Which Marketing Analytics Should You Track? A Guide to the Numbers Game

Analytics are both the bane and the saving grace of marketers. Naturally, everyone wants to determine the exact return on investment for their marketing initiatives, but which metrics are important to determine that ROI? How do you determine if a simple Facebook “like” actually turns into a new customer? Read correctly,marketing analytics can come close to guaranteeing success. But measured incorrectly, the same numbers may lead to confusion and frustration.

Below, we will discuss the various numbers you can track in relation to your marketing strategy, along with tips on how to track them. By following this advice, you can ensure that you’re getting the most out of your analytics data.

THE BASICS: REACH AND EXPOSURE

The most basic metric of any marketing campaign is its reach. Just how many members of your target audience actually saw your message? Depending on your medium of choice, this metric may consist of the average ratings for the program on which your TV advertisement ran, the circulation of a publication that includes your ad, or the number of contacts in your direct-mail or email list.

Determining the reach of your campaign will be the easiest task in marketing analytics, as these numbers are usually readily available. However, it is also the most unreliable method of determining success––if you stop here, you simply have no way of gauging the amount of actual interest your campaign generated.

You may blast your message to millions of audience members, but if you've picked the wrong medium or the wrong time, you won't get a single customer. For more accurate measures of success, you have to go deeper into the analytics.

REACTION MATTERS: INTERACTION AND WEB CLICKS

Measuring reaction to your ad, via clicks to your website or "likes" on social media, allows you to determine just how many of your audience members were intrigued enough to react. Like reach, the interaction metric is relatively easy to track, while providing you with a more accurate picture of how successful your ad truly was. Through tracking URLs and redirects, you can also track click-throughs, even from traditional advertising channels like TV, radio, or print.

However, while tracking interactions with your advertisement is more accurate than merely tracking its reach, it still doesn't provide you with the full picture of success.

As you can imagine, the majority of your audience will never go beyond the initial click or interaction with your ad. A Google search ad that generates lots of click-throughs still may not yield a single customer. That's why good marketing analytics have to go even deeper.

CONFIRMING INTEREST: CONVERSIONS AND SIGN-UPS

We're starting to get the fuller picture. Tracking conversions means paying attention to the sector of your audience that doesn't just click on one of your ads, but actually follows its call to action all the way through.

A conversion may mean signing up for your newsletter, receiving a free trial of your software, or being contacted by your sales team. Either way, it shows significant interest in your company and thus provides you with a good idea of the success of your ad. The more conversions you get from a single ad, the more successful that ad has been in generating targeted interest.

Depending on your medium of choice, tracking conversions can be difficult. Often, it requires setting up different landing pages for each of your individual campaigns. These unique landing pages allow you to determine who signed up as a result of which ad.

Digital channels like Facebook and Google are seeking to ease the process by providing marketers with conversion pixels, which are added to the thank you page that a potential customer sees after she signs up on a landing page. These pieces of code allow you to track conversions, even without dedicated landing pages for each campaign.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL: CUSTOMERS

We'd be remiss not to mention the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign: gaining new customers. Tracking your lead conversions is a good way to evaluate your success, but even that isn't completely accurate, as the majority of your leads may never turn into customers.

If you're in ecommerce, you can use conversion tracking for shopping carts and get accurate results. But if you're not in ecommerce, the best way to track your customers gained is to calculate your average lead-to-customer percentage, and plug that number into your conversions.

In other words, if a Google campaign resulted in 50 conversions, and your average lead-to-customer rate is at 20 percent (meaning one out of every five leads turns into a customer), you can reasonably estimate that your Google campaign resulted in 10 new customers. It's the most complicated, but also the most complete way of estimating your campaign's ROI through marketing analytics.

Of course, this is just a cursory overview of the multiple levels within marketing analytics. Each of these levels deserves its own blog post. Yet simply being aware of the powerful ways that analytics can measure your marketing success can allow you to be more informed when setting up your future campaigns.