Essential Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Trying to make a marketing strategy work without using marketing metrics to track results is kinda like setting out on the longest road trip of your life, only without a map.

Sure, you might know where you started, and you might know where you’re going, and you might know what general direction (north, south, east, west) you should head in too.

But because you don’t have a map, you don’t know which highway is fastest, which roads lead to nowhere, and which motels you should stop at for the night. As a result, even if you do end up at your destination (which is highly unlikely), it would have taken you a long time (with a capital L).

In this post, we’ll explore the nitty-gritties of marketing metrics: what statistics you should be tracking, how you can use the results to focus your marketing strategy, and what tools you should be using.

 

The Marketing Metrics that Count

With the marketing metrics tracking tools available today, you can track just about anything and everything. As a result, it’s easy to end up wasting your time tracking the marketing metrics that don’t give you concrete, actionable information you can actually implement to improve your marketing.

In this section, we’ll take a look at the 5 major categories of analytics (see below), and we’ll investigate each one in depth. We’ll talk briefly about why it’s important to measure to see which metrics will be most useful to you.

• Traffic
• Email
• Conversions
• Customer Activity
• Bottom Line

 

Traffic

The most popular statistics that webmasters track by far are the ones that have to do with traffic.

The Problem with Big-Picture Traffic Statistics

This makes sense, because traffic is a category of analytics that we can easily translate into money for our business. After all, it’s a simple equation:

More traffic = More people viewing my site = More people buying my products = More money

 

Image via QuickSprout

Because of this seemingly simple & valid equation, people tend to focus on the big-picture traffic statistics, i.e. the number of visitors per day/month/year.

But even though the equation is valid to a certain extent (your online business isn’t going anywhere if you have zero traffic), it is by no means the end-all and be-all of marketing.

The importance of big-picture traffic statistics (e.g. number of visitors per month) is overestimated, for several reasons.

Firstly, these big-picture statistics do not indicate how well that traffic is translating into money. You might be getting 100,000 visitors per month, but if you’re only making $1000, then you’re only making a cent for each visitor.

Second, these statistics also don’t take into account how much money you’re spending to produce that traffic. If your monthly marketing budget for content, graphic media, promotion, etc. is $2000 all-in, then your business is losing a cent on every visitor (continuing with the previous scenario).

Last, but certainly not least, the big-picture statistics ignore acquisition: i.e. how your traffic performs as a function of where it comes from.

Reddit and Stumbleupon, for example, are notorious for producing high volumes of traffic, but also very high bounce rates and laughably low conversion rates.

That’s because most people who use Reddit and Stumbleupon aren’t actually looking to seriously engage with the websites they visit through those networks.

On the other hand, traffic from sources like Facebook ads tends to perform much, much better since Facebook allows you to target their users by age, location, interests, and more.

So while you should definitely pay attention to the overall traffic figures, don’t get too hung up on them. Also, you should realize that these big-picture marketing metrics are not going to give you information you can act on to improve your marketing. That comes when you investigate the following statistics that are much narrower in scope.

Acquisitions

As we briefly touched on above, assessing your traffic according to the channels through which it comes is a crucial step to analyzing traffic appropriately.

Traffic Source	Visitors	Cost	Cost per Visitor
Social Media	10,000	$500	$0.05
Organic Search	5,000	$100	$0.02

For starters, you’ll want to think about the volume of traffic that arrives through each source.

Is social media your biggest driver of traffic? Guest posting? Or do you get visitors the ol’ fashioned way, via organic search rankings?

Once you know exactly through which channels your traffic is coming, you can capitalize on that information by focusing your marketing efforts on the sources that deliver visitors.

For example, if you’re running a fitness blog and you discover that Pinterest and other social networks drive you more traffic than anything else, then you’d probably want to focus on building your social media presence even further.

Another important metric to track with traffic acquisition is the cost of each visitor based on the channel through which it comes.

In keeping with the fitness blog example above, let’s say that you got 10,000 visitors in a month from social media. In that same month, you got 5,000 visitors through organic search. Obviously, social media seems like the traffic channel to focus on.

But now let’s add a new piece of information to the equation: cost. If you spent $500 on social media marketing in that month, then you’re spending $0.05 per social media visitor. And if you spent only $100 on SEO, then you’re spending $0.02 per organic search visitor.

Suddenly working on social media presence doesn’t seem like the best idea, does it? Pursuing more organic visitors would mean more traffic at a lower cost per visitor (which translates to more profit).

Average Time on Site

The average time on site metric is a great way to measure engagement on your site.

This slice of data measures the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site each session.

If each visitor spends only about 30 seconds on your site before hitting the back button, then you know that there’s probably something repelling about your site. Get to work on fixing that.

Bounce Rate & Pageviews per Visit

The bounce rate and pageviews per visit metrics are also important indicators of your traffic’s engagement level.

A “bounce” is a visitor that happens on your website, views only one page, and immediately leaves (there are other definitions of a “bounce”, including one that limits bounces to <30-second, single-page visitor sessions).

Therefore, bounce rate measures what percentage of your visitors view only one page before leaving.

Image via Qualaroo

A high bounce rate is a negative result and definitely something you’d want to improve on.

Pageviews per visit is essentially the other side of the same coin: it measures the average number of website pages each of your visitors browse through in each session on your website. More pageviews per visit mean that your visitors are interested in the content on your website.

Returning Visitors

The returning visitors metric

Visitor Type	Conversion Likelihood	Reason
Returning Visitors	More likely to convert	Familiarity with the site and repeated visits indicate appeal and comfort with spending money.
New Visitors	More likely to convert in other ways	May subscribe to a blog or share a post after a single visit.

