Behind every successful company is a team that understands one very important skill: how to use available data to grow their business. As more and more entrepreneurs and businesses enter the world with each passing day, it is more important than ever to keep up with the competition by understanding how to analyze data and implement it into an effective marketing strategy for your business. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when trying to get your business off the ground, especially in the tech/manufacturing industry, is trying to guess what your audience is looking for based on what you think they want, instead of knowing what your audience wants based on what the data tells you about their interests. There are endless data points at your disposal in order to effectively target your audience, but at the top of the pile are marketing metrics. Further below, you will find six marketing metrics you can use to start improving your business through effective digital marketing campaigns. 

But first, what are marketing metrics? 

What Are Marketing Metrics

Marketing metrics are the lifeblood of a company. Also known as a Marketing Key Performance Indicator (KPI), a marketing metric refers to the measurable value that shows how effective a particular campaign is performing across all marketing channels.

Think of it this way: you cannot possibly provide an optimal experience for every online consumer at every point of contact. What you can do, however, is gain insight into the overall online consumer experience by using marketing metrics to increase efforts in areas that will benefit your business the most and adjusting or decreasing resources spent in areas that are not producing enough. Marketers can use metrics to show the value they are providing. As a business owner, you can have greater peace of mind allocating a bigger budget to your marketing team when the metrics can demonstrate the value of their efforts. The potential applications of marketing metrics to help a given business grow are exponential, and how far they will take your business is up to you.

With all the available data at your disposal, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to start. Identifying the most useful metrics that will have the greatest positive impact on your marketing campaigns can be difficult because not all businesses are the same. Nonetheless, there are a handful of universally beneficial marketing metrics that will be useful for you to become familiar with.

6 Marketing Metrics to Help Grow Your Business 

Utilize these six marketing metrics to help grow your business:

Impression Share: This metric is used to determine how much visibility a brand is receiving on a given channel as a percentage of the total number of impressions it can acquire. Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed to someone, regardless of whether that someone clicked on it or not. Thus, if you run an ad that receives 40 impressions out of 100 total potential impressions, your impression share for that ad would be 40%.

There are a number of ways to improve your impression share:

• Increase your campaign budget: Your budget is a major factor when it comes to impression shares. That is because your budget controls how regularly your ad is displayed. The more often your ad is shown, the greater the percentage of total impressions it can reach.

• Increase your bid: Whenever there is ad space available, Google Ads runs an auction. By placing a bid for your ad, you are placing it in the running for that auction. The platform will allow you to bid for your ads based on what makes the most sense for your business (clicks, impressions, conversions, etc.). This way, you will only pay when someone performs the action your campaign is targeting. Raising your bid can improve the likelihood that your ad will show for that available ad space.

• Improve ad quality: Sometimes the issue with a low impression share has nothing to do with the amount of money you are spending or who your target audience is, but the quality of the ad itself. The key to a high-quality ad is giving users what they’re looking for and delivering on your promises. 

Bounce Rate: When someone visits a single page of your website and leaves immediately without any further action, this is called a “bounce.” Bounce rates are detrimental to your conversion rate and can indicate a poor user experience and decrease sales. When a new lead makes their way to your site, you want them to stick around. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to look around, browse other pages, and ultimately buy or sign up for something. If your consumers do “bounce,” it indicates that they did not find anything interesting or useful, and this may be a sign that you need to change things about your site to become more relevant to your consumers.

To improve your bounce rate, try these helpful tips:

• Define the bounce rate: This may seem obvious, but you want to make sure whatever tool you are using to track the bounce rate on your landing pages is set to a short duration like 10 to 30 seconds. If you accidentally set the duration higher, or it is set higher by default, your high bounce rate may include users who are actually engaged in your content and find it useful.

• Provide relevant content consistently: Creating quality content consistently is key. When you provide users with useful content that informs and engages them, they will stick around for a while and see what else they can find on your site. When you do this consistently, consumers will be more inclined to interact with future content.

• Use calls to action (CTAs): Incorporate CTAs to get users to read more of your content. One way to do this is by providing links to related articles. If you provide high enough quality content, users are more likely to want to click links to related materials, thus boosting your site traffic.

Click-through Rate (CTR): Not to be confused with conversion rate, CTR refers to how many times a particular ad is clicked on as a percentage of the number of impressions. So, if out of 100 impressions, 4 people clicked on your ad, the CTR for that ad would be 4%. CTRs for ads are typically low so 4% or higher is a good sign that it is relevant and engaging.

The important thing to do with CTRs is understand that getting someone to click is just getting their foot in the door; the next step is providing an experience that matches with the ad or link that got them there. If your ad promises a free manufacturing software service and the first thing that pops up on your site when someone clicks through to your site is a subscription form that asks for their credit card info, you are not aligning the ad with the experience and you are likely to see an increase in your bounce rate as a result.

To boost your click-through rate:

• Analyze your keyword choices: One of the biggest influences on your click-through rate is your keyword choices. Producing quality content and identifying your target audience will not have much effect on boosting your brand if you do not even show up on search engine results pages (SERPs). This really boils down to relevance. The best way to stay relevant is to ensure that the keywords you choose to target with your ads are on par with what the ad is promoting and think about the experience the user clicking through to your site will have.

• Define your audience more specifically: The tighter the parameters you set for the audience your ad is targeting, the more qualified your users will be. This will in turn boost your click-through rate and save you money on ad spending.

• Choose the best times of day: Running ads 24/7 is neither cost-effective nor will it help your CTR. Analyze your CTR per hour to find when your audience is online and dial down your campaign during times of low activity.

Average Time on Page: A sometimes overlooked data point is the average time a person spends on a page. You might think that the more time a visitor spends on a given page, the better, but this is not the case. While a short amount of time spent is not a good indicator, too much time spent on a page can mean that the content is too complex or that the user is idle. There is a sweet spot of about 2-3 minutes that suggests the user is engaged and finds the information on that page to be informative and interesting.

To improve the average time a person spends on your web page:

• Provide high quality content (again!): It may seem repetitive, but it is true. Providing content that is informative, engaging and relevant to your brand on a consistent basis is one of the best ways to keep your customers scrolling.

• Make it scannable and easy to read: Today, most people want their information in a quick and easy to digest format. Opt for copy that is easy to scan like summaries, tables of contents, bullet points and lists in place of lengthy descriptions and flowery language. Including a CTA will also capture your reader’s attention.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): CPL refers to the amount you spend to acquire a new lead through a campaign. It is calculated by dividing how much you spent on a marketing channel by the number of leads you acquired from it. For example, if you spent $1,000 on Facebook Ads in a given period of time and you acquired 10 leads, your CPL would be $100. CPL can be used to determine how to grow your customer base. After all, before people become customers, they often must become leads first.

Ideally, you want to spend as little and acquire as many leads as possible. Knowing your CPL will equip you with the information you need to maximize your budget and target the lowest-cost marketing channels to drive up your customer base and convert more leads and sales. 

To improve your CPL, try:

• Adding or removing keywords: You want to find an ideal keyword set for your ads to target that will bring in the highest number of relevant users as possible. To do so, you will want to monitor your keyword statistics closely, remove the ones that are not performing well, and add keywords that are similar to the ones that are doing well. A good way to make this easier is to use one keyword per ad so you can turn off the poor-performing ones right away and to keep a list of the negative keywords to exclude from future campaigns.

• Use long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that return fewer but more relevant results than their more generic counterparts. For example, if you search “rice” in Google, you will get over a billion results, but if you search “low-calorie brown rice brands” you will get about 60 million results. If you were marketing a low-calorie brown rice brand, targeting the latter in your ads might yield fewer results than people who just searched “rice,” but they will be much more qualified and relevant and therefore more likely to become customers.

Conversion Rate: A high click-through rate does not necessarily mean those clicks result in sales. For that marketing metric, you want to look at the conversion rate, the percentage of clicks that result in actual sales.

Conversion rate can be improved by: 

• Making your processes hassle-free: One of the reasons users do not convert into customers is because a process is too much of a hassle to complete. An example of this is if you have lengthy forms for them to fill out. If someone goes to sign up for your newsletter, they are likely to get part of the way through it and just give up if its super long. That is a potential lead/sale you worked hard to achieve that just slipped away for something as simple as a sign-up form being too long. Eliminate hassle from your users’ experiences and the results will follow. 

• A strong, positive online presence: Your online presence and reputation are major factors when it comes to your conversion rate. In fact, 89% of customers will not take action until they read reviews. It is important to include positive reviews and testimonials on your site to boost your credibility, gain the trust of your users, and keep them from having to go to a third-party site to see what people are saying about their experiences doing business with you. 

Bottom Line 

Marketing metrics are more than just arbitrary stats and figures. They are powerful indicators of where your business stands and where it is heading. Use the six metrics listed in this article to start gaining insight into the critical points in your sales/marketing pipeline that may be holding you back from growing your business to its full potential. 

For more tried-and-true marketing solutions in the technology and manufacturing sector, come check out our blog. Need branding, messaging, or strategy solutions for your business? Schedule a call or send us a message today! 

About Millennium Agency 

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman-led boutique creative branding, storytelling/messaging and digital marketing strategy firm with a passion for accelerating your business growth. By uniting creative branding and data analytics, our expert teams combine your vision with our marketing expertise and methodology to deliver exceptional results. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, and a worldwide presence, the professionals at Millennium Agency would like to learn more about your business.  Visit www.mill.agency or book time here.