What is Your Favourite Digital Marketing Metric?
We have been asking key influencers across the Digital Marketing landscape a number of questions around digital marketing metrics. Questions like, what are your favourite metrics? What top metrics would you take to the board? As marketing departments engage in digital transformation, why ican it be so damn hard to be a data driven marketeer, why the struggle? In this part 1 of 3 blogs we’ll be sharing what Rand Fishkin, Dave Chaffey, Edwina Dunn, Brain Clifton, Matthew Tod,Tink Taylor and Mathew Eisner had to say when asked.
What is your favourite metric and why?
Big thank you again guys for giving up your time to respond to the questions!
To make the most of these metrics, I have mapped the answers to a basic funnel using.Building Awareness Unique Visits – Rand Fiskin talks about Keyword Opportunity Metrics Audience Share- Edwina Dunn loves Customer Commitment (brand love) Engage Audience Engagement Segments – Brian Clifton goes into detail about engagement rate by segments (using Google Analytics) Achieve Conversion to Marketing Goals ROI- Tink Taylor, because Sales is what matters. Build Customer and Fan Relationships Net Promoter Score – Dave Chaffey, how satisfied are your customers. K Factor- Matthew Eisner, do your customers do some work for you and get you more customers? Matthew Tod- doesn’t have one favourite metric……read on to find out what he had to say. Ready to read? Let’s go!
Building Awareness
Rand Fishkin, former Wizard of Moz, Founder SparkToro
My favourite metric……. is Keyword Opportunity. It’s a metric that the SEO world has only recently come around to using, and tries to estimate the relative click-through rate to the organic, web search results for a given keyword. With Google introducing so many types of rich data in search results, there’s a huge difference between ranking #1 for a query with 10 blue links vs. one with a Knowledge Graph, three ads above the results, a news block, an image block, etc. Keyword Opportunity helps us prioritize the right keywords to target, not just the ones with high volume.More about it here and in the KW Explorer tool.
Edwina Dunn, CEO Starcount
My favourite metric is customer commitment (brand love)because just using spend, value or frequency places no value on the degree to which a customer is truly engaged with the brand; too often a valuable customer may be disloyal and spending with others also and so we have to fight constantly to keep our share of spend.
Engage Audience
Brian Clifton, Author and Director of Data Insights & Analytics
My favourite metric is engagement. This not something you can directly lift out of your analytics tool – you need to give it some thought. In Google Analytics Engagement Rate is obtained as a segment i.e. a segment constructed to include all visitors that have done something of value on your website.
What constitutes “value” is what requires thought. Mostly, value is defined as completing a call-to-action. These include the obvious candidates of:⦁ visitors who clicked an email link (made contact) ⦁ visitors who completed a contact, subscription, or survey form (made contact) ⦁ visitors who logged into a private area (existing customers, members, subscribers) ⦁ visitors who add-to-cart but did not purchase ⦁ visitors who transacted with you ⦁ visitors who commented on a product, post or article However, engagement should also include softer metrics such as: ⦁ visitors who viewed specific content that requires genuine interest (or effort to find) e.g. special offer related to previous content viewed. Amazon does this very well with their “People who viewed this product also viewed…” ⦁ visitors who’s visit goes beyond the “site average”, such as spending x minutes longer on your site, viewing y pages more. INSERT PIC
Basically any action that constitutes real visitor engagement on your site should be included this segment i.e. its a count of visitors that engage with your brand in some shape or form. Then calculate what percentage of your total traffic this represents – I guarantee you will be surprised, and not in a pleasant way! Around 150 years ago, John Wannamaker famously stated:“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”Amazingly I find that is still true today.
Achieve Conversion to Marketing Goