News
News Article
Marketing+
Mon
11
Apr 2022
Marketers are spoiled for choice when it comes to performance metrics - but are insights getting lost in the crowd? This week, GO! and our experts dive into some of the most underappreciated channel marketing metrics, and how to make use of them.
If someone asked you to create a bingo card of words most commonly heard in Marketing, ‘metrics’ would be one of the first on there.
It’s what we use to measure the success (or otherwise) of our efforts. But with so many of these indicators available, it’s easy to select one or two for our usual reporting and simply ignore the rest.
Capacity and resource can partly be blamed for this. Small marketing teams often don’t have the time in their day-to-day schedules to go as granular as they might like when scrutinising data. As long as the overall picture is looking good, other things become less of a priority.
So what? Well, this most likely means that there are plenty of useful metrics that you're overlooking across your marketing channels - metrics that, when scrutinised, can provide useful information to help improve performance.
If you’d like to dive deeper into your data but don’t have the time – GO! can help with that. Let us know what you're looking for and we can put you in touch with one of our specialist data and insights agencies.
Why is it useful?
Saves and shares are a good indicator of ad-to-audience relevance and has the added benefit of free reach and impressions.
If someone saves an ad and then returns to it, there is no advertising charge. If you share an ad to your own or a friend’s profile, the ad has the potential to be displayed to the user's audience free of charge. Any interaction with these saved ads is free, and an ad with multiple shared can significantly boost campaign performance without the additional cost.
Why is it useful?
An ad with many comments can be a positive indicator that your ad and your audience are a good match. They can also give unfiltered, word-of-mouth insights into your product or service. Look out for comments that contain a specific theme or similar descriptors. These can provide insightful trend data into how certain audiences feel about your business.
Whether positive or negative, they can be turned into actionable data points that expensive and time-consuming CSAT or BPS surveys might not have uncovered. Lastly, take note of how users speak about your product or business. Is it formal/informal? Use of specific phrases or references? Ad comments may inspire new methods to speak to your audience in a way that better resonates.
Download: The Best of The Network 2021
To discuss overlooked metrics in SEO, we spoke to Declan Reilly, Head of SEO at GO! Network Member Evoluted. Evoluted are an award-winning digital design, web development and digital marketing agency based in Sheffield.
Declan believes that not enough segmentation happens when looking at metrics for SEO. “It’s definitely great to look at the full picture too but identifying how you are impacting visibility/traffic/sales at more defined levels across your site will give you a much clearer picture of your performance.”
“Proper segmentation across a site you’re working on will allow you to focus more energies on the pages that make the true difference in a business’ performance. For instance, by separating blog performance from your money pages, you can better tall how your top of funnel content is working verses the bottom of your funnel.”
“The best measure of success in SEO is the end goal of organic revenue / enquiries. Metrics around visibility, sessions or user experience are great, but more as measurements to support that end goal of more business.”
Event: Building a Digital Suite that Grows With Your Business
Why is it useful?
When reviewing bounce rate, you can see what you need to do to improve your website’s ‘stickiness.’ The longer a visitor stays on your website or other marketing material, the better it is for SEO and conversion.
Bounce Rate gives you a good idea of the quality of your landing pages and other marketing material. A high Bounce Rate could be a sign that your landing pages aren’t relevant or useful to your visitors.
Why is it useful?
Audience growth is one of the most basic, yet also one of the most critical metric for judging organic social performance. Audience growth rate is defined as the change in audience size on a social network (that is it say, it is the rate of decrease in the total number of followers and fans after certain social media activity.)
Using this metric will allow you to see how well a post/entire campaign has performed. To calculate audience growth, measure new followers gained after a social media activity over a period of time. Then, divide them by the total number of audience. Now all you need to do is multiply by 100 to get a percentage fore audience growth rate.
Event: Building a Brand with Impact: Investing in Awareness Channels
Why is it useful?
By knowing how your subscribers are reading your emails can inform you how to design your emails. You should always use templates that look good across both mobile and desktop devices, but if most of your opens happen from a smartphone, you’ll want to take extra care to prioritise these recipients.
