Measuring marketing can feel confusing and daunting, there are so many metrics and stats, from click throughs to bounce rates, dwell times to cost per click... but where to start? Here are our suggestions for the 6 most important ones to track on a regular basis.
1. Number of website visitors
You will be able to look at all sort of stats on your website performance; page views, dwell times, google rankings... If all of these feel too much for you, if nothing else, look at the unique visitor volumes and their trends in line with your marketing activity.
2. Engagement health level
Most marketing strategies will contain social media activity on at least one of the platforms. If you haven’t already, narrow your selection down to those which work for you and your business – don’t try and be on them all, and be aware of the time-drain if you are posting yourself. In terms of measurement, it can be tempting to look at follower numbers, but a truer measure of success is engagement – post views, likes and comments. Use this to assess what works and what doesn't in terms of tone and format, but be mindful of what this is contributing to your business. Until those followers become website visitors, the engagement is only serving to foster a relationship. It's an important part of the marketing mix, but not the be all and end all.
3. Your email subscriber list
Of course this one’s up there for me! Email marketing has the best return on investment of all marketing channels, so keep an eye on your subscriber volumes as a key measure of success.
4. Lead volumes
Marketing activity will be doing lots of different jobs from positioning your brand through, raising awareness and driving consideration. Those objectives higher up the funnel are more difficult to track, but your blend of activities should be aiming to capitalize on interest raised and generate enquiries, so this is another key proof point that your spend is working.
5. Conversion rate
A super important one to analyse and track; look at your lead to sale conversion rate to understand what works well and what doesn’t in terms of your sales process, and to assess the quality of interest raised by your marketing efforts.
6. Marketing Spend vs revenue
I often get asked how much businesses should be investing in their marketing. As a general guide, you’ll want your marketing expenses to be somewhere between 4% and 10% of your total sales. This figure will be influenced by your stage of growth, your ambitions and how well other methods of business development are working.
