Tracking your Marketing Automation

Google Analytics can accurately measure the majority of marketing metrics but not all of them. If you want your business to track its marketing campaign with greater detail, you’ll need to choose an all-in-one automation tool for marketing.

Site Visits

The metric for Site Visits is an essential one to keep. This is because a business can gain insight on how much traffic a marketing campaign is getting. Once they they have the numbers they need, they can reach toward a specific goal using the “Visits” metric.

Conversion Rates

The volume of conversion rates will vary from business to business, so it’s wise to base metrics goals accordingly. High conversion rates signify that a business’s content messages and ads are being viewed and responded to positively, especially when that business delivers a direct call-to-action.

Visitor Site Time

The longer a visitor stays on your site the more potential he or she has of forming a relationship with your brand. If your visitor site time seems unusually low, it may be time to analyze how your marketing strategy can connect with your visitors better. Bounce rate is closely related with visitor site time since it measures how many visitors saw your home page. If you see that a large percentage of your visitors left off any further action after seeing your home page, this is a strong indicator that your site failed to capture their interest. However, adjustments can be easily made by making it easier for visitors to navigate to the content they need and by adjusting your home page design and even your call-to-action.

Volume of Shared Content

Social interactions remains a valuable metric to hold onto. That’s because social medias circles typically carry on conversations about their favorite places to shop,and who gives the best customer service. These types of interchanges automatically increase your visibility and trustworthiness online based on word-of-mouth.

Blog Comments

There are multiple clues you can glean from blog comments about how your marketing strategy is doing. Comment generations are very valuable to see how people react after reading your content and their written responses made thereafter.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return of investment (ROI) is one of the most vital metric marketing to measure what strategies from your marketing campaign that are potentially the most profitable and which ones don’t hold water. You also have to take into account all of your available resources to make your final decision how to move forward.

What are Some Less Priority Metrics?

Businesses typically place their focus on certain metrics more than others. The question is, Which metrics should be your top priority, and which ones should be put on the back burner? Basically, your business needs to target, report, and forecast the most relevant metrics according to your operations and sales goals. The next step is to foster an effective marketing strategy. As this is done, metrics found to be less important can be pushed aside. It’s crucial to go through this process of elimination before a bad marketing strategy causes irreversible damage to a marketing campaign. The following marketing metrics are no longer considered a top priority in 2016:

1. Likes on Facebook

Getting “Likes” on Facebook used to be an easy way for a business to see the volume of visitor’s to their webpage and engage them without paying for ads. Unfortunately, restrictions on how a business wins over new fans organically on Facebook are increasing.
As a result, it’s getting more difficult and more expensive to gain new Facebook fans and subsequently reach them on an ongoing basis via “Likes”.

2. Display Ad Impressions

Another misleading marketing metric is ad impressions. Ad impressions are described as representing the number of potential visitors who may have briefly been exposed to a piece of content. Ironically, a lot of businesses have no clue of how many people are actually viewing their ads! Exposure to an ad doesn’t necessarily mean that a visitor will do some action afterward. If an ad doesn’t reach and engage the right audience, there is little reason for them to do anything else, least of all share what they’ve seen to others.

3. Keyword Rankings

There was a time when websites received their rankings based on keywords. However, keyword rankings can’t reflect the interest placed in a particular search over time. If a interest in a particular search dwindles, a business can’t adjust their keyword strategy based solely on their keyword ranking. Moreover, keyword rankings don’t reflect organic traffic conversion, a consumer’s behavior before they did a search, or what they want in goods, services, or information. Nowadays, a website’s success is based on a business’s authoritative presence, reputation, generated content, consumer trust level, and experience.

Strategies to Improve Your Business’s Metrics

There are several strategies you can utilize to improve your business’s metrics so that it is more direct and more effective:

Put your strategy on paper and/or digital form

This helps you see how to reach your marketing goals and plans step-by-step and make adjustments along the way. A document of marketing activity acts as the motivating force behind long term progress; this approach proved effective for 53 percent of business-to-business content marketers as reported by the Content Marketing Institute.

Conduct more marketing discussions.

It’s important to conduct marketing discussions with a marketing team on a daily or weekly basis. It’s best to review how newly generated content has affected the traffic on a website both positively and negatively. A business can take the opportunity to discuss ideas on specific topics directly influencing their consumer base’s decisions and how a marketing strategy can be incorporated within popular trends. Lastly, a business needs to understand what led their visitor’s down the purchase path, and then guide them to conversion using relevant content. If there’s room for improvement in any of these three areas, it’s up to the team to mete out manageable duties among themselves to make these goals achievable.

Plan how to present and distribute your marketing

The key to good marketing is to plan how to present and distribute a marketing strategy to the target audience. This involves the right timing and the right place whenever new content is created and released.

Extract all of your traffic’s sources

It’s crucial to have a metric that gives your business the percentages for all of your visitor traffic’s sources, which can be mainly divided as direct URL browser visits, search query visits, and website/blog referral visits to build a strong presence and credibility to your site.

Customer retention

Your business’s long term survival depends on customer loyalty. Retention is the single most factor that keeps your online presence strong. Customer retention heightens your stream of profit. There’s also something else about running a marketing strategy that needs your attention. It costs less to retain a consumer than to win over a new one. The way to effectively retain a customer involves recognizing their individual value and efficiently fulfilling their needs or resolving their issues through an excellent support team. Posting testimonials on a website is one easy way to encourage new customers to form a long lasting relationship with your business.

Final Comments

Marketing strategies take time to achieve success long term. That’s why it’s important to closely monitor how metrics affect your sales on a regular basis. Marketing online can be even more challenging than traditional marketing since a business needs to build trust and a good reputation with digital consumers little by little.

Metrics are key performance indicators to allow you to regularly track your business performance over time and execute your business tasks more proficiently. Rework your message, your strategy, and perhaps your website design. If the goal is to generate more traffic from Facebook, you may need to redirect your budget spending to traffic acquisition rather than measuring your percentages of “Likes”. Use a digital marketing strategy that includes a variety of tactics like blogging and social media. Moreover, strive for a bounce rate that is less than 50 percent and seek to engage your visitors so that they remain on your site longer.

For more information and resources about marketing automation, visit our resources page.