Metrics, Metrics, Metrics…Which Ones Matter?

In the complex world of marketing, there’s metrics on almost everything- views, impressions, engagement, open rates, click through rates, likes, comments, and the list goes one. But which ones should you have your eye on and which ones are less critical?

If you’re ready to spend less time weeding through data and understanding the story that the metrics are telling we’ve got you.

A few of our favorite things

CPL and CPC

If you’re looking to compare “apples-to-apples” results, cost per lead (CPL) is where it’s at. So you posted a Facebook lead gen ad, you sent an email through a media partner, and you attended a live event. Which tactic got you the most bang for your buck? CPL levels the playing field. For example

Facebook lead gen ad
Spent $500 /  Converted 100 Leads = $5 Cost Per Lead

Media partner email
Spent $3,000 /  Converted 250 Leads = $12 Cost Per Lead

Live event
Spent $10,000 /  Converted 100 Leads = $100 Cost Per Lead

Often when you start evaluating campaign success with CPL you’ll see how much more efficient your digital lead gen tactics are over traditional tactics like conferences.

Check out this guide to get start calculating your own CPL.

But what about CPC?

CPC (cost per click) tells you how much you’re spending per click on an advertisement or link. If you have a Google Ad words heavy media spend you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on CPC to make sure you’re not over spending for under performing keywords. Take your CPC metric a step further and track conversions so you can get to…you guessed it…CPL. CPL can level the playing field and allows you to measure your CPC efforts alongside your other channel tactics, for example:

Google Ad Words
Spent $8,000 /  Converted 75 Leads = $107 Cost Per Lead

ROI and Pipeline

ROI (return on investment) is the king of all metrics–sure you did some marketing, love that for you. But how much money did you make? ROI is the metric all we marketers are striving for, to get there make sure you take these steps:

• Track your campaign spend (by channel if you want to track CPL by channel)

• Use a CRM to track lead conversions (we like SalesForce or HubSpot for this)

• Have sales reps tag opportunities to the marketing campaign (we like SalesForce best for this)

• Keep sales reps compliant with keeping an up-to-date pipeline

And ta-da, real-time ROI data. For example:

Facebook lead gen ad
Spent $500 /  Converted 100 Leads = $5 Cost Per Lead
2 leads turned into opportunities, cost per deal $250
1 opportunity closed for $5,000 
= 900% ROI

Media partner email
Spent $3,000 /  Converted 250 Leads = $12 Cost Per Lead
10 leads turned into opportunities, cost per deal $300
3 opportunity closed for $5,000, total $15,000
= 400% ROI

Live event
Spent $10,000 /  Converted 100 Leads = $100 Cost Per Lead
20 leads turned into opportunities, cost per deal $500
10 opportunity closed for $5,000, total $50,000
= 400% ROI

But what about pipeline metrics?

If you’re not tracking pipeline metrics…we love them. Understanding what stage deals are in can help you improve conversions across the funnel. Take it a step further and track how many leads from your campaign convert into opportunities to get a better handle on how many leads you need to generate at the top of the funnel to achieve target revenue numbers.

In short–the higher your conversion rate at each stage of the funnel, the better your marketing campaign is performing, the fewer leads you need at the top of the funnel to impact revenue at the bottom, and the happier your boss will be.

Here’s the key conversion points we look at: 

• Conversion rate of campaign leads to SQLs (info or demo requests)

• Conversion rate of SQLs to opportunities

• Conversion rate of opportunities to sales 

Take a deep dive on the marketing funnel.

Identifying Influencers

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been asked to work with a social influencer? Did you know what metrics to look at to determine the quality of the influencer? The best metric to use is engagement rate. Here’s how you calculate it:

Total influencer followers / (comments + likes on a single post) = engagement rate

What are good influencer engagement rates?
According to upfluence:  

“A ‘good’ influencer engagement rate for an influencer with a mid to large-sized audience is 3% or above. Most influencers will have an engagement rate between 1% and 3%, so anything over 3% would be considered above average. Micro-influencers, who have smaller audiences tend to have higher influencer engagement rates overall. For a micro-influencer, an engagement rate of 5% and above shows a strong performance. “

Less-important metrics

Open Rate

Since Apple’s changed in privacy rules during their 2021 iOS updates, open rate has become an unreliable metric. Instead, many businesses have turned to engagement metrics (like click through rate) as a way to accurately measure engagement.

Assessing the performance of your emails is a complex job- much more than a simple open rate.  What actions were taken after the email? Was the email underreported by the tracking pixel because of iOS? Did the prospect see your content or did it just open in a preview in their email client? Instead of open rate look at:

• CTR

• What devices they viewed on so you can optimize for your audience’s viewing preferences

• What links did they click most

• Unsubscribe rate–make sure it’s under 0.5% per email

Impressions

This one might be a little controversial. Yes, for brand awareness campaigns knowing how many eyeballs saw your banner ad (impressions) may be important. But we’re a lead gen agency and impressions don’t feed our sales partners leads. If we do measure impressions it’s in the context of the full marketing funnel so we know how many impressions it took to drive a lead conversion.

Typically CTR (click through rate) accompanies impression data–if we can marry that up with CPL data we’re good. In a vacuum without CPL data impression and CTRs don’t give us much. 

If your agency is just delivering impression data–ask for more.

What about repeat impressions?

Okay okay so this is where we DO like to look at impressions–as a comparison to reach. For example, if we’re running a social ad and we see:

100,000 Impressions/
25,000 Reach
= 4 Impressions Per Person

We don’t want to deliver more than 3 impressions per person. So if the impressions are 3x more than the reach, stop the ad. Generally you’ll see your lead gen slow down after 2 impressions which will give you a clue to look in on the ad–but the impressions/reach will give you the information you need to make the decision to turn the ad off. 

Followers

Has your boss ever told you to get more followers? It’s okay, we know they have. Maybe you were even encouraged to buy followers. Well good news–put the checkbook away, buying followers is not where it’s at. The metric we look at is audience engagement–not size (remember how we calculated the value of an influencer? The same metric applies to your brand).

And don’t buy followers. Please. Please don’t. It gets you literally nothing. The people you buy are irrelevant so they’re not sharing your message with an engaged community. In fact you’re likely to get NO engagement at all. 

Also remember–you don’t own followers the way you own a lead that converts into your database. They can leave you at any time…

Page Views

Page views can be a deceiving metric. You’ll notice that even Google Analytics has moved towards engagement metrics and away from reporting big numbers without context. Instead of pageviews look at conversions by page. Determine how people are getting to high conversion pages and double down.

Need help with your metrics? Drop us a line! 

Red Brick Partners, a veterinary marketing agency with over 14 years of B2B and B2C veterinary marketing experience can help. Whether you are searching for ways to generate leads, automate sales and marketing processes, or boost awareness, we’ve got you! Discover how we help our clients. 

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