4 Marketing Campaign Metrics Your Company Can’t Ignore

Being a successful marketer is more than bringing a creative mind to the table. The best in their class, from marketing assistant to CMO, have a solid understanding of these basic campaign metrics: Click to Open Rates (CTOR) measure how many visitors acted after seeing an ad. Cost Per Impression helps you compare how people viewed your ads across various campaigns and channels. Cost Per Click (CPC) tells you how much you’re paying to get a response (either within a single campaign or across different campaigns and channels). When combined with other metrics, these measurements help marketers better understand the effectiveness of their efforts, while providing a solid foundation for future decisions. Through accurate measurement, marketing can become a “science” that produces a solid ROI (rather than being unpredictable, or even worse, a waste of valuable time). For this reason, marketers must be able to think beyond basic campaign metrics and incorporate these additional four metrics into their strategies: 1. The Lifetime Value of Your Customer Consider this your starting point and end goal. Without a solid handle on this metric, you’ll never be able to properly target, service, and cater to your ideal customer. Go beyond the initial “touch point” and follow your customer through the entire sales and marketing process to determine where the value truly lies (this will also dictate your upfront strategies). Understand, for example, that pulling in a customer quickly via an initial media strategy may not necessarily yield a long-term customer for your brand. The easiest way to determine a customer’s lifetime value is by factoring in all of the sales that a particular user will engage in over the course of your relationship. 2. Your Online and Offline Bounce Rate Sure, you want to know how many people are engaging with and responding to your online and offline media strategies, but exactly how many of them didn’t convert to customers (for whatever reason) can be a very telling metric. Put simply, the bounce rate tells you how many visitors leave your website or turn off your commercial before taking further action to buy (or, learn more). A potential customer who views your direct response commercial on TV and then visits your URL for more information, but who then leaves the site before “clicking” on any specific pages, has effectively “bounced.” Your goal should be to have the lowest bounce rate possible because the longer someone engages with your brand, the more likely it is that you’ll convert him or her into a customer. 3. The Amount of Time People Spend on Your Website In today’s cluttered, information-rich world, getting “sticky” eyeballs to spend time on your website is a primary goal that escapes even the best-intentioned marketers. By understanding the amount of time that customers spend on your site, and which pages he or she is visiting, you can determine which pages are the most compelling and engaging. From there, you can optimize your site, individual pages, customer relationship management (CRM), and engagement strategies in a way that keeps those sticky eyeballs glued to your website for as long as possible. 4. Your Campaign’s Projected ROI In today’s budget-conscious business world, CMOs are regularly asked to prove the value of their campaign decisions. As one of the most important factors for any marketing campaign, a projected ROI helps CMOs demonstrate the profitability associated with their decisions and investments. This, in turn, allows organizations to make even better marketing decisions going forward (or, to stick with what’s working and leverage it even further). Put simply, a positive ROI translates into an effective marketing strategy, while a negative one means it’s time for either a major or minor adjustment. Calculating the ROI for your campaign is fairly straightforward: compare your cost-per-lead with your lead-to-close ratio and then compare the resultant number with your average customer value. If you shell out $100 per lead — and if you close half of those leads — then you’re paying $200 for every new customer. Compare this number to your average customer value to determine whether you’re generating a profit or if it’s time for some serious campaign realignment. By keeping an eye on these key metrics, you’ll be able to get a solid gauge on your marketing campaign’s health. As you integrate these and other metrics into your overall strategies, be sure to consider whether your underlying goal is sales, engagement, or some other measurement. Exactly what your goals are can have a profound impact on how you obtain and use the key metrics for your campaign, which should be holistic in nature and not just centered on a single measure. A campaign focused on generating dollar value, for example, will require a different approach than an effort that’s focused on brand awareness. By understanding the various platforms that are available, and by creating campaigns focused on the appropriate customer responses, you’ll be able to hone a campaign that ignites just the right level of engagement, awareness, and response.

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4 Marketing Campaign Metrics Your Company Can’t Ignore

Jessica Hawthorne-Castro

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Jessica Hawthorne-Castro