Which metrics are the most useful to monitor your marketing campaign?

From click-throughs and bounce rates to interactions and impressions, it can be hard to keep track of all the metrics you need to measure a campaign. You can spend time gathering data using all the latest tools, which may look good on paper, but they are only useful if you can learn from them. The results should tell the story of how well your campaign performed and what improvements can be made for next time.

The first thing to consider is what it is you want to find out from your results and how this fits into your overall strategy. Whether you’re trying to make a sale, set up an initial chat or simply just raise brand awareness, the metrics that you measure show the journey to that goal, to better understand how the goal was achieved or not achieved.

Using a software platform such as HubSpot or Hootsuite can help map out that journey for you, mitigating the need to locate specific metrics, as those tools gather all the information you need into one platform. There are pros and cons to using marketing tools like those, but it’s important to use ones that benefit you, rather than report on the metrics that ‘look the nicest’ a.k.a vanity metrics.

There are so many things you could measure, but in this article, let’s look at which metrics we believe mean the most to your overall campaign. (Of course, this all depends on the type of campaign you’re running!)

Emailer metrics

For an email marketing campaign, metrics such as click-throughs and opens are useful for finding out whether someone is engaging with the design and content of the email. Opening the email is a great way to indicate that the subject line and title of your email were ‘worth’ reading more of.

This statistic is dependent on the type of industry you work in so it’s best practice to look at like-minded businesses to see if there is a specific industry average.

Having the ability to measure bounce rate is also really important. Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were unsuccessfully delivered, meaning they ‘bounced’ out of people’s inboxes. This could be a way to siphon out all the email addresses on your list that are no longer active.

Our advice is to measure these top three most closely:

• Interactions (clicks)
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Opens

Social media campaign

For social media marketing campaigns, the metrics available are vast. For organic social media (paid is a whole different story), and particularly if your business is newly set up on social media, measuring the use of hashtags or key words in your copy for ‘reach’ is a great way to see how many people saw your content to begin with, ensuring it hits the right audience.

Of course, this is also dependent on the social media post content. On Instagram for instance, a Reel will outperform a single static graphic, based on the way the platform is built. Similarly for YouTube Shorts, initial reach will perform better than the typical landscape long-form video, purely based on how YouTube Shorts is built for content consumers.

For the more established organic social profiles with a bigger following, focusing on metrics such as engagements and interactions highlights that people want to connect with the content. The more interacted with your content is, the faster your followers will grow.

We believe that the golden metric is ‘shares’ – meaning how many times your post has been shared with another audience member. This metric means not only has someone read it and interacted with it, but they also feel that they want to share it with their own following.

We suggest keeping the closest eye on:

• Reach
• Engagements/interactions
• Shares

Website campaign or Lead-generation campaigns

For a campaign that incorporates a link to a web page, using an analytical platform such as Google Analytics can measure a person’s journey from the initial touchpoint (perhaps an email or a social media post) all the way to then hopefully completing the call to action, whether that’s a purchase from the web page storefront or getting in touch about a service or offering. Finding out who clicked where, is a good indication of what type of content is interesting to your audience.

The main metric to focus on is drop off and time on the page, depending on the analytical platform. If several people were to open a web page from a link on a social post or email but spend less than 1 or 2 seconds on it, that wouldn’t be considered successful. Sure, the content might not be relevant for them, but it depends on the number of people who click the call to action. Let’s say 30 people click the link in your Instagram bio and they all leave after 1–2 seconds, it means that something in your content needs adjusting. If someone were to spend maybe 5–10 minutes on a web page, we can assume that they are interested in what they are reading.

Another great measurement is scroll depth. If the web page has scrollable content, then the analytical platform will be able to tell you how far they got before they dropped off. A good scroll depth can be anywhere between 60 percent to 80 percent of the page.

Our recommendations for measurement are:

• Drop-off rate
• Time on page
• Scroll depth

So, what’s the verdict?

It’s important to ensure that you compare your data with competitors, but it’s equally important to compare the data with yourself. The numbers and data can look great on paper, but it becomes a lot more useful when you compare it with previous campaigns. That is how you measure success.

Following our metric suggestions will give you a good indication of what type of content your audience finds most interesting and what you should create more of for your next campaign. That’s not to say other metrics don’t add value, such as impressions on social media, or if people visited other web pages on their exploration. But, the metrics that could change the way you market are the ones where the audience guides you, not the other way around.