5 Essential Marketing Metrics You Need to be Watching

Creating and executing a good online marketing plan is only the beginning of the process. Once you have the plan in place, you need to monitor essential metrics to determine what kinds of changes will need to be made to improve the plan. This will allow you to improve your current marketing plan's effectiveness and create better marketing programs in the future.

Engagement

For websites such as Entrepreneur.com , which offer a great deal of information, engagement is a very important metric. For a website, engagement is measured in how long users stay on your site and how many pages they look at. If you have users looking at several pages for long periods of time, then your material is effective. If users are bouncing around various pages and leaving after a few seconds, then you need to improve your content.

Repeat Traffic

This is a marketing metric that can be applied to online and offline plans. It is simply the measure of how often people come back to your site, or your business, and engage the features you have to offer. For a website owner, this would be measured in visitors that come back often and spend time on the site. For a retail business owner, this would be how often people return to the store to purchase products.

Cost Per Lead

The marketing experts at a website such as DentalMarketing.net place a premium on maximizing the cost per lead for their clients. If a company is spending $10,000 per month and getting 100 leads, then the cost per lead is $100 each. The goal is to lower that cost per lead while still getting quality prospects.

Focus

In marketing, focus means that the plan is getting consumers to react in a way that is consistent with the plan's intentions. If a shoe company puts together a marketing plan to sell its latest basketball shoe, but tennis shoe sales go up instead, then the plan needs to be re-examined and re-worked.

Conversion

What is your marketing plan trying to do? Are you trying to get people to sign up for a newsletter? If so, then you need to compare the traffic you get to the number of people who register. The higher your conversion rate, the more successful your campaign will be.

Make no mistake about it. The days of the CMO who is not fluent in metrics, analytics and spreadsheets are long gone by. The internet has made it relatively simple to measure metrics and if you aren’t measuring your marketing metrics, the competition will pass you by, leaving you in the dust. Remember, it’s vital that these marketing metrics are measured every day. In order to get the most out of your metrics, you need to have projections in place that can be compared to actual results. That will let you know how well your marketing plan is actually working.