Make sure you are measuring the most important online marketing metrics. This seems like an obvious statement; however, most businesses are drowning in data and forget to prioritise the most important things. This article reviews the 3 most important metrics for a business – these are the metrics that need to be dashboarded.
There are huge number of metrics available in the world of online marketing. Facebook Ads alone has over 50 individual metrics available. Google Ads has well over 100 and let’s not even think about the number available via Google Analytics. And of course it is so tempting to dashboard as much of this data as humanly possible. This is a temptation which should be resisted at all costs. In fact, the fewer metrics the better. Management are busy people with many day-to-day challenges to face in running a business. The online marketing dashboard that they receive by email every week or month should be capable of interpretation within a few seconds. If it isn’t it will soon be just another piece of information that is lost in communication. This article review the top 5 metrics that management should review on a regular basis via their dashboard. These key metrics are easy to interpret and and make decisions on the basis of.
Metric Number One: Website Visitors by Channel
Without website visitors there won’t be any conversions. There wouldn’t be anyone to complete a contact form or start a live chat. The role of your online channels is to drive quality traffic to the website – if the number of visitors is dropping over time then these channels aren’t performing optimally. The total number of website visitors should be displayed at the top of the dashboard along with its relative percentage increase or decrease over time. This is the first indicator of a significant change. If there is a marked increase or decrease in traffic it points to a change in performance of one or more of your channels.
There should be a table showing the website visitors by channel indicating how these numbers have changed over time. This will identify which channel is causing the dip or spike in performance. This information alone is enough to trigger a request for more detailed feedback from the marketing team.
Metric Number Two: Conversion Rate by Channel
Your website is there to generate leads, right? So it goes without saying that the dashboard will contain a metric for the number of conversions generated. This will include amongst others, enquiry form completions, chats started, documents downloads, e-Zine subscriptions, clicks to call and clicks to email. Each of these conversions should be represented as columns in a table whilst the channels should be the individual channels. This will show the total number of conversions and the conversion rate per channel. This will provide a snapshot of how each channel is contributing to your key business objectives. Over time it will create a model, where for example you can estimate how many enquiry form completions will be generated by your social media channels in any given month. Having created many tables for clients over the last 5 years, we have a clear idea of what conversion rates should be achieved by businesses in different sectors.
Metric Number Three: Cost Per Conversion
OK – so not all traffic is paid traffic but when it is, it is all the more to measure it. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are two of the most popular pay per click platforms used by businesses today. However, if conversion tracking hasn’t been set up correctly on these platforms they can provide to be extremely expensive. Check out the table59 services for deciding on important conversions and how to implement tracking code. Once you have followed this advice correctly you will have access to the cost per conversion data for your paid platforms. And once you have this data, it becomes invaluable. You will (or should) have an idea of how much you are prepared to pay for a lead – it becomes your objective to drive your cost per conversion underneath that number – and once you have done that you are close to building a highly effective lead generation model!
These metrics are great starting points for any business. In fact, without access to this information it is difficult to run an effective online marketing campaign. table59 specialises in assisting clients to build the correct metrics and to implement them across all channels.
