Are you keeping on top of your metrics?

So, you recently launched an engaging and innovative marketing campaign that you’re sure will be a success.

The only way to truly measure your progress is through metrics, as this provides marketers with quantifiable data. Moreover, by setting up the right metrics, you can refine your strategy over time to maximise its chances of working well.

There are a lot of figures out there, from Google Analytics to Facebook Insights, and so finding the right ones and monitoring them effectively could be what sets you apart from the competition.

Traffic: Stay clear of your own journey

Brands need to make sure they are only tracking the right traffic to the portals. Kenny Davies, senior content optimisation specialist at Axonn Media, said that this is especially true for small or new sites, as counting their own traffic can make their data misleading. „As you move around your site testing pages at random, you can forget these visits are being tracked just like anybody else’s. If you refresh a page a few times, this can really push up the page views,“ he stated. Luckily there’s an easy solution to the problem, as provided Google Analytics is set up to exclude the IP addresses of any computers that are used for development and testing work, you’ll get a true reading of how many people are actually visiting your site.

Revenue

Marketing companies have to set themselves some business goals when it comes to revenue, as they need a benchmark to properly gauge success. This figure should be created by looking at last year’s numbers, trends, seasonality, and pacing. By monitoring this figure day-to-day, you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times, and whether additional promotion is required to meet end of quarter or year targets.

Churn rate

No one likes to lose customers, but it is part and parcel of business. The key to maintaining success is identifying the underlying patterns behind the fluctuations. For example, a price hike could lead to a drop off in the number of customers to your site, while it could also be linked to a competitor introducing a short-term promotion. But unless you monitor the statistics, you’re unlikely to have a firm idea about what went wrong to make sure you can prevent such a problem from happening again.

*Don’t jump to conclusions using small samples *

It’s easy to get carried away by a very positive trend in a small data set. If a certain type of article is attracting much more traffic, the temptation will be to concentrate on similar-themed content. However, this could just be a red herring, and so it is a much better idea to base any decisions about strategy on data patterns monitored over a significant period of time that give a true reflection of your success.

*Social media reach *

All marketers are trying to tap into the power of social media, as it offers a superb platform for interacting with a huge number of potential customers. Marketers should be focusing on real engagement, including shares and comments, as this demonstrates a degree of effort on the part of the customer. While likes are indicative of support for a brand, it is more of a broad brush stroke measure and does not necessarily mean there will be a conversion – for example, some customers will like thousands of pages on Facebook. Moreover, if you use social media channels as customer service tools, make sure complaints are moved off-site as soon as possible and dealt with in an effective manner.