A Quick Reference Guide for Marketing Metrics
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One thing I’ve learned during my time in the agency world is that I am downright spoiled when it comes to data and tools. Since my job involves a heavy amount of research and strategy, I spend a lot of my time reviewing charts, graphs, dashboards, and spreadsheets (you can say I’m really starting to Excel at those….I’m sorry.)
This exposure has helped me develop a second language that I speak around the office - marketing metrics. I can just as easily turn and ask my coworker how his weekend was as I can ask about how the landing page conversion rate has changed from one referral source to another. It has become secondhand to me, and I probably take that for granted.
I most notice this when I meet internal marketing coordinators, managers, or directors. Since so much of their time is dedicated to getting marketing efforts out the door (emails, social media posts, advertisements, etc.) they don’t always have the privilege of spending a lot of time analyzing the metrics behind their tactics.
So when the time comes for them to look through their Google Analytics dashboard, or even meet with their partner agency for some monthly reporting, the marketing metrics presented can cause a bit of confusion.
Good news - you can use this quick reference guide to get a snapshot of what 5 of the most common marketing metrics mean, and how you can use them to shape your marketing efforts moving forward.
Traffic Sources
Traffic sources are very simple - traffic is the amount of visitors coming to your website, and source is just where they came from. So if I tell you that 44% of your traffic last month was organic, organic is the traffic source.
The main traffic sources we measure are:
- Organic - traffic that comes to your website through search engines
- Referral - traffic that comes to your website via on link on another website
- Social - traffic that comes to your website via a social media click
- Direct - traffic that comes to your website via a bookmark or directly entering in your URL
For most organizations, you’ll find that organic traffic makes up the majority of your overall traffic, which is a really good thing. You want people to find your website when they use search engines like Google and Bing, so growing that is always a top priority for digital marketers.
Email Open Rate
This is another straight-forward marketing metric. Email open rate (OR) is the percentage of people who actually opened that email you sent. When you send a monthly newsletter, for example, let’s say it goes to out to your entire email marketing list of 1,000 people. If 200 people open that email, you have a 20% open rate.
Generally speaking, a healthy open rate falls in the 20-25% range, but this can vary greatly depending on your industry. MailChimp has a great overview of email marketing benchmarks per industry that you can check out here.
If you want to improve your open rate (which you should), the two most important things you should look at are your list quality and your subject lines.
List Quality - Some organizations throw any and everyone they can on their email list, with little regard to who those people actually are, or the types of content they may be interested in. Focusing solely on growing the number of email subscribers you have is a short-sighted approach, since the quality of that list is what most impacts your open rate.
Are there people on that list with outdated / unused email addresses? Do some people never open up a single email you send? Purging your email list is a healthy things to do, and it can make a huge difference.
Subject Lines - Consider how many emails you get every day. You practically click “Mark as Read” by default at this point, right? By writing compelling and engaging subject lines, you can win over more people to actually read your content. Tip: Make those subject lines short and sweet, send yourself a test email, and gauge whether or not you would open that email.
Click-Through Rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click a link in your email compared to the overall number of emails sent. Jumping back the open rate example of 1,000 email sends and 200 opens, say 50 of those people actually click a link in your email to read your latest blog post. 50 clicks out of 1,000 sends = 5% CTR.
Just like open rate, CTRs will fluctuate depending on industry, but a good benchmark to aim for would be in the 2-5% window. You can improve your CTR by incorporating great content that compels readers to click, like blog posts. For example, a quick win for monthly newsletters is to check out your Google Analytics from the past few weeks or months. Find out which 4 or 5 blog posts were the most popular, and include links to them in your email.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is one of those metrics most every marketer knows, but many aren’t really sure what to do with that information. In short, bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and leave without interacting or engaging any further (i.e. don’t click on anything, they just bounce right out of your website).
Kissmetrics has a great infographic on how bounce rate is calculated, things that cause it, and how you can improve on it. Since they are great ideas, here are a few of the ways Kissmetrics suggests for improving bounce rate:
- Reduce external links
- Improve pageload time
- Build a clear navigation / UX
- Remove pop-up ads
- Provide relevant content
I bolded that last point for a reason - quality content will always be a factor in whether or not someone engages with your website. Your site may look beautiful, but if there isn’t interesting content there for people to consume, they will bounce right on out of there, plain and simple.
Conversion Rate
My absolute favorite marketing metric, conversion rate, is the percentage of site / page visitors who complete your goal action. For example, say you have a general contact form on your website. Your site receives 5,000 visits per month, and about 50 contact form submissions. That would give you a conversion rate of 1%.
Conversion rate can be used to measure digital marketing success in a variety of ways - which is why I love it. We can look at sitewide CR, specific landing page CR, or even CR per campaign. It is a flexible metric that helps explain which pages are doing their job.
The act of improving conversion rate is known as conversion rate optimization, or, CRO. CRO is one of those practices, similar to SEO, that doesn’t have a cut-and-dry rule book for what’s included. It is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, and can involve everything from writing better copy for a landing page to changing the design of your website. You can think of CRO as one of the most important things you can do in digital marketing.
How to Move Forward with Marketing Metrics
OK - 1,000+ words and you are still here? Fantastic. That means that you are well on your way to becoming a marketing metrics expert (or, at least much more aware than before).
Moving forward, the best thing you can do is setup benchmarks for these metrics. Take a look at your Google Analytics account, your marketing automation platform, and whatever tool you use to send emails. Note how well each metric performs overall through the past 6-12 months, and begin tracking them on a regular basis.
Being able to clearly visualize your metrics and performance is the first step to optimizing them all. And, if you use a spreadsheet to track that data, I hope you Excel at that process (Yes, I reused the same joke, but it was 1,000 words later so I assumed it would be fine).
Good luck!