You can measure your marketing success efficiently by marketing metrics which is essential because they tend to weigh output things concerning effectiveness. The effectiveness of ads, PR and events could not be measured in the past by marketing department. So you could not justify the cost of the marketing efforts, but with metrics, they can gauge by relating to the number of things you produce. For example, an operational metrics can measure sales per region or cost per customer. But you have to customize your metrics because many different metrics measure different things. You can’t just take a generic metrics and used them in a company. There are various industries, different sales trends and different customer segments. So you need to apply the metrics that work for you. Here Are Some Metrics:
Bounce Rate
This measures the number of people who paid a visit to a page on your site but left (“bounced”) without moving onto another page. Google defines it as a “single interaction on your website followed by an exit.” But then, having a high bounce rate is not ideal, but this differs in all cases. For instance, if you’re running a blog, where the purpose is to have people spend time reading through your content, then a high bounce rate is bad for your site. On the other hand, if you have a sales site, where the only action needed from your page visitors is to click a purchase button which would lead them to the 3rd party’s shopping cart, then a high bounce rate makes sense and is expected.
Sessions
A session calculates how many times a user interacts with your content for a given period, for example, if you log into a particular website today and explored its various pages, that would count as one session and it should be counted as two sessions if you visited the same site the following week. A high session is ideal. But just like the bounce rate, it will depend on the purpose of your website. A blog with a high session average is excellent as this implies that the site visitors took their time to explore other pages; while a sales page, where the visitors are expected to leave after they pay for their purchases, will naturally have a low session average.
Time On Site
This can measure how engaging your site is. The fact is that not all pages are meant to have a high time on site figure. Again, if it’s a site that is intended to let the users explore, e.g., a blog, then you want a high number. However, if it’s a page where the call to action is mere to sell, then spending more time on the site is terrible. It is an incredibly great way to determine whether or not your content can capture the attention of your visitors. Know the pages your visitors are spending more time in. It’s most likely that they found the content featured on such pages useful and it would be a great help to you to put more focus into those types of materials.
New vs. Returning Users
This measures the visitors to your website. It calculates the new people who are visiting your website and also how many people that are returning. It is a significant metric to determine the overall quality of your site, depending on what it’s built for. For example, if you have a content-driven website, a high new and returning user rate shows that your content is good enough to attract new audiences and more interesting to keep them coming back for more. If you are running a service-oriented website, a high new user and low returning user rate might mean that your site is captivating enough to capture new audiences, but not informative enough to entice them to come back. While getting new site visitors to your website is necessary, measuring the number of people that come back to your website is also essential. Never forget the fact that keeping your site updated is adequate for building customer loyalty and engagement. It’s as crucial as your efforts to keep bringing new eyes to your website.
Revenue
This one is pretty obvious; moreover, the goal of an online store is to generate revenue. You’ll want to monitor your site’s revenue trends to ensure your marketing efforts are leading to more sales. Apart from total income, you should also be tracking your margin on those sales(you can do that outside of an Analytics platform like Google Analytics) and then comparing that to your costs, both internally and also with your marketing and advertising efforts.
E-commerce Conversion Rate
This portrays the percentage of visits that came from an ecommerce transaction. When benchmarking E-commerce Conversion Rate, it’s essential to do so when considering not only your industry but also device type and referral source.
Average Order Value
Your site’s average order value shows the average revenue generated by a single on-site purchase. While this is usually impacted more by your site than any marketing efforts, it’s still worth keeping an eye on to make sure that your efforts aren’t driving traffic that leads to transactions with a below average order value.
Putting It Together
The following formula shows the three critical elements to generating revenue: Traffic x E-commerce Conversion Rate x Average Order Value = Revenue. Before implementing any changes to your site, understand where these three metrics stand today and set goals for what you expect to happen with your efforts. Increasing any one or more of these metrics while maintaining the same output from the others will lead to increases in revenue. Another great way to measure marketing success is the cost per lead. The combined value of production costs, ads spend, and team salaries divided by the number of points you generate for sales will tell you how efficient your marketing spend is, how targeted your efforts are, and gauge how effective your total marketing efforts are. This metric is useful because a company can determine how much they can pay for a lead based on close rate, then decide if their marketing efforts are leading to successful transactions. Another important metric is conversion rate, which is a percentage that can be found by dividing the number of visitors coming to your website by the name of leads resulting from your site. While there is no benchmark for conversion rate, and it differs by industry, this metric tells a story of how successful you are at bringing qualified visitors to your website and how successful your site is at convincing visitors that you have something to offer. A higher conversion rate means that you need fewer visitors to get the same number of qualified business opportunities from your website.”
Sales
This is going to sound obvious, but all marketing activities should always lead back to sales. There are lots of tools to measure online analytics, impressions, engagement, etc. but all the connection in the world won’t make a lick of difference if your company isn’t making money. That said, you do need to trace back from sales to your marketing efforts to figure what is working and what isn’t so you are not wasting money and energy either. What specific tools you use will all depend on the marketing activity. Finally, while there are lots of metrics at your fingertips, paying attention to the right ones makes all the difference. Make sure the data you’re looking at indeed align with the goals of your marketing, then compare that data to your past performance to judge success. At the end of the day, how your site performs may not meet the “industry standards” but that doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t working.
