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.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Metrics: Tracking marketing metrics is crucial for a successful strategy.
- Big-Picture Traffic Stats: These stats are often overestimated and don’t always translate to profit.
- Traffic Source Analysis: Understanding where your traffic comes from can optimize marketing efforts.
- Cost Per Visitor: Analyzing cost per visitor helps in budget allocation.
- Engagement Metrics: Metrics like average time on site and bounce rate indicate visitor engagement.
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
- 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the most important marketing metrics to track?
Key marketing metrics include traffic sources, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and engagement metrics like bounce rate and average time on site. Platforms like Buildfire make it easy to track these metrics effectively.
How can I improve my website’s bounce rate?
Improving bounce rate involves enhancing user experience, optimizing page load times, and ensuring relevant content. Tools like Buildfire allow businesses to create engaging and fast-loading mobile apps that can help reduce bounce rates.
Why is cost per visitor an important metric?
Cost per visitor helps businesses understand the efficiency of their marketing spend. By analyzing this metric, companies can allocate budgets more effectively to channels that provide the best return on investment.
How do I track traffic sources effectively?
Tracking traffic sources involves using analytics tools to identify where your visitors are coming from. Buildfire, for instance, offers integrations with various analytics platforms to streamline this process.
What tools can help with tracking marketing metrics?
There are numerous tools available for tracking marketing metrics, including Google Analytics, SEMrush, and platforms like Buildfire that offer comprehensive analytics solutions.