Repeat Sales Potential

Take a look at the comparison of customer repeat sales likelihood:

Customer Type	Likelihood to Buy Again
First-time Customers	27%
Second-time Customers	45%
Customers with Three or More Purchases	54%

So in short, someone who’s already become your customer is far more likely to give your business more money in exchange for goods/services than some random website visitor who’s never bought from you before.

The buy-again potential of customers is largely untapped in the online business world. Many marketers forget that the most productive source of new sales is often their existing customer base.

But you won’t get very many of your customers to buy from you again if you aren’t working to keep them engaged and continually interacting with your brand.

Clicky

Clicky is another highly popular web analytics tool. Unlike Google Analytics, Clicky does have paid plans — if you want to track more than 1 site and/or more than 3,000 pageviews per day, then you’re going to have to shell out at least $9.99/monthly.

Feature	Google Analytics	Clicky
Cost	Free	Starts at $9.99/month
Real-time Data	Basic	Advanced
Visitor Information	Standard	Detailed

However, Clicky does come with great bang for your buck. It’s real time data is much better than GA’s, and it has more detailed information about each visitor that comes across your website (see below).

It also features heatmaps that show you where visitors click on your pages, spam/bot filtering, an upgraded bounce rate metric, dynamic conversions (that don’t have to be pre-defined) and much more. You can see a tabular comparison of Clicky and GA here.

If you want to learn more about Clicky, read Ramsay’s full review at Blog Tyrant.

Conversion Metrics Tools

Tool	Features	Pricing
Google Content Experiments	Sends traffic to two separate URLs to see which page converts better.	Free
Visual Website Optimizer	Website editor, detailed reporting, heatmaps, traffic segmentation, multiple integrations.	Starting at $49/month for 10,000 tested visitors

Image via Rich Page

If you want to learn more about VWO, check out Rich Page’s review.

Customer Activity Metrics Tools

The best type of tool to use to measure customer activity is a CRM. These tools can track each visitor’s individual actions on your site, right from their first session to their post-sales activity.

CRMs also often come along with many other features, including marketing automation functionality like overall traffic analytics, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization. So if you do decide to go with a full-featured CRM, keep in mind that a lot of the above tools will be redundant.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is quite popular with small businesses, and for good reason: it packages into email marketing, automation workflows, and a nifty CRM into one affordable solution.

The tool starts at just $9/month for up to 500 contacts (comes with a two-week free trial), and is well known for its premium customer support. I’ve used the tool extensively myself and have always found it super-simple to navigate and altogether quite easy to work with. If you’re on a budget, then ActiveCampaign is probably the way to go.

In this post, Carl Taylor details why he moved over to ActiveCampaign, and why he thinks you should, too.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is well-known in the online marketing space, but its high pricing point can be a turn-off to many. Infusionsoft’s cheapest plan starts at $199/month, and all plans require purchase of a “kickstart” (customer onboarding), which begin at $699. That makes the minimum spend upfront about $900, which is quite a daunting sum for many.

However, if you can afford the tool, then it’s hard to make a case against it. Infusionsoft features a full suite of CRM and marketing automation functionality: detailed analytics, close interaction with contacts, payments, multiple integrations, and oh-so-much more.

Here’s Seth Ellsworth’s take on the tool.

Bottom Line Metrics Tools

Baremetrics

Baremetrics is an affordable income tracking tool specifically for SaaS business. It creates detailed analyses of some of the most important cash flow metrics through integration with Stripe.

Unfortunately, the only thing that Baremetrics cannot take into account is cost, so you don’t end up with an overall profit/loss picture. But regardless, it’s still a highly useful tool.

As seen in the screenshot above, the founder of Baremetrics, Josh Pigford, publicly displays the company’s own bottom line figures with the use of a public Baremetrics dashboard that you can view here.

Pricing is based on your monthly run rate, and starts at $25/month for a $2500 MRR. All plans include email reports, instant notifications, goal analysis, and more.

Pulse

Pulse is a neat cash flow management app that was created by a small business, for small businesses. Unlike Baremetrics, Pulse does come with the functionality to report costs & expenses so you have a great overall picture of your business’s performance.

The app allows you to import income and expenses from external sources, choose between one-time and recurring items, and project future cash flow based on previous payments.

You can test it out with a 30-day free trial, after which it’s only $14/month for up to 3 accounts, 3 users, and 3GB file storage.

Conclusion

And there you have it — the beginner’s guide to marketing metrics.

This one has been quite a long read, so let’s take a moment to quickly recap the post in a few bullet points:

The five major categories of metrics:

1. Traffic — look at the big picture, but don’t ignore the narrow-scope metrics like acquisition and engagement indicators
2. Email — always track open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates
3. Conversions — investigate the best sources of low-cost, high-value conversions
4. Customer activity — track how your customer interacts with your business through social media, email, and your website so you know how to get more value out of each one
5. Bottom line — carefully account for your revenues, costs, and overall profit

And the best tools for each type of metric:

1. Traffic — Google Analytics, Clicky, Mixpanel, KISSmetrics
2. Email — Mailchimp, Vero
3. Conversions — Google Content Experiments, VWO
4. Customer activity — (use fully-featured CRMs) ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft
5. Bottom line – Baremetrics (for SaaS companies), Pulse

Remember: all of these types analytics are critical for your business. You’ll never achieve the full potential of marketing metrics without using all of the above in conjunction.

It’s time to get tracking!

How do you use marketing metrics to grow your business? Do you have any tools you’d like to recommend? Leave your comments below!