The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Metrics: Designing, Implementing and Tracking

Did you know that 89% of successful marketers use strategic metrics to boost their business? Well, it’s true.

If you’re looking to increase your marketing ROI, it’s important that you look into and assess marketing metrics. This concretely measures how effective your campaigns are so that you can optimize your efforts.

But what are marketing metrics, exactly? How can you design, implement, and track important numbers? Read on to answer these questions and to jump-start your next marketing strategy.

What Are Marketing Metrics?

At their core, marketing metrics are a quantifiable method of tracking the performance of an advertising campaign. They serve as a sort of measuring tool so that experts can gauge what they need to do to increase their visibility and sales.

Marketing professionals use metrics to monitor and record the progress of any given campaign. They also measure the progress and determine how it can be improved. The end result is that marketers can concretely see their ROI and what areas must be improved to boost it.

Marketers must consider their goals for a given campaign and select the metrics that best showcase this goal. They can then track how successful they are at meeting objectives.

They also can see where they were unsuccessful and quantify the failing parts of a campaign. Quantifiable metrics lead to well-thought-through actionable items.

Types of Marketing Metrics

The metrics that your business looks into will depend on its objectives. However, there are some common KPIs that you need to track.

The first is cost per acquisition (CPA). This metric shows how much you need to spend to get one new customer for your business. This metric is one of the most important because it helps you to allocate your funds and set a successful marketing budget.

Cost per lead (CPL) is intimately linked to your CPA. This metric measures how much it will cost to obtain a new lead via a full campaign and/or individual channel. This lets marketers better create realistic goals and track ROI so that they can allocate funds better.

Click-through rates showcase the number of times your site or ad generates clicks. It compares it to the number of impressions to show how engaging a page or PPC advertisement is. Marketers can emulate the ads with higher click rates in the future to boost their ROI.

Note that these are simply some of the most common content marketing metrics. There are dozens more. Each business needs to examine which KPIs are most relevant to their goals and look into those metrics.

Why Are Metrics Important?

There are a lot of reasons that tracking metrics is important. Understanding metrics allow marketers to:

• Understand which marketing channels yield the highest ROI
• Allocate funds to channels with a greater ROI (PPC ads, social media marketing, SEO, web design, web development, etc)
• Increase overall results by honing in on the most effective marketing strategies
• Understand sales cycles more thoroughly
• Set long-term goals based on actual metrics (derived from short-term goals)
• Provide themselves with an easy way to conceptualize numbers (by creating visual data and analyzing it)

Ultimately, this lets experts make overall better-informed decisions regarding marketing budgets and efforts. Less time and money will be wasted on low-ROI channels.

Designing Metrics

Now that you understand what marketing metrics are, you likely are wondering how you can design some that can help your business grow. This process is heavily dependent on your business and its goals. It will alter depending on exactly what you want to measure and accomplish.

That’s why the first step in the metrics design process is establishing brand objectives. Marketers have the tough task of constantly balancing both the day-to-day possibilities of your brand and the bigger picture of where you’re going. Marketers should look into possible initiatives and determine which ones fit in with your brand message.

It’s important for these professionals to constantly remain focused. After all, there are hundreds of ways to market a brand with both inbound and outbound strategies. There are only a few that will work with your unique business.

Market only on platforms that will reach your target demographic. Young people tend not to be on social media like Facebook nearly as much as they use Instagram or TikTok. Investing in a TikTok campaign might work towards your goal of ensnaring this target audience while Facebook Ads would yield a low ROI.

Make sure that you’ve thought about how every step of a marketing campaign works towards your long-haul goals. If something doesn’t, that’s a sign that you should cut it from your strategy. It won’t have a high ROI and funds can be better allocated elsewhere.

Make sure that all content directs towards an ultimate goal (such as making a sale or generating a lead). Link ads to lead magnet forms and your online shop. Encourage people to reach out with strong CTAs.

Create Goals for Campaigns

Once you know the big-picture goals of your business, it’s time to break these goals down into smaller ones. Specifically, you need to come up with concrete objectives for the marketing campaign that you’re planning.

Create a plan that showcases the reasons for and timeframe of your campaign. This will let everyone involved see where the campaign should be so that you’re on track.

If you fail to set campaign goals, you’ll have no sight of what you should be doing. You won’t be able to figure out where you’re successful and where you have room for improvement. Since these facts- these metrics- are essential for future success, goals are critical to any marketing campaign.

Determine Your Metrics

Once you set goals for your next campaign, you can finally get into the actual process of designing marketing metrics.

Determining your KPIs based on your goals is critical. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are quantifiable performance measurement tools that marketers use. They can track how well a campaign is doing throughout its life cycle.