To do this, a more concise design with less text and fewer options to click out to additional content can streamline the experience for readers on a smaller screen. If most are opening your emails from a desktop, you have greater flexibility for the design and content.
Why is it useful?:
If you’re not adding new readers to your email lists, the size of said lists will eventually decrease over time (even if your unsubscribe rate stays under 2%.) Audiences can be grown organically by encouraging current subscribers to share your content, offering bonus content to subscribers that aren’t available elsewhere or adding widgets to your site prompting visitors to subscribe. You can monitor the success of your efforts by keeping an eye on how quickly your lists grow.
Amanda Walls, Director of Cedarwood Digital (another award-winning network member) believes that marketeers often get tied up in digital performance metrics, things like “CPC, CPA, ROAS etc, without understanding how they tie back to fundamental performance for the business.”
“Really, we need to start by understanding the business goals - what do they need to achieve and in what volume? Understand this means we can build out the metrics that will deliver true business values.”
Amanda believes that metrics such as Conversion Rate and Conversion Value are two of the most overlooked with it comes to PPC. “The most overlooked metrics are often those that tie directly to the client's business goals.”
“By identifying and tying our "digital" goals more closely to our client goals means we can develop strategies that are designed to meet what our client's need rather than achieving vanity metrics.
This can include tying our metrics in with client's offline data, identifying what the ideal customer/conversion value looks like & adjusting our marketing accordingly. By focusing on direct metrics rather than vanity metrics means we are delivering more of the right kind of customer to our clients rather than just delivering visitors to the website.”
“Achieving business goals - I think it's easy for us to put soft metrics on these along the lines of improving a client's ROAS but it's the business goals that account. This can be centred around delivering the right kind of visitors, delivering the right quality of leads & also sales of the right products.
Rather than just driving traffic to the website by focusing on business goals, we can provide real value and this is where our client's get the best marketing return.”
Why is it useful?
‘Referrals’ are recommendations for further information, endorsed by the site that hosts the link. Any traffic that comes through your website from a source other than Goggle is reported as a referral. Looking at referral traffic shows which online media outlets are driving people to your site from earned coverage and can often throw up a few surprises.
Businesses want high profile pieces but giving routine content to more-technical trade publications that go into the nuts and bolts of your business is a good way of getting people onto your site and into your content library.
Looking at referral sites can show how well your press strategy is going. If you link to other pages of your site or a call to action, rather than always linking to the homepage, this can help prospects move through your site and give you a better understanding of where visitors are coming from.
Why is it useful?
Often abbreviated to SoV, Share of Voice is a metric that measures a brand’s mentions in the media against the mention of your competitors. Understanding the percentage of media that your brand is mentioned in is a good indication of your authority in your field.
Your Share of Voice percentage can be calculated by taking mentions in industry publications and dividing this metric by mentions of all brands in your industry and multiplying by 100. For example, if your brand had 600 mentions in industry publications, and the total number for all brands in your field was 2500, the equation would be 600/2500 x 100 = 24%. Share of Voice is a great way of benchmarking your PR team’s success.
Event: Digital Transformation at Scale: Making a Molehill out of a Mountain
Why is it useful?
It’s all well and good using SEO, paid ads and organic social to drive people to your site, but how many of your visitors are enjoying what they find there? This is why web traffic shouldn’t be the only metrics you’re measuring for the success of your content marketing. You should also look at the average time spend on your pages. This can be found in Google Analytics under Reports > Behaviour.
More time spent on a page is a good indication that the user is taking in your content rather than just skimming over it. It also indicates that the content is something that the user is looking for and matching their search intent.
Why is it useful?
The number of content downloads from your site can be a good way of measuring your content marketing. Downloadable content on sites usually includes white papers, templates, brochures, guides etc and are mostly gated. If a content is ‘gated,’ it means that it’s hidden behind a lead form that a user must complete to download the content. It’s a good way of being able to retarget users and shows eagerness to consume your content.
Downloads are also a good way of measuring middle-of-funnel content. For example, if you are offering a content download at certain parts of your site, or within a blog post, you can use it to measure the success of your content at this part of the funnel.
If you’d like to know more about how any of the above channels can help with your marketing strategy, or how to use overlooked metrics to improve your current performance, get in touch today.
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