Today, many company owners or executives believe that if their product or service holds any value, they will gain customers, hence, no need for any additional expenses in the form of marketing. Similarly, while they believe that by marketing they can introduce their service or product to a much wider audience thus gaining more potential customers in the process, they are only interested in doing so if they have extra time or resources to spend on these campaigns.

This is mainly because of the belief that present-day customer behavior is unpredictable, and that a previously successful marketing campaign can be a complete failure the next time, resulting in loss of money, time, & effort, which is fairly accurate, considering present consumer environment & trends.

However, much like everything else in the digital age pertaining to a business enterprise, relevant tools and methodologies can be used to streamline your marketing effort as well and to offer you the assurance that your efforts, as well as your marketing expenses, are being paid off completely in the form of valuable prospects and increased conversions.

Likewise, to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, it is crucial that you measure the performance of different marketing channels separately and as a whole to get valuable insights and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Though, in order to measure the performance of different channels, Key Marketing Metrics are essential that will help you rationalize the data analysis process to a great extent for better results. Following marketing metrics are paramount in order to verify the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns & also to effectively devise better-targeted marketing campaigns in the future:

The most straightforward way to discern whether or not a particular marketing campaign were successful is to start by identifying the number of visitors on your site, before and after the start of such campaign. This way, if the numbers of visitors were increased after the beginning of the campaign, then the marketing campaign was a success. On the contrary, if your site visitor ratio did not increase or the increase ratio was not up to your expectations, then this shows that your marketing campaign was unsuccessful and therefore you need to investigate different marketing channels to identify the root cause of fewer site visits.

Click-through ratio is an essential metrics for any marketing campaign, as it can be used individually as well as a collective metric to identify the success ratio of your marketing efforts, for instance, a higher click-through ratio of your emails would signify that your email marketing campaign was successful. Meanwhile, a similar approach can be used to identify the success percentage of your content marketing as well, i.e. how many site visitors proceed to carry out the desired action such as signing up for a demo or a newsletter etc. Likewise, to determine your collective marketing efforts, you can combine these different marketing channels click-through (CTR) ratio to evaluate your efforts accordingly.

While total visits would only inform you about the increase in a number of site visitors since the start of your marketing campaign, New vs. Returning Visitors metric would inform you how many of those visitors are returning and how many are new. There are many ways to use these metrics afterwards in order to identify your marketing efforts success ratio, for instance, the identification of new vs. returning visitors ratio would inform you whether or not your prospects are returning, which is a good sign, i.e. if they are not interested in your products or services, why bother coming back. Similarly, the identification of new visitors’ ratio would inform you, whether or not you are able to compel new prospects to visit your site, which in return would suggest that your marketing campaign is successful in navigating fresh prospects to your site.

Channel wise identification of traffic can offer great insights regarding how to improve the effectiveness of a particular marketing channel. This metric segment your site traffic into four major components: Direct, Referrals, Organic, and Social. The direct traffic refers to visitors that entered your website directly, such as by entering your site’s URL. Meanwhile, Referrals indicate site traffic that was redirected by other sites. Similarly, Organic & Social Traffic refers to visitors that entered your site via a search engine (without clicking on any Ad) and visitors that were redirected to your site from a social media platform, respectively. Channel Specific Traffic is a great way to identify channels that are more effective than others, for instance, if your site has a greater organic audience then this signifies that your SEO strategy is working, whereas, a higher social traffic ratio would suggest a superior social media marketing strategy.

In the 21st century content is King, there is no way around it. In fact, content marketing has some of the highest return on investment ratio. For this exact reason, you have to have an active blog with exciting new content together with your products/services promotion to increase your site visitors’ return & subsequently conversion ratio. However, due to constantly increasing competition, the need for interactive content is increasing but how do you identify whether your visitors are interacting as per your expectations. For this, you have to use Actions Taken metrics to test the interactive components in your content, such as the short quizzes in terms of the ratio that how many visitors took action in order to measure the efficiency of your content marketing.

Visitor Bounce Ratio refers to your site visitors that jump off to other sites without performing any anticipated action after they have been successfully redirected to your site. Some web pages may have higher bounce ratio than others, for instance, an inadequately optimized e-commerce site can have a significantly higher bounce ratio on their checkout page. Similarly, landing pages with ambiguous or badly optimized call-to-action may also have a higher bounce ratio. Correspondingly, by identifying visitors bounce ratio on different web pages, you can distinguish landing pages that have comparatively higher bounce ratio and optimize them accordingly to achieve better results.

Contrary to Visitor Bounce ratio, which is a site visitor’s jumping off to another website after they have just browsed a single page of your site, Visitor Exit Ratio refers to visitors exiting your site after they have navigated through multiple pages on your website. Even though being similar to Bounce Ratio, Visitors Exit Ratio offers a much wider outlook of your site visitors. For instance, with Bounce Ratio analysis you can identify and improve your landing pages, however, with Exit Ratio, you can distinguish visitors’ behavioral patterns and web pages that your site visitors usually visit before going off to another site. Moreover, this metric can also facilitate you in evaluating your content, i.e. during a visitor’s session, after how many articles they exit your site or is there any particular content which makes visitors bounce off during their session.

The number of visitors you have successfully converted represents your overall conversion ratio. More specifically, this refers to site visitors making your desired actions such as, filling out a form, providing you their contact details, or simply subscribing to a newsletter. Identification of your conversion ratios is one of the most essential components in the present-day to identify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts as well as the achievement of your set objectives. Simply put, if you have a higher conversion ratio, then your marketing campaign is a success as it is generating positive results if not, adequate optimization is required in order to generate better results.

Leads to Close Ratio represent the number of Leads that were successfully converted into Customers, i.e. prospects with whom your sales team was able to successfully close a deal. Measurement of your Leads to Close Ratio can provide valuable insights to the marketing team such as,

• How many Leads were successfully closed by the sales team?
• Which Channel has the highest & subsequently lowest Lead Close Ratio?

Afterward, by using the accumulated data from these, your marketing team can devise future strategies accordingly, that is, by prioritizing marketing channels with higher lead to close ratio. Correspondingly, by prioritizing channels based on their performance, not only you will achieve superior lead to customer conversion ratio but your resource expenses on marketing channels with low lead to close ratio will be better managed as well.

Lead Quality can vary greatly, depending on a marketing channel, for instance, LinkedIn can have a higher Lead quality for a business enterprise in comparison to Content or Email Marketing, and the opposite can happen as well. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to determine the Lead Quality Ratio of different marketing channels, so that you can assess channels based on their ability to produce high quality leads i.e. that are easy to convert or has a higher lifetime value etc. this way, you can focus more on such channels for maximum output. Moreover, you can also determine average lead quality by evaluating leads from all channels collectively, to identify whether or not you are targeting the right audience. Finally, in order to effectively identify lead quality, your marketing team has to work in collaboration with the sales staff to determine high valued prospects, afterward used that information to identify channels that generate those leads. Also, depending on your business, distinguishing Lead Quality is more imperative then distinguishing Lead Quantity.

Calculation of your Customer Retention Ratio is essential in several ways, such as, it will tell you about how many customers are likely to conduct business with you again or how many will bring Referrals in the near-future. However, calculating your Retention Ratio can be fairly difficult for some businesses, for instance, businesses like e-commerce can easily calculate their Customer Retention Ratio, largely due to the nature of their business, i.e. a short buying cycle. Whereas, the same would be difficult for a real-estate enterprise, which has a longer buying cycle. Nonetheless, its pros overweigh its cons and it can be a valuable metrics to evaluate your efforts. A low customer retention ratio indicates less Loyal Customers, which further indicates that you are unable to provide your customers a seamless Customer Journey. And thus, need to improve their experience by doing things like proper follow-ups, i.e. sending personalized emails after they have successfully made a purchase or by sending customized promotional emails to provide assurance that you care about them in order to increase their satisfaction & eventually their retention proportion

Customer Value can be different depending on your business, for instance, usually, the value of a customer is higher for a healthcare or a legal enterprise in comparison to an e-commerce business. However, at the same instance, the number of leads is low for both of these industries. To calculate Customer Value the calculation of Customer Retention ratio beforehand is a necessary requirement. This is not an entirely marketing metric, but it can inform you about the return on investment on each customer. Customer Value can be calculated by taking all transitions of a customer over the course of their relationship with your company into account. Moreover, it can also be calculated by taking average transactions of your existing customers into account. Later, by using the generated results, you can set goals & allocate marketing budgets accordingly.

In the age of the Internet, a better placement of your business website on different search engines can be extremely crucial for your business, for instance, a single search on any popular search engine typically returns hundreds of thousands of results. However, people usually open the first page’s results only. This factor alone speaks of the importance of Brand Visibility. In fact, it may not be entirely wrong to state that a good or bad Brand Visibility can either make or break your business today. A simple way to measure this is by using a (free of cost) tool like Google Search Console to see if search queries related to your business are increasing over time. If yes, then this indicates that your marketing efforts are being paid off and as a response people are searching for you, else, you need to improve your marketing strategy accordingly.

Per Lead Cost is a somewhat focused marketing metric in a sense that it informs you about the effectiveness of individual marketing channels. In general, it is a targeted metric that allows you to calculate the efficiency of a chosen campaign. Per Lead Cost can be calculated by dividing the amount of money spent on a single marketing medium by the number of leads generated by that medium. Rather than providing you a general idea regarding the cost of acquiring prospects, per-lead-cost would inform you about the exact price of a Lead. This way you would have a clear insight pertaining to mediums that produced low-cost leads as well as marketing channels that generated moderately costly leads. Afterward, you can use this data to shift your focus on better marketing mediums accordingly.

The life of a lead is another major component in identifying how much effort you are exerting before you are able to convert a prospect into a customer. The general lead lifecycle involves following stages: Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, and Customer. This metric can inform you about the average duration of a Lead before finally being converted into a customer, contrary to lead-to-close ratio, which only informs about the number of leads successfully closed. You can use this knowledge to align your marketing methodology & channels to your goals accordingly. For instance, prospects from some marketing mediums may need to put back more often into the Lead Nurturing Tunnel before their final conversion, thus requiring more effort & resources. However, by identifying the average life of a lead, not only you would have the feasibility to shift your focus on marketing channels that generate better results in terms of leads generation, but you would be also able to create better marketing campaigns in the future by keeping your average life of a lead in view.

Return on Investment is an all-in-one metric to identify whether your efforts are being paid off or not, that is, if the ROI is greater than the amount being spent on a particular marketing campaign, then your marketing campaign is a success otherwise, you need to adjust your marketing expenses for better results. Calculation of ROI is the best way to identify the success proportion of a campaign; furthermore, it is fairly easy to calculate. For instance, you can calculate your marketing ROI by comparing your “Per-Lead-Cost” against your “Lead-to-Close” ratio. By doing so, you will have an average “Customer Acquisition Cost” which you can compare side by side your average “Consumer Value” to determine your return on investment ratio.

It is of paramount importance that you should not rely on a single metrics as your main indicator to identify your marketing efforts success ratio – principally because several factors can influence a single metric. For instance, Click-Through Ratio of Google PPC ads can be influenced by a mistaken click on part of the prospect. Meanwhile, a higher conversion ratio does not justify future company growth, primarily because it is influenced by whenever a prospective customer performs the desired action. However, that desired action cannot solely justify that a lead would, in fact, be converted into a Customer, simply because of the fact that, in reality, not all leads are converted into Customers.

However, by using multiple metrics and by doing a periodic analysis of data gathered from these metrics, you can better understand your marketing efforts and how well your customers & potential customers are responding to them. This is chiefly due to the feasibility of comparing & contrasting customer data from various platforms, devices, and touchpoints, which make the data analysis process worthwhile, while at the same instance also generate credible results for devising future marketing campaigns.

Finally, always remember that continuous optimization in your efforts in terms of devising & managing your marketing campaigns is the Key to achieve success. However, effective optimization cannot be done without a comprehensive analysis process along with relevant metrics to rationalize the whole process.