Examples of KPIs might include:

• The engagement figures for a Google Ads campaign
• The clicks vs impressions of an ad on Instagram
• How many new customers you have been working with since the beginning of the campaign
• Customer retention rates
• Monthly visits to your website
• Number of times people downloaded more information on a product

Marketing campaigns should have about 3-5 KPIs that measure the most important parts of their performance. They should be based on both short-term and long-term goals. Meeting KPI objectives when looking at your metrics is the #1 measure of campaign success.

However, you also will need to come up with supplementary metrics that are important to your campaign. You will use your KPIs to determine what these additional metrics should look like. They don’t always directly impact the brand or your business’s bottom line but instead work to achieve KPI goals.

For example, say that your main KPI is to sign on 100 new customers during the span of a marketing campaign. Generating more visits to your website might be a supplementary metric. Clicks alone aren’t your end goal but they could quickly lead to sales.

Implementing Metrics

Implementing metrics is the process of analyzing them and using them in future marketing campaigns. It generally refers to the practical ways that metrics are used after their collection.

The first step towards doing this is getting the right tools. Appropriate applications go a long way. Many marketers, however, struggle to integrate all of these applications. This makes sense since multiple metrics must be tracked.

You’ll need something to see when direct emails have been opened vs when recipients bounce. You’ll need another piece of tech to measure what keywords created PPC conversion. It’s tricky to try to use all of these metrics together when you have 3 or 4 apps open.

Luckily, there is a solution: Swell’s all-in-one marketing application. You can send emails and SMS texts in addition to seeing when people click them (and when they don’t). You can also use drag-and-drop software within the application to design visually appealing newsletters, social media posts, and more.

You can also use the app to track leads and view new business opportunities. Combine this with analytics tracking and you’ll be ready to go.

Collect and Visualize Data

Once you use your application as well as Google Analytics to capture metric data, you’ll need a way to easily visualize it. Looking at a list of numbers will go nowhere. You need a way to conceptualize trends and actually assess the information presented to you.

Graph out the information presented to you in an easy-to-read format. You don’t need to input each data point by hand- in fact, this is a huge waste of time and resources. There are tons of ways that you can automate the creation of charts, graphs, and more.

Automation also makes the metrics that you’re looking at more accurate. It allows for data to be standardized so that marketers can perform their jobs more easily. Standardization also means that multiple marketing professionals can look at the same data and interpret it accurately.

Measure and Share Metrics

Once you have an easy-to-interpret visual data layout, you can then measure your KPIs and secondary metrics. Make note of your success. Look into how much above or below the mark you are and adjust your campaign accordingly.

If you’ve exceeded a metric, that’s awesome. Make note of how much you excelled by and aim to meet or exceed those numbers next time. Push yourself to do as well as possible.

On the flip side, note numbers and percentages for metrics that you missed the mark on. You can then assess why you didn’t meet your goals and determine how you can do better. Reallocate funds, time, and energy into resolutions for these challenges.

Tracking Metrics

In addition to measuring metrics in the short term and reevaluating your campaigns, you also will need to engage in long-term tracking. The first step towards this is to share all metrics and their visual data with your team.

Make sure that everyone on your marketing team is on the same page. Communicate with company higher-ups about what is happening. Tell others how you plan to optimize your next campaign and get more input about what you should do.

Asking for second, third, and fourth opinions means more ideas and more innovation. It means greater success.

Look at the Long Term

Integrating metrics means looking at a chart of your progress for one campaign and using them in your next. It means understanding the ways that you can use the numbers from one campaign in the future.

To track your metrics, you’ll need to look at data from multiple campaigns. Determine where reallocation was successful vs where it made no difference. If something still isn’t working despite manipulating time and resources towards it, you might need to scrap it.

Long-term tracking helps you to come up with a long-term battle plan. You can see the areas that consistently have a high ROI and push those forward. You also can look at your target audience and what they want to see so that you can make campaigns more appealing to them.

Upgrade Your Technology

Marketing applications also should be updated and upgraded over time. This means talking to professionals and getting ideas on how you can better use technology. Upgrading your integrated app to a higher-level plan may be the boost that your next marketing campaign needs.

You also can assess the software tools that you’re using. Is the software running smoothly? Are there any additional plugins or applications that could make your job easier?

Do your research and answer these questions. Better technological solutions always make for a better marketing campaign.

Optimize Your Marketing Strategy Today

Now that you know all about marketing metrics, it’s time to begin designing, implementing, and tracking them. Our experts are committed to helping you control your business with a single application.

SwellSystem’s cloud-based all-in-one application integrates multiple processes including invoicing, goal-tracking, and digital marketing. Sign up for a free trial of our services to streamline your business processes today.