The Marketing Metrics That You Shouldn’t be tracking

There are numerous online metrics that marketers should be following through their websites if they want to develop a successful business. It is no longer enough to simply count the number of followers or likes that you get on social media, organizations need to know more about how their marketing budget translates into memberships, sales, and revenue. In other words – is your marketing changing the bottom line?

There are so many different ideas about which analytics are the best ones to track when you want to assess the effectiveness of your marketing scheme. Unique visitors, click-through rates, likes, and shares – but how do you determine the ones that really matter. Which ones are going to showcase the true results of your marketing efforts?

Email Marketing Metrics

So you have a list of email addresses longer than you can cope with – that doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. You might have twenty thousand contacts, but if no-one opens your emails or clicks through to the websites and links contained within, your email list means nothing. Stop focusing on making bigger lists, and instead start tracking your click-throughs.

Quality over quantity. Instead of simply adding more names to your contact list, look at the interactions that you’re already having. Click through rates are important because they inform you just how often your emails are actually having the desired impact. Your emails are intended to have people open them, and follow the instructions within, whether that’s to register for something, visit your website, or read your article.

Social Media Metrics

Too many companies focus entirely on tracking their followers and fans. Not so long ago, companies jumped on the idea of Twitter and Facebook with gusto, but it may not matter exactly how many likes you actually have. Instead, you should be focusing on measuring your audience reach. How far is your content traveling through shares and other mediums? How many interactions are you generating from the things that you post? Look at the impression you’re making. If you have thousands of followers but no-one is interested enough to share your content or lead to conversions, then the amount of fans you appear to have is useless.

Remember, the quality of the content you post will go a long way towards achieving the kind of pure, organic reach that you need to convert simple fans into customers or buyers.

Website Visitors and Visits

Traffic is great, but effective traffic is better. Finding out that you have so many unique visitors a month doesn’t really help, as the numbers are too broad. Your analysis doesn’t differentiate between the traffic that turns into conversions, and the traffic that clicked onto your page accidentally. A better metric to track than visitors is sources and performance.

With a bit of luck, you should already have an analytics program in place, such as Google Analytics, that can be used to track your website performance. Find out the percentage of visitors that turn into leads according to the channel they came from, and which pages are performing best at converting your visitors into leads.

Conclusion

Metrics are important, but it’s useless to waste your time tracking the ones that aren’t going to have an impact. At the end of the day, you need to measure the factors that are actually making a difference to your bottom line. If what you’re doing isn’t converting visitors into leads, then you can’t be sure your marketing is effective – in fact, the chances are it isn’t.