So how did that campaign go? And how do you know?
OK, this may sound so basic as to be risible, but you’d be amazed at the vast sums of marketing budget spent around the world with nary a thought to actual performance metrics.
Hey, it’s great that the CEO loved it. But as most marketers know, you have to understand what you’re trying to do—and how close you are to getting there at any given time. There are thousands of marketing metrics, but here are a few baseline metrics many of our clients use to track progress and make the best possible decisions.
Customer Acquisition Cost
How much are you paying to get customers? And what’s a new customer worth? Understanding where you stand here can really be helpful when making budgetary, strategic and channel decisions. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) is calculated by combining total sales and marketing costs for a given period of time and dividing that number by new customers acquired during that period.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is a measure of how many people, as a percentage, do something that you’re trying to get them to do. So if you have a website selling reciprocating compressors online, and four out of 100 qualified visitors to your website actually end up buying compressors, you’ll have a 4 percent conversion rate.
Customer Lifetime Value
More valuable customers demand more attention, resources and analysis. The calculation can be a little complicated when you look at the details. But a basic version is just annual profit contribution for a particular customer, multiplied by the average number of years they’ve been a customer minus the initial cost of acquiring that customer.
Cross Channel Visibility
This metric would vary depending on the specific brand and channel strategy, but basically we’re talking about an array of metrics considered together which reveal what channels—and which content on those channels—created the most engagement.
The Usual Web Stuff
Tracking web metrics doesn't really mean much unless you’re considering them in the context of an overall marketing strategy. Still, if you have a website you need to be tracking at least: bounce rate, referrals, number of unique visitors, pageviews, mobile vs. desktop, SERP ranking and user flow analysis (including exit pages).
Net Promoter Score
This metric basically indicates how many of your customers would recommend your company, product or service to someone else. When asked how likely a customer would be to recommend your company or offering to a friend, we’re looking for people who would rate the likelihood either a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1–10. The number of those people minus the number of all the other people you asked is your Net Promoter Score.