When it comes to marketing performance, what you see isn’t always what you get. It’s easy to look at vanity metrics such as likes, comments, views, or shares as a marker of success. While these metrics look pretty and may make you feel good, the question becomes, is this action actually driving ROI? With so many metrics to dig through, it’s tough to know which ones can tell you if your content is hitting home with your audience. To determine which marketing efforts are making a difference, these metrics are a great place to focus your time and resources.

  1. Conversion Rate – To measure your website’s conversion rate, take the number of total sales and divide it by total visitors. This percentage is important to track and can tell you if your CTAs (calls-to-action) are effective.
  2. Bounce Rate –Your website visitors should be spending time on your site, not leaving. If customers are consistently leaving your website after viewing the first page, this is a sign that you may want to make a change. Ideally, you’ll want your bounce rate to fall between 26% and 40%.
  3. Traffic – Are your social media posts or digital ads driving viewers to your website? Your marketing efforts should directly impact your site’s traffic. Through link shares and calls to action, you can effectively move customers through the marketing funnel.
  4. Open Rate – Your email campaigns are only as good as your subject lines. If you’re not persuading your audience to click into your email, they aren’t seeing all the good things you have to share inside the campaign. Open rate is a great metric to determine if your subject lines are captivating the attention of your readers.
  5. Click-Through Rate (CTR) – This metric is relevant for both email campaigns and digital advertising. This number signifies if your copy and calls to action entice the viewer to take action or “click-through.” For email campaigns, this looks like directing the customer to a blog post or webpage. For digital advertising, this looks like sending them to a contact page or a page that shares a product or service.
  6. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – How much are you spending each time someone interacts with your ad? When it comes to digital ad CPC, the lower the cost, the better your ad is performing. If this is high, it may be a sign that it’s time to adjust copy, creative, or audience.

There are many metrics to consider when making marketing decisions. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, these are a few numbers that we keep a close eye on for our clients as well as ourselves. At the end of the day, we want to create content that converts, which means remaining flexible, open-minded, and data-driven.

“What separates good content from great content is a willingness to take risks and push the envelope.” — Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-founder, HubSpot.