The Marketing Metrics You Need To Measure

This list can grow and grow until you are snowed under with a plethora of metrics that are irrelevant to your business. That is why we have collated three marketing metrics that you really need to be aware of, focusing on, monitoring and measuring; Attribution, Engagement and Click-Through-Rates.

Attribution:

Attribution plays an important role in your marketing efforts. But what does attribution mean? It refers back to the customer journey, which before the rise of technology and mobile devices was quite linear, whereas now consumers have an overabundance of available information that can help assist in the decision that they make in their purchasing behaviour. The journey consists of three stages, the awareness stage, consideration and decision stage. Attribution determines the role that any given channel plays in the influence of the journey and shows every stage of their eCommerce journey.
Over time, algorithmic attribution has become a best practice for data-driven marketers and companies. Instead of assuming which channels are successful and which are not, you can find out exactly by using algorithmic attribution.

Why is Marketing Attribution Important for Your Business?

When starting up a marketing campaign attribution allows you to predict your customer’s journey in order to answer their questions, provide them with their desired product and share all the essential information without them having to ask for it.
There are many ways that visitors can land on your eCommerce website, these are all then given a specific pinpoint for when they first interacted with your store. The attribution can be referred back to in numerous ways, including first touch and last touch attribution, the last touch being the final pinpoint that the visitor made before converting. Attribution pinpoints can refer to organic results, display ads, social ads, or any element that a visitor sees that may get them to visit your site. Which allows you to analyse where your campaign can improve.
Therefore, it is an important metric that you should focus on analysing in 2017 as it can help confirm the areas of your business that are not converting as well as they should and the areas which are performing particularly well with those first touch attributions.

Engagement:

What is it?

Of all elements that digital marketing touches and influences, engagement is perhaps one of the most important yet difficult areas. It is essential in order to grow through repeat business. Engagement most commonly occurs as a metric that measures something loosely and may not provide real sustenance for the benefit to the business. With the unprecedented availability of data and analytics tool, measuring engagement should be an essential part of your marketing metrics, definitely more so than the standard “follows” or “likes” on social media platforms.

How does it affect your business?

Knowing how to engage with your potential customers is vital for your business, as it is what makes your business successful. Being able to engage with people and allowing them to trust you gives them more of a reason to come to you when they are needing what you can sell to them.
There are many ways in which you can engage with your customers, as long as you know how to provide relevant and useful information in a friendly, polite and helpful manner and the key is, is to be different and genuine.
Two free, easy and essential ways in which you can connect with your customers, continue to be engaging and add value:

1. Social Media – Seeing social media as a tool and not just a platform will provide you with a connection to customers, letting you share, identify questions, research influences and create content.
2. Answer FAQ’s – Creating content that answers all your customer’s questions will really give them a reason to trust you and adds value to their experience with your brand. Collect the most popular questions customers have asked and answer them, the more creative format of the answers the better.

Through the content that you create and share across your website and social media channels by delving deeper and exploring the engagement each piece of content receives you can create more of that particular type. Creating a video is a successful method and in 2016 had record numbers of engagement with people watching over 39 billion hours of video on YouTube alone. Each social media platform has their own analytics tool which provides you with the essential information to measure which campaigns and platforms gave you the best engagement, for specific campaigns.

Click-Through Rate:

Click-through rate is a term often used in marketing and is commonly referred to in Google AdWords, it is an essential source for PPC to help measure your success rate. Before you look specifically at measuring your click-through rates and the alterations you could make it is essential that you understand what they are and how important they are to your business.
A Click-Through Rate(CTR) is used to measure the number of clicks a specific campaign receives per impression. An impression is the number of times it is shown to users, it is measured by the number of clicks your campaign receives divided by the number of times your ad it is shown.

Why is CTR so important?

No matter your business you should measure and understand CTR, understanding a number of clicks your ad, email and website get are crucial in measuring the success of your marketing and more importantly the areas for improvement. For example, a user may click through the call to action on your email and then leave the page they land on instantly, this should prompt you to check that the links work and it takes you to the desired page.
By measuring the click through rate you can understand which areas of your marketing campaign, whether that be email marketing or paid search ads, are successful and which areas are in need of a revamp. Through most marketing methods, the most common fixes are creating fresh content, intriguing images and obvious information. Understanding what a good CTR is for your business can help you to spend more time working on improving the campaigns that are not performing as desired.

Conclusion

There is an endless list of marketing metrics that as an eCommerce business you could measure, however, some of these are irrelevant to your business and can be exhausting when it comes to the results that you desire. These are just three marketing metrics that as an eCommerce business you should be aware of and should form an essential part of your marketing plans.
 
2016 brought many new trends in digital marketing and with these, there are new marketing metrics that you need to be measuring. We have created an eBook that runs through 7 essential marketing metrics that matter in 2017. Please feel free to download this free eBook and make sure your marketing is working as hard as you in 2017.