Are You Tracking the Right Metrics for Your Marketing Campaigns?

Analytics can be both a gift and a curse when it comes to marketing. But it’s also what makes digital marketing so efficient.

By Rehan Ijaz

Being able to set clear goals for campaigns and measure success to the last detail is something you can’t get through any other method. But too many businesses end up getting lost in the numbers and becoming unfocused as a result. Here are some of the most important metrics you should be looking for in your marketing campaigns.

Advertising Cost of Sales

Those familiar with Amazon ads are probably already familiar with this, but others might be completely in the dark. Put in simple terms, advertising cost per sale allows you to subtract advertising cost from your profit margin to get to your net profit. It is counted as a percentage of your margin that is taken by advertising costs.

Search Scientists have a nice case study where they were able to turn one of their clients’ Amazon account around and reach the six-figure, single-digit advertising cost per sale mark. It truly shows why ACOS matters. Keeping track of your ACOS allows you to know how much you can actually afford to pay on ads and still get some revenue. Or you could decide to break even in order to boost your best seller rank and increase organic sales.

Another thing that makes understanding and knowing your ACOS so important is that you can use it to fine-tune your campaigns. For instance, you could identify keywords that have a high ACOS and either eliminate them or invest less in them. You could then choose those with the lowest ACOS and go all out.

Traffic by Source

If you’re selling through your website, then overall traffic is important. But what’s even more important is knowing from where it comes from.

Knowing overall traffic is useful to track any sudden dips in traffic. This could help you find out if a new Google algorithm has been rolled out or if there was an update. Knowing the source of traffic is a great way to tell which sites you’re being referred on, and also focus your content strategy on sites that pay back the most.

Returning Visitors vs New Visitors

This number can also help you assess if your content is getting any results. Lots of returning visitors is a sign that your content is sticking. A high number of visitors, on the other hand, could be a sign that you’ve done a great job at marketing but doesn’t really assess how successful, useful, and relevant your content was.

Sessions and Session Duration

This metric, however, could give you a clearer picture of how well your content is being received. A session is counted by Google as a single visit per 30 minutes. Average session duration, on the other hand, is the total time people spend on your site on average.

This is one of the most valuable indicators that you can look for when assessing how your site is actually performing. This will allow you to do some A/B testing and play with different interfaces, colors, navigation, and content as well as content types. This could be switching from written word to video or adding infographics, for instance.

Page Views, Most Visited Pages, and Exit Rate

This will also be telling of whether your campaigns are successful and how people react to your material. Page views are the broadest of these metrics and they show how many people come to your website and how many pages they visit. Knowing the number of page views is essential to see if people like your website as a whole, or if only a few pages are actually offering value.

The most visited pages metric will also give you some additional insight on which pages are the most valuable. You’ll also be able to see from where visitors to these pages came from, so you can fine-tune your efforts and target the highest traffic sources.

Your site’s exit rate will give you a better idea of how good your site’s design and user experience is. Do not confuse this with the bounce rate. Bounce rates only show when a person instantly left, or “bounced”, from the site as soon as they logged in.

Exit rate, on the other hand, will show you exactly when they exited after checking a few pages. This could be useful if you wanted visitors to perform a certain action, for example. Or if the goal of your marketing campaign was to have more people come to your site and learn about your brand. For instance, you could find out that a lot of people exit once they get to your blog or ‘about us’ page. This could be a clear indicator that you need to tweak these so you can get better results.

Conclusion

Knowing which metrics to look for is a central part of any successful marketing campaign. If you feel like you’re still lost in this sea of data, we strongly suggest you start working with professionals who’ll be able to navigate you through it and give you some indications.

Rehan Ijaz is an entrepreneur, business graduate, content strategist and editor overseeing contributed content at BigdataShowcase. He is passionate about writing stuff for startups. His areas of interest include digital business strategy and strategic decision making.

Marketing stock photo by NicoElNino/Shutterstock