Every marketer knows the importance of tracking different metrics to show improvement over time. Give a marketer the right set of data, and they can optimize campaigns, landing pages, blog posts, and more that are better at converting leads.
Having data to base your decisions off of will help you make smarter decisions, suggest copy or design changes, and find opportunities for different marketing channels.
So, the question becomes: which metrics should you be tracking for your marketing efforts?
To get started, we are going to cover the basics metrics and reports you will need to analyze if you want to take your marketing game to the next level.
Metrics to Track for Your Blog
1. Visits
This refers to the number of people visiting your blog. Before you can optimize your content, you need a sizeable amount of traffic first. This is far from a vanity metric. Your blog is crucial to the top of your marketing funnel. Visits will show you if you aren’t getting enough traffic at the top (that will eventually be converted down the funnel).
2. Leads
After you obtain enough traffic, you’ll want to know how many leads your blog content generates. The goal of blogging is to convert traffic into leads, so this will measure how successful your blog is. After you form a baseline, you can start to analyze trends like what type of content is the most successful and start optimizing from there.
3. Subscribers
Even though most marketers forget about this metric, one of the keys to increasing blog traffic is increasing blog subscribers. Anyone just starting to blog will need to focus on building their audience.
Email Marketing Data to Track
1. Open Rate
Open rate calculates the number of times recipients opened your email by dividing the number of opens against the total number of emails sent out.
While some marketers argue this statistic is misleading, it is still an important one to measure. You might not be able to relate opens to the bottom line, but the more opens you get will translate into more opportunities for your email to receive clicks.
2. Click Rate
Click rate is the number of times your email was clicked on divided by the total number of emails delivered. It will show you how many people interacted with your email (not just ‘read’ it) and took the next step you wanted them to take.
3. Unsubscribe Rate
An important one to monitor. An unusually high amount of people unsubscribing from you might mean you are annoying people with too many emails, or your content isn’t landing with your personas.
Social Media Monitoring
1. Reach
Reach signifies the potential number of people you can reach with any social media message. In other words, it’s the number of people who follow you on various social media platforms.
2. Leads
Your social media leads are those who have interacted with your social content (like clicking on a link) and then converted to a lead on your website. You may find that certain content performs better on certain social channels compared to others, or you get more clicks when posting a certain time of the day.
3. Engagement
Engagement shows the number of people interacting with your social content: likes, comments, and shares. It will provide valuable feedback on whether your audience is engaging with (or enjoying) your content, so you can make sure you’re providing the right type of content.
Metrics make the marketing world what it is. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to calculate improvement or prove our value to a company’s bottom line. These metrics just cover the basics of what you need to start tracking, and there are many more excellent ones to look at outside of this list.
Need help tracking and proving ROI? HeadsUp Marketing is here to help! Download our free cheat sheet with the 6 marketing metrics that your boss will only care about by clicking on the box below. You can also contact us with any questions you might have about calculating your own marketing metrics.