You already know how business metrics can help your company grow. After all, metrics like revenue growth, profitability, expenditures and cash flow offer valuable insight into your company's current financial state -- and whether it's headed in the right direction. But how can metrics like these help you evaluate your business' marketing efforts? Are you meeting your marketing goals? Is your business capable of sustaining these goals? Online marketing metrics provide important tools that you can use to answer these questions and determine your company’s overall state of health.
Identifying and using these metrics is not as complicated as you might think. Here are 5 more metrics to help you achieve your marketing goals:
Customer Acquisition Costs
This figure represents the cost to acquire a customer. Did you spend $1,000 on a campaign that yielded 20 new customers? Your cost is $50 per customer for that campaign. The actual formula is this: take all your sales, marketing and overhead expenses for a particular campaign, then divide that total by the number of customers you acquired from that campaign.
A high cost per customer is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as these customers retain their value to you over time.
Customer's Value to the Company
If you have a high percentage of repeat or lifetime customers continuing to spend money at your business, it's possible to sustain a higher customer acquisition cost. This is a good metric for judging the true cost of each customer and how much your company can afford to spend on them.
A customer's lifetime value is determined by comparing the average amount of money a customer spends over time to your business' cost to acquire that customer. How does this number compare to your net profits or losses?
Percentage of Revenue
Changes in your revenue stream can lead to trouble. If, for example, 50% of your revenue comes from selling pet supplies, 30% from dog training classes and 20% from grooming services, a drop-off in sign-ups for training classes will affect your profit levels and cause a shift in costs for the other services.
SEO
This metric includes the results from all the elements of SEO you've incorporated into your marketing efforts. Since your online marketing campaigns are key to attracting qualified leads and paying customers, their success is critical to your company’s long-term financial health. Analytics tools, like Google Analytics, can help you determine which of your marketing tactics are succeeding -- and which aren’t. Look at the following:
- search engine rank
- most popular keywords
- organic traffic
- unique page views
- bounce rates
Optimizing your on- and off-site content is essential to your marketing efforts. These metrics help ensure those efforts are kept on track.
Social Media
Social media metrics tell you how well your social media marketing campaigns are working. Since social media has become an integral tool for attracting and retaining customers, these metrics should not be ignored. Look at your:
- number of subscribers
- number of fans and/or followers
- how many of those fans and followers convert into paying customers
- quality of referral sources
These online marketing metrics provide invaluable information when you determine just how close you are to achieving your weekly, monthly and yearly goals, and they allow you to adjust your online campaigns ass you go. Make sure to incorporate them into your business strategy to get -- and stay -- on the path to marketing success.
