7 Key Metrics Your Marketing Department Should be Collecting

Cost per customer, cost per lead, lifetime customer value, ROI

all these are important data sources for your business. Are you collecting this data? If you aren’t, why not? If you are, do you have accurate tools and analysis to capitalize on the data you are collecting?

Here’s a list of 7 key metrics your marketing department should be collecting and analyzing, and some helpful advice on how to do so.

Return on Inbound Marketing

Are you engaging in some inbound marketing strategy? If not, you should take a look at this case study; it might help you change your mind. If you are, inbound marketing can be a challenging process to report on. There's just so much available data! Each inbound funnel takes time to set up and returns can happen anywhere from instantly to years later depending upon a wide variety of variables. It is therefore vitally important that your marketing department routinely record, track and analyze data concerning inbound marketing. Here are our top 5 metrics (beyond the obvious) that you should be measuring:

1. New business from inbound activities
2. Websites traffic-to-lead ratio
3. Landing page conversion rates
4. Lead-to-customer ratio
5. Marketing-Influenced customer revenue

Return on Social Media Marketing

Track both paid and organic marketing in your social media campaigns. Each is a different type of data, each is essential to understanding and planning social media marketing.

Each platform has different methods of internal tracking as well as options for external tracking through 3rd parties. Take time to research data management methods for a social media platform before starting a marketing campaign on it.

Organic Search Results

Who does Google and Bing bring to your business? There are many ways to track this, and it is essential that your marketing department do so. Google analytics tracker is a key tool for tracking this, and it produces a key part of understanding your inbound marketing strategy and ROI overall.

Comments and Other Feedback

Comments are hard to quantify. Someone can give you a list of three good things they liked about your article and two things they didn't. Someone else declares that they will never read your blog again, but they provide a backlink to their own website. Then again, someone else claims to love your site but you see the exact same comment on multiple sites.

Comments are the most difficult to categorize, but they are one of the most important online metrics to collect, track and analyze. Take time to engage with customers and to track, at minimum, positive, neutral, and negative comments on blogs and social media.

Heat Maps

When a user hits your website, where do they go? What do they do? A heat map gives you a visual interpretation of how many customers read different pages on your site and how far down the page they read. These are useful tools for understanding where to place CTAs and how length affects various types of posts.

Conversion Rates on Forms and Landing Pages

Where do customers go when they land on action-specific pages in your marketing? Forms and landing pages exist to drive traffic to a specific activity. Whether it is growing an email list, filling up a webinar, or selling a product, you need to find bounce-rates, click-through rates and other pertinent information to track conversions on landing pages.

Mobile Traffic

What operating system do the majority of your customers use? Do they use phones or tablets? Where people come from is important to your marketing, it often can be instrumental in narrowing demographics regarding your market. Mobile tracking needs to be a key part of your search, social media and other information tracking.

There are so many tools and metrics to keep track of, but do you know what makes reporting and analysis a lot easier? Marketing automation and having an inbound marketing partner like Gecko Marketing. Contact us to find out more.