5 Metrics You Should Be Tracking and Why

In today’s digital landscape, we have what can only be described as an overabundance of information. But thanks to website analytics platforms, this information surplus is not only measurable, but can easily drive massive impact on your company’s bottom line.

Well, maybe easy is a relative term. Knowing how to sort through the noise and best utilize the information at your disposal can be a difficult, time-consuming task. It’s also a task that looks different for everyone, so it’s important to keep your business goals top-of-mind when evaluating the numbers and establishing your key focus metrics.

Whether you’re a marketer, business owner, or self-proclaimed influencer, it’s easy to get consumed in buzzwordy metrics that may not be that valuable for you to explore. To help ease the pain of sifting through numbers and metric types, a pain we’ve all felt one time or another, our team put together a list of suggested metrics that have proven to be most valuable for our clients:

1. Cost per Acquisition

We have christened cost per acquisition (CPA) as the holy grail of marketing metrics, and rightfully so. While CPA is one of the many metrics that can be used across platforms, it’s a great indicator to measure the financial impact of your marketing campaigns. Your CPA essentially asks, “How much did it cost you to score one paying customer?” And since there is no universal benchmark for what your CPA should be, we recommend dividing your total spend by total attributed acquisitions. 

2. Cost per Conversion/Cost per Action

Not to be confused with CPA, the term ‘conversion’ is a bit more ambiguous than it lets on. Depending on your specific goal, a conversion can mean anything from form fill or whitepaper download, to signing up to receive promotional emails. Similar to CPA, your cost per conversion will tell you, “How much did it cost for one person to take a specific, preferred action?”

You can easily calculate your CPA by dividing your costs by your number of conversions. And luckily, there are many digital resources available (we prefer WordStream) that outline specific industry benchmarks to help identify where your cost per conversion/action should score compared to other brands.

3. Click-Through-Rate

Simply put, your click-through-rate will tell you the rate at which your audience is clicking through to your site. CTR is a great metric that tracks a number of things depending on the specific medium. For example, in promotional email marketing, your CTR will help establish a distinction between marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQLs)—meaning a distinction between customers who need a little more nurturing, and customers who are ready for sales emails. However, for paid media campaigns, CTR can help assess if your ad was unique, memorable and attractive to your targeted audiences.You can easily calculate CTR by simply dividing your number of clicks received by number of impressions; and as with cost per conversion, there are many digital resources available to help give you a better idea of current industry benchmarks.

4. Engagement

For any companies wanting to leverage their organic social media presence, whether to increase brand awareness or site traffic, engagement is king. Measuring engagement is the #1 method to weigh the success of your organic social tactics. It provides a clear window into what your audience clicks on, interacts with, and reads. It also gives you a better idea of the type of content they want (or need) to see. For example, if you notice your posts about dogs tend to get higher engagement than your posts about cats, you’d be right to assume your audience wants more dog content! And with Facebook racking up about 2.3 billion users worldwide, we highly recommend utilizing social media as much as possible.

Going deeper than social, engagement is also a great tool to use to see how well your audience is liking your website or email content. And by looking total opens/click versus unique opens/clicks, you can determine if people are going back and re-consuming your content.

5. On-site Behavior Analytics

Okay, this may not be a specific metric BUT monitoring your audience’s on-site behavior is essential in perfecting your user experience (UX), site engagement, accessibility, visibility, etc, so we couldn’t not add it to the list. Using a website analytics platform like Google Analytics, you can pull key statistics to show how users interact with your website. If you pump out a lot of blog and insight pieces, look at how long users stay on specific pages; if you have an eCommerce site, find the point in the customer journey that they tend to abandon their cart; if you utilize paid media or email marketing, see which channel people are using to get to your site.

While we love data analysis for many reasons, that love comes full-circle due to the fact that there is no cookie-cutter approach. Still unsure what metrics are most valuable in helping to reach your goals? We’d love to help – get in touch with us!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022