Marketing Metrics: Finding Your Key Benchmarks

Marketing Metrics: Finding Your Key Benchmarks

While attending the Digital East Conference a short time ago, I had the pleasure of listening to Michael Goldberg from Martini Media, discussing the idea of a “Guiding Star Metric”.  It’s no secret that today’s industry has shifted to become metric driven.  The marketer of today has to have the innate ability of cutting through the noise, and make educated decisions.

It’s about to get Personal: Metrics Marketing in the Family

My father and I have pursued vastly different career paths.  I myself, a digital marketing enthusiast, while he is an international airline pilot.  The photo to the right is of him descending to Philadelphia International Airport. Career titles aside, our skill sets intersect when the time comes to visualize massive amounts of data, understand what that data is telling us, and then make judgment decisions based off what we perceive.  Wrap it up Blake! OK, so for my father, the most important instrument at his disposal is called an ‘Attitude Indicator’, that shows the pitch and role of the plane at any given time. When push comes to shove, this is the key instrument to understand what the aircraft is doing.

Determining Key Marketing Metrics

Similar to flying, a marketer needs to know the status of their efforts at any given time.  How do I begin to assess what is important, or not important?  My best advice is you start with the end goal in mind. Determine what the goal of that particular campaign is, then what metrics best determine how these goals are performing.

In celebration of breast cancer awareness month I chose do a mock breast cancer awareness campaign for a local charity.

Objective: Drive Awareness for awareness, including attending events, donating.

Mock Data for the Month

Spend- $20,000 on a Campaign for Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Visits- 4,000 Visits

Exit Rate- 46.42% (Average Exit Rate from the Top 5 Traffic Pages, after the Landing Page)

In this case you could instantly say that ‘Average Time on Site’, ‘Page Views’, or ‘Exit Rate’ would be the best metrics data, but I think they only go skin deep.  How do you know if your efforts are actually in line with to the main objective?

To look past the obvious, I would want to know my cost compared to engagement level.  To find our Cost per Engaged Visitor, manipulate the data…

Find the Engaged Visitor Rate (1 – Exit Rate) = (1 – 46.42%) = 53.58%

Next, find Engaged Visitors (Visits * Engaged Visitor Rate) = (4,000 * 53.58%) = 2,143 visitors

Plug in the data for Cost Per Engaged Visit (Cost / Engaged Visitors) = ($20,000 / 2,143) = $9.33

Time to Move the Needle

So you know what your guiding metric is, the important thing to know is, how to “move the needle”.  What changes can you make to continuously improve this metric?  Your thoughts, behaviors, and content of your marketing efforts need to be geared toward improving this key metric.

In our example with our charity and breast cancer awareness month, I would suggest an overall investment in user engagement to improve our metric.  Fresh content, mobile experience and interaction could all benefit user experience.  With a higher engagement rating, exit rate would likely decline, and overall cost per engaged visitor will decrease.