You already know this, but let’s say it again anyway: when marketers like you report to leadership teams, it helps your case if you can present campaign metrics that give a clear picture of the campaign's impact on the business bottom line.
Every business running a marketing campaign will be at a different stage, with a different focus. But that doesn’t mean we can’t measure success! In fact if you know what you’re trying to measure, you’ll want to know where to look for the numbers that tell you whether you’re getting the results you need.
We’ve identified a consistent suite of digital marketing metrics that you’ll find incredibly useful for transparent, impactful reporting that shows decision makers the impact of your work. With a data visualisation tool like our very own KLIQmetricsTM, you’ll be able to track your marketing activities and strategically plan future activities for maximum impact.
You can’t do this without your ideal customer
In our list of metrics below, we talk about your ideal customer, or target customer. It’s essential to have defined your target audience as part of a successful marketing strategy. And remember, if you’re including SEO, account-based marketing (ABM), social media advertising or marketing automation in your marketing strategy, the KLIQ team offer an Attract & Nurture service that’s a great place to start.
Marketing benchmarks and statistics
When it comes to measuring and tracking marketing effectiveness, benchmark reporting gives you a useful basis for comparison. Our popular blog on B2B reporting benchmarks and statistics is a very valuable starting point!
Brand awareness and sentiment
Does your ideal customer know your brand and what it stands for? Brand awareness is how you reach your target audience and build a strong brand reputation. Sentiment is an important business intelligence tool that captures data based on the voice of the customer (VOC) and, through text analysis and social listening.
- Sentiment analysis: Monitor brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and social media engagement for qualitative insights into the perception of your brand. These metrics usually require specialist social listening and text analysis tools separate to quantitative data visualisation tools. Positive sentiment and increased awareness tell you that you’re on the right track with building your brand.
- Brand awareness
- Measure brand awareness on your website by reporting on total users, new users, returning users and the sources of your website traffic.
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- In your digital advertising, brand awareness will be revealed through reach, impressions and frequency of post views.
Brand consideration and engagement
When your ideal customer is making a decision to purchase, do they consider your brand? The measure of whether and how much your brand is included in their purchase decision is called brand consideration.
What to measure:
- Engagement: How long do people linger in your content? This is telling you how deeply they dive into the detail and whether they put the effort into engaging with your content and brand.
- To measure this on your website, look to page views, pages per session, button licks and scroll depth. Create and measure events to help you understand key interactions on the website.
- In your digital advertising, you’ll be looking for clicks, engagements, likes, shares, comments, engagement rate and cost per click.
- You’ll measure engagement with your emails through delivery rate, open rate, click rate and the dreaded unsubscribe rate.
- If you’re using YouTube to engage customers and leads with your brand, measure views, avg. view %, avg. watch time and subscriptions.
- For businesses using LinkedIn for brand-building, exploring new prospects, and user nurturing, measure reach, frequency, clicks, total engagements and engagement rate
- Brand consideration: Often used interchangeably with brand awareness, brand consideration is actually closer to the conversion part of your sales cycle. Your ideal customer will only be able to consider your brand when making a purchase, if they are already aware of your brand. Measuring consideration is about measuring attitude, rather than behaviour, so could involve surveys, polls and campaigns. Search traffic metrics can serve as a digital equivalent for these tools but it’s important to remember that digital metrics don’t reveal intention. They tell you what people are searching for but they don’t explain why.
- Social media including remarketing: Further down the purchase funnel, tools such as Instagram and Facebook from Meta are excellent for remarketing and keeping the brand front of mind. Measure clicks, impressions, frequency, conversions, cost per conversion, cost per clicks, CTR
Conversions
From brand awareness to brand affinity and beyond, the factors that lead to conversion can be hard to measure neatly for display in a marketing metrics dashboard.
Instead, identify the actions that represent a conversion, and make sure there is a way to measure those actions, e.g. with events and actions set up in Google Tag Manager. The specific action you measure will vary depending on the campaign’s goals.
What to measure:
Conversions: Your conversion rate is the percentage of leads that convert into customers. If you have enough data to reveal the conversion rate, this metric offers valuable insights into the effectiveness of your sales funnel. Improving conversion rates indicates that your messaging and targeting resonate with your audience.
- On your website, measure actions such as form submissions, path to purchase, drop offs in the purchase journey, ecommerce purchases, asset downloads.
- In digital advertising you’ll generally define a ‘conversion’ during your campaign set up. It can be a button click, a page visit or a range of other actions. To measure, report on conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate and conversion value.
- Organic search is a powerful tool and provides valuable insights about the part of the customer journey when they are researching options and ready to make a buying decision. Here you’ll want numbers for clicks, conversions, cost per click, CTR, cost per conversion.
Other digital marketing metrics that matter
There are a number of other metrics commonly reported on as part of longer term marketing strategies over an extended period. These metrics may combine data across multiple campaigns. For accuracy they rely on a strong data set and data skills.
ROI (return on investment)
This is the cost of the campaign compared to revenue that can be directly attributed to the campaign.
When we talk about cost in the context of ROI, it goes far beyond budget. Resources, tools, skills development and budget all contribute to the overall investment in marketing. To justify the marketing investment, there must be evidence that it will generate a return and contribute to profits.
And remember – your ‘returns’ on that investment can continue long after the campaign is completed. A campaign, implemented strategically, is linked to your other campaigns and evergreen marketing activities to feed into brand awareness more broadly
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? Knowing the cost will help you understand the efficiency of your marketing efforts. For sustainable growth, keep your CAC low while maintaining quality.
The CAC is calculated by dividing the campaign marketing costs by the number of new customers gained over the course of the campaign. Traditionally, the CAC is not calculated on a campaign by campaign basis, but knowing the cost of acquiring customers will help you calculate the effectiveness of your current brand campaign by knowing how it stacks up.
CLV (customer lifetime value)
Evaluating the long-term value of customers you’ve acquired helps you prioritise nurturing and retention activities. A high CLV is a sign that you have loyal customers who contribute significant revenue over time.
As for CAC, a customer lifetime value is less about your specific campaign than about how the campaign compares to all your other marketing efforts.
Data visualisation with KLIQmetricsâ„¢
Reporting is just one of many competing priorities that busy marketers juggle daily. Unfortunately, reporting can fall down the list, out ranked by the requirements to develop and manage campaigns and stay on top of day to day marketing activities.
At KLIQ, we understand that the role of digital marketing is to boost business growth. We also know, from experience, that marketing strategies need to be data driven. Measurement, analysis and action are the keys to success.
And that’s why we’ve developed KLIQmetrics™, a powerful, shareable, data visualisation tool that displays all your real-time marketing metrics in one place, from all your marketing data sources. Contact us today to find out how you could benefit from KLIQmetrics™ analytics reporting for marketers everywhere.
