The top mistake most business owners make when it comes to marketing metrics

The top mistake most business owners make when it comes to marketing metrics

marketing metrics

Business growth is all about capitalizing on what works and adjusting what doesn’t. That’s why metrics play a pivotal role in your success. Without keeping track of every aspect of your business performance, it’s easy to let opportunities (and potential issues) slip through the cracks.

Marketing metrics are essentially values that measure the performance of your marketing efforts. Once you launch a campaign, how many people are seeing it? Are they clicking on your link or continuing to scroll? Are they engaging with your call to action? These are what marketing metrics are all about. But are you making a common mistake when it comes to your metrics? Read on to find out. 

Are you tracking the right digital marketing metrics?

There are many different avenues of digital marketing that can help you with customer acquisition and retention, such as content marketing and email marketing. But when you launch a blog post on your site, or a new email campaign, tracking the wrong metrics can prevent you from seeing the important stuff. 

A common mistake that business owners make is focusing on the surface-level data that doesn’t contribute to future marketing strategies. When we’re talking about the “wrong” metrics, we’re referring to the vanity metrics. While they’re nice to look at, they don’t help you move forward or help you in the long run. Without proper analysis, these metrics aren’t indicators of sales.

Common vanity digital marketing metrics include:

  • Social media followers.
  • Comments and likes on posts.
  • Email open rates.
  • Page or video views.
  • Email subscribers.
  • Trial users.
  • Page views.
  • Traffic to site.
  • Engagement rate.

While vanity metrics can give you a boost of optimism, they aren’t indicative of revenue that stems from campaigns.

How to avoid making mistakes by tracking the right metrics

While all metrics can benefit your business in some way, you should prioritize actionable metrics instead of vanity metrics. In all aspects of digital marketing, actionable metrics can provide you with an understanding of how your marketing efforts are paying off so that you can see where the strengths and weaknesses are. 

There are many actionable metrics that you should take into account, even with some avenue-specific metrics. For instance, an email marketing campaign can be monitored through email opt-in rates. Another example is conversion rates on content posts.

But all digital marketing avenues should be tracked by a few key metrics, including:

  • ROI — Return on investment (ROI) is an indicator of whether the money you’re spending is paying off through retention. It’s calculated by comparing the CLV, customer lifetime value, with the CAC, customer acquisition cost. The CLV refers to the revenue you earn from a customer over a specific time frame. The CAC is how much it costs the business to acquire a new customer. If the CAC is much higher than the CLV, that indicates that you need to adjust the target audiences for your strategy.
  • Impression share — This metric refers to how your business performs in a certain channel compared to the total potential viewers. We’ll use a video campaign as an example. An impression share means calculating how many people saw the video compared to the total number of potential viewers it could have reached. As your impression share improves, you can determine that the video is being frequently viewed, possibly leading to sales.
  • Lead generation — A number of actionable metrics fall into the category of lead generation, but two that should be prioritized are number of leads generated and conversion rate. By seeing how many leads for potential customers that you can drum up with a campaign, and how many of those leads become customers, you can gain insight into the relevance of your campaign and the effectiveness of your call to action.

Want to attract new visitors to your website with the right metrics? BURG+CO. can help

Increasing traffic to your website plays a role in increasing conversions and leading to new clients. However, it’s difficult to attract visitors to your site when you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, this is what we specialize in at BURG+CO.

Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new leads and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help. Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.

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