Old-fashioned marketing campaigns are quickly becoming a thing of the past as customers and merchants prefer the efficiency and convenience of digital marketing. While you may be relieved that you no longer have to make cold calls or advertise in your local newspaper, these methods were a little easier for retailers to track.
Today, as you’re likely juggling multiple channels, segmented audiences, personalized content, and several other discrepancies, it can be overwhelming to know which metrics to monitor. If you’re looking to revamp your ads campaigns, you can save yourself from future headaches by focusing on these 5 key metrics first:
1. Content Performance
Jodi Harris, director of editorial content and creation at the Content Marketing Institute, states that, “It’s a good idea to establish sound measurement practices from the start of every program, enabling you to track, analyze, and optimize your content’s performance on a continual basis.” Although it might take up to 18 months before you start noticing patterns and trends with your content, you can easily begin analyzing the effectiveness of your content by considering the following:
- Tracking new vs. returning users.
- Blog comments, likes, shares, inbound links, etc.
- Finding the “original lead” that brought customers to your site for the first time.
- Page views and time spent on site.
- Percentage of customers subscribed to and/or following your brand.
2. Lead Conversion
Tracking your content performance actually goes hand-in-hand with lead conversion. Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo, reports that roughly 40% of the company’s customers initially engaged with the brand through their content. However, lead conversion doesn’t end there.
The idea behind lead conversion is to collect data from the very first time a customer interacts with an ad campaign until they either disengage or become a customer. Tracking this metric allows you to see where any “problem areas” lie in your marketing campaign, such as potentially confusing CTA buttons or a slow checkout process. As you begin to notice where potential customers leave your site, you can develop hypotheses and start implementing various tests to reduce the amount of lost customers. It may take some trial and error, especially when it comes to mobile optimization, but it’ll be well worth it in the end when your sales increase!
3. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
You can track click-through-rate, or CTR, on specific webpages or whenever you run a paid ad campaign. On your website, you might track the percentage of visitors that sign up for your email newsletter, subscribe to your blog, or complete some other desired action. Meanwhile, you can test the effectiveness of your Facebook or Google ads when you compare the number of people who saw the ad to those who clicked on the ad.
If your CTR is high, that means you’re doing a great job catering to your audience’s wants and needs! However, if your CTR is low, author and marketing expert Neil Patel suggests these strategies that are most likely to appeal to consumers:
- Focus on long-tail keywords.
- Include images or symbols for a more eye-catching CTA.
- Test out different titles on social media.
- Optimize your URL formats.
- Localize your content.
4. Bounce Rate
If your conversion rates are low and your SEO strategies don’t seem to be helping your cause, it might be eye-opening to monitor your site’s bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to the amount of people who quickly leave your site after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate might mean that:
- Your loading speeds are too slow.
- Your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
- The content is difficult to read.
- They can’t navigate the site easily.
- Your keywords aren’t clear enough to browsers.
- Your online store theme/layout needs an upgrade.
5. Social Media Engagement
Don’t just look at your follower count on social media! What really matters on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is the number of times people interact with your content. Even if you don’t have thousands of loyal followers, you can still reach a massive audience when others feel motivated to tag your brand and share your posts on their own pages.
Most importantly, when you keep tabs on the types of content your followers enjoy the most, you can incorporate more of those effective elements into your campaigns. For example, some brands have gained hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers simply by appealing to their target market’s sense of humor. No matter what your business specializes in, you can (and should!) feel free to share funny stories, “behind-the-scenes” looks inside your company, and other personal and relatable content.
