Data-driven marketing - What marketing metrics should you be tracking

In the world of marketing, we use data every day for a whole range of marketing applications. Even outside of marketing data and metrics make up an awful lot of what you do, probably without realising, even just working out the change of petrol prices or the ever-increasing price of Freddo’s we use metrics to determine good and bad regularly. 

In the world of marketing, though data and metrics are massively important, a fair amount of data is tracked and measured to help make marketing changes or decisions.

Why Track Data and What are Metrics?

A lot of people are a bit freaked out about their data being tracked but it’s an important part of the online experience that helped improve the internet as everyone knows it. Marketers use data to keep track of how things are performing within a campaign or on a website and use the insights to improve the ongoing marketing strategy or user experience. 

Metrics are just a way of quantifying data, in marketing they are measurable values and processes used to work out the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and to show the results achieved. 

When the digital landscape began to grow, new marketing opportunities like social media became massively important. Marketers need a way to keep track of these channels and gain insights from the data they provide.

What Metrics Should you be Tracking?

Using something like google analytics can be very confusing, it can be an overload of information the first time you log in so there are a few specific bits of information you should track:

• Users & Sessions: These are two different metrics but are both as important as each other and should be compared to one another. As you might have guessed this is the number of users on the website and how many sessions your website has been getting. If you had 200 users and 600 sessions you could work out that on average each person has visited the site 3 times. Measuring these over time can show how your business is growing and how marketing campaigns are performing.

• Session Duration: Session duration is the length of time a single session is on average from each user. This is a great way of working out user engagement and experience, if the duration is low for example chances are the user experience is poor and you should work on improving it. 

• Pages per Session: This metric shows the average number of pages a user views in a single session. This is also a good metric to measure user experience and engagement and comparing this with session duration is useful to work out how your site performs. 

• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit your site and leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can show a technical problem or content issues. If your bounce rate is high look around and see if you can work out the problem, it could be a problem with a specific browser or device performing poorly so people leave. 

• Conversions: If you make use of goals in your analytics or have an eCommerce site you should be measuring conversions. It can show you the number of people and what percent of sessions are completing goals. You can also track how much you have made through your site.
  
  

What we do as an Agency

Like any other marketing agency, we use data and metrics to make decisions. We track our client’s data to help us make decisions on what works best for their marketing strategy and to track how the campaign has performed so far. We of course want our clients to perform as best as they possibly can so all of this data is vital to help. 

If you are struggling to deal with data, metrics or marketing as a whole why not get in touch and see how we can help you with your marketing.