Proving Marketing Campaign Success with Metrics

Effective digital marketing isn’t magic – it’s a science that involves tracking numbers, analyzing data, and measuring results. Defining the metrics that matter most is foundational to developing successful marketing campaigns.

But digital marketers too often rely on base-level data like lead volume and website traffic. While covering these basics is essential, a more thorough analysis is necessary to gather the crucial insights that will help perfect your marketing plan.

Let’s look at the basics of marketing metrics and KPIs and dive into some of the marketing metrics you should be using to measure your campaigns’ success.

What Are Marketing Metrics?

Marketing metrics are quantifiable data points that help measure the success of a marketing campaign. They show how effectively campaigns are tracking for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and help marketers develop a clear picture of their strategy, continuously optimize it, and plan for the future.

The most appropriate marketing metrics for your business to measure will vary between individual campaigns but will invariably be those that have the most significant impact on your business goals. These are your KPIs.

KPIs could be sales-generated for one campaign but incremental for another. KPIs are one of the most important elements of any campaign, with the ability to provide marketers with a clear picture of how their strategy is fairing. By tracking these KPIs, marketers can see what’s working, what’s not, and make effective adjustments in real-time.

So, not only do marketing metrics help you and your team improve, but they also communicate the value your department provides to the company as a whole in terms that stakeholders can appreciate. This information is critical for everything from annual budgets to headcounts, making marketing metrics essential to the overall health and strategic guidance of any business.

What Are Some of the Most Valuable Marketing Metrics?

Different marketing metrics offer unique insights, and marketers have to be selective about which ones they focus on to determine the success of a campaign. For example, email opens and clicks can show engagement level, while the unsubscribe rate can indicate if audiences find your content interesting and relevant. Ad impressions and video views help measure your campaign reach. Cost-per-action can help you track the efficiency of your campaign.

There are various tools and services out there that can help you organize your metrics, like HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics & Dashboard software. Here are some standard metrics marketers use to make informed decisions about optimizing campaign strategies and inform budgets.

Email Marketing

• Open rate: How many people open your marketing emails. Most commonly expressed as a percentage calculated by dividing the number of email messages opened by the total number of emails sent (excluding those that bounced).
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of subscribers who click a link or image in your email out of the total emails sent.
• Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of users who have unsubscribed or opted out of your mailing list after an email campaign.

Digital Marketing

• Click-through rate: The ratio of users who click on a specific ad to the total number of viewers.
• Cost-per-action (CPA): A tracking and pricing model referring to a user completing a specified action, such as a form submission, download, sale, or click.
• Impressions: How many individual times an ad is viewed by a visitor or displayed on a web page.

Social Media

• Followers: A high follower count is great for brand credibility, but your follower growth rate is a better metric for how a business is growing its reach.
• Impressions and reach: Impressions are the total number of people your content is visible to, while reach is the number of people who choose to see your content and engage with it through likes, comments, or shares.
• Engagement rate: How much interaction social content earns relative to reach or other metrics, such as reactions, likes, comments, shares, saves, direct messages, mentions, click-throughs, and more, depending on the platform.

Website

• Website traffic data: This shows trends in your visitors’ browsing behavior.
• Page views: Counted every time a web browser loads one of your website pages, including refreshes.
• Sessions: Tracks the interactions a visitor has across your site, including page views, form submissions, and button clicks.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a particular page and then leave the site.
• Entrances: The number of website sessions initiated on a particular page.
• Exit rate: The percentage of sessions ended on a particular page.

Content

• Traffic: Whether it’s blogs, landing pages, guides, whitepapers, case studies, or anything else, content traffic is the lifeblood of any digital marketing strategy. This information helps better understand where traffic is coming from geographically and online, what they’re looking for, and what they find valuable as you continue to optimize a marketing campaign.
• Downloads: How often users are downloading a piece of content.
• Shares: The amount of times users share your content with others. More shares indicate that users are finding value in your offerings.
• Qualified leads: How many users have filled out and submitted a lead-generation form.

Sales

• Follow-up time: The average time it takes for a sales rep to follow up with a lead after self-identifying through a form submission, content download, etc.
• Sales call volume: Provides insights into the overall bucket of calls handled in a given period.
• Sales call tracking: Monitor calls-per-hour, call outcomes, times-per-day, conversions, calls by landing page, first-time callers, and more.

Revenue

• This is the amount of money you make on top of all your expenses and the primary statistic you want to be happy to report to executives and stakeholders!

SEO

• Keyword rankings: A leading indicator of the ability to improve on existing search rankings or rank for new keywords.
• Keyword search volume: The number of times a specific keyword is searched for within a particular time frame.
• Organic traffic: Traffic you earn from appearing in the search engine results pages without paying for placement.

Measure the Right Marketing Metrics, the Right Way

Sure, you can measure countless data points, but it’s equally important to know what to measure and why you’re measuring it. It’s often said that when businesses focus too much on the nitty-gritty of guidelines, processes, and metrics, employees struggle to do their best work.

Take the pressure off and gain newfound clarity on what’s most important to you and your business by getting help from dedicated professionals who work with these statistics every single day. From web activity and conversion analysis to aggregated industry intelligence, Sagefrog puts marketing analytics and attribution strategies in place to identify what’s working, optimize your buyer’s journey, and close the loop on your program’s success. Learn more about taking your business further with effective marketing metrics.

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