Bonafide Marketing Genius

10 Marketing Metrics and Processes That Can Help You Analyze Your Performance

Marketing is a never-ending search for metrics and processes that can help you prove and improve your performance. To that end, we have compiled a list of 10 marketing metrics and processes that can help you analyze your performance and figure out what you’re doing right, and what you could be doing better.

1. Engagement Rate

This metric measures the percentage of site visitors who engage with your content at least once. Engagement can be defined as any activity that is measurable and allows you to track and analyze the behavior of your audience. Some examples of measures that you could use to calculate engagement rates are:

  • Logged in (i.e. visited the home page or one of its sub-pages)
  • Opened a product listing page or call to action (CTA)
  • Created an account on your site
  • Liked or shared one of your posts
  • Asked a question in the forum
  • Subscribed to a newsletter
  • Made a purchase
  • Viewed media (e.g. videos, infographics)
  • Added your website to your social media account (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)
  • Called a business or tried to reach out to a business by email or phone
  • Voted in an online poll

There are a few things to note about this metric. First, make sure that you are tracking the right customers. You don’t want to mistake website visitors for active customers, because that could seriously hurt your numbers. You can prevent this by adding a bit of code to your website that tracks the login status of each visitor. Second, make sure that you are measuring the right actions. Just because a visitor has visited your website once doesn’t mean that they’ve engaged with your content. You can use your website’s analytics tool to find out what actions drove the most traffic to specific pages, and then you can focus your efforts on encouraging more of those actions. Finally, make sure to look at the data with a critical eye and try to understand what it is trying to tell you. The more you know, the better you can perform and improve.

2. Lead Generation Rate

Lead generation refers to the percentage of website traffic that converted into confirmed sales or leads. The goal of lead generation is to generate as many leads as possible through various online and offline marketing activities. To calculate your lead generation rate, you will need to make a few key determinations. First, what is the industry of the products or services that you offer? Next, which lead-generating techniques do you use, and which ones do you need to improve upon? Third, what is your conversion rate —that is, the percentage of people who become leads—and how can you increase it?

Once you have that established, you can begin calculating your lead generation rate:

  • Total Website Visits
  • Potential Sales
  • Conversion (i.e. The percentage of people who became leads)
  • Cost Per Lead
  • Average Order Value
  • Categories Of Products Or Services
  • Time Since Last Order (i.e. How long has it been since the last purchase?)
  • Shipping Method
  • Payment Method
  • Links To Social Media Accounts

Checking the metrics for your affiliate marketing program is a great way to analyze performance and figure out if you’re making any money or losing money. It’s important to remember that the metrics for affiliate marketing programs will be a little bit different than the ones outlined above. For example, if you promote a discount store, you might want to consider using this metric:

  • Total Visits To Affiliate Marketing Pages
  • Total Earnings (i.e. Sales + Commissions)
  • Lifetime Value (i.e. The dollar amount that each visitor is worth, based on their purchase history)
  • Cost Of Goods Sold (i.e. The dollar amount that each visitor is responsible for, based on the products they’ve viewed)

3. Online Visitor

If you’ve been putting out quality content on a regular basis, then you’ve probably gained a decent amount of organic traffic from people discovering your content through search engines. In today’s world, the amount of traffic that you receive online is greatly influenced by how well you perform in search engine optimization (SEO). To that end, you need to keep in mind a few things in order to optimize your performance and increase your online presence:

  • Create content that is valuable and useful to your target audience
  • Use keywords in your content to naturally attract the right audience
  • Pro-actively engage with audiences through social media and other platforms
  • Monitor and analyze your performance in search engines
  • Consider paying for promoted posts on social media platforms
  • Do your research before buying a word press theme or hiring a freelance writer
  • Don’t be afraid to try new things. While it’s important to have consistent and reliable metrics, it’s also important to be experimental and take a chance on new ideas that might just work.

4. Cost Per Acquisition

This is one of the most important metrics to calculate when you’re deciding how much you should be spending on marketing. It measures the cost of generating a lead, or an opportunity to buy your product or service, against the sale that resulted from that lead. You’ll need to have a clear picture in mind of what an average sale looks like before you begin making cost per acquisition calculations. First, determine the average order value (AOV) for your product or service. Then, take that average and multiply it by your conversion rate. The final result will be your cost per acquisition (CPA). For example, if you sold $5,000 worth of widgets last month and you had a 10% conversion rate, then you would need to spend $500 on average to generate a lead —at which point you would break even.

5. Brand Awareness

Branding is all about creating an identity for your company that is distinct from your competitors. One of the best ways to do this is by measuring brand awareness. Brand awareness is the degree to which your target audience recognizes your brand and associates it with positive feelings. You can do this through any number of means, including:

  • Reputation Management
  • Product Awareness
  • Pricing Strategy
  • Advertising & Publicity
  • Online & Offline Marketing
  • Web Analytics

These are just a few of the metrics and processes that you can use to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Remember, marketing is a search for ever-improving performance and efficiency. With that in mind, make sure to stay focused on the big picture and try to determine what you’re doing right and what you can do better. Then, you can begin working on changing the things that you’re finding lacking.