Importance of Marketing Metrics

What are Marketing Metrics?

Before you can appreciate the value of marketing metrics, it’s important to define them and know everyone is on the same page with terminology and functions. Marketing metrics are data points that help quantify marketing campaign performance to track and measure effectiveness. In digital marketing, there is a range of metrics that measure a variety of data points, and some are more important than others.

When a campaign is being developed, key performance indicators (KPIs) must be established to define what metrics and data points are the most meaningful to your campaign’s success. KPIs are specific metrics that support the campaign objective and business goals. These can include sales goals, number of leads generated, total message impressions, etc. Closely measuring these metrics through the duration of (and after) the campaign will help drive optimizations to improve performance, and provide insight into the success of the campaign.

Why Measure Marketing Metrics?

Simply put: return on investment. A strategic marketing campaign is a business investment that should result in a boost to your business objectives, whether it be sales, lead generation, enrollment, or another. 

Unlike other business investments such as infrastructure or logistics, marketing metrics offer a way to measure performance – to see if it’s a worthy investment. And with the customer journey becoming more and more complex, it’s increasingly important to understand your campaign’s effectiveness and the customer’s experience at each touchpoint.

Monitoring and measuring KPIs through the duration of a campaign enables the marketing team to evaluate performance and make adjustments, if necessary, before the campaign is completed. For example, if a multi-channel campaign has two channels that are underperforming, those efforts could be paused to reallocate the budget to the higher-performing channels. Catching an underperforming channel early (but not too early) is always better than waiting until the campaign has run its course when that budget has been potentially ineffective. This is how to ensure your campaigns are always evolving and making every dollar count for the best ROI.

After the campaign has run, its effectiveness and ROI can be measured by evaluating KPIs and results: 

• Did sales increase incrementally?
• Were there specific marketing channels that performed better? 
• Was there specific messaging that the audience responded to better?

Measuring marketing metrics with correct attribution can answer these questions and help strategize smarter, data driven campaigns. Understanding your audience/customer and the appropriate messaging on the correct channels is imperative for planning future campaigns with the best ROI.

How to Measure Marketing Metrics

Measuring marketing campaign success begins with identifying the desired goals and objectives, and determining what KPIs will support those. Once this has been outlined, the campaign should be created and launched with reporting in place to regularly monitor the defined KPIs.

Many digital ad platforms, such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, and programmatic ad vendors, provide dashboards that report on campaign performance with several data points. Similarly, email platforms like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor provide metrics for specific email campaigns. For media coverage and press releases, Muck Rack is a robust tool that provides in depth data for publication pick-ups and media mentions.

If a campaign’s objective is to drive traffic to your website to learn about a service or perform a desired action, Google Analytics is a popular tool used to measure various, anonymized website performance metrics, including traffic acquisition and user behavior. This powerful tracking tool provides visibility into what’s happening on your website (what type of people are visiting, how they got to the site, what they’re doing on the site, and more) and can help attribute website goals to the appropriate channels. For advanced visibility into website user behavior, tools like Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar can capture heatmaps and screen recordings.

The Greteman Group Approach:

1. Identify the campaign goals and objectives with the client
2. Outline campaign-specific KPIs that support the campaign goals, and additional metrics that supplement those KPIs for further comprehension
3. Set up necessary tracking using relevant tools to collect every possible data point
4. Set up and launch the campaign
5. Monitor initial and ongoing KPI data and cross reference any overlapping data for accuracy and discrepancies
6. Adjust campaigns as needed based on performance
7. Compile performance, results, and insights into an easy-to-read report at the campaign’s conclusion

Compare and Adapt

Marketing metrics are crucial to measuring a return on investment for campaign efforts. With so many performance metrics and data points available, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and confused about which ones are relevant to track. 

The most important ones to watch are those closely aligned and related to the overall goals of the campaign. Additionally, a single metric by itself isn’t often useful. Comparing it to a benchmark, seeing how it trends over time, and/or comparing it to different channels or campaigns will start to produce the insights needed to evaluate performance. 

Let us walk you through more details on how marketing metrics can be more useful in your overall marketing strategy.