing up directly via a social media platform?
- Website clicks – how many people are clicking through to your website?
- Website form completions – how many people are signing up via your website?
- Unsubscribers – how many people are unsubscribing to your newsletter?
- Conversion rate – (Action/Impressions x 100)
- Click-through rate – (Website clicks/Impressions x 100)
- Website clicks – how many people are clicking through to your website?
- App downloads – how many people are leaving your website before making a purchase?
- App sign-ups – how many new paid subscribers have joined your app?
- App sign-up value – the total value of new app sign-ups
- Conversion rate – (Action/Impressions x 100)
- Click-through rate – (Link clicks/Impressions x 100)Cost per result – how much does it cost you per result?
Now that you know what metrics you should be reviewing and reporting on, it’s important to be able to add context when reporting both internally and externally. While there are some industry benchmarks for certain metrics, your biggest competitor is yourself, so you should always be comparing your metrics to previous months, quarters and years to ensure you are seeing consistent growth.
Ask yourself:
What ROI do we need to achieve to break even? If we are consistently achieving a 1.3% conversion rate, for example, how many people do we need to drive to our website to achieve 100 sales next month? How can we improve our organic content to increase shares and saves? What value can we provide audiences that would interest them in signing up for our monthly newsletter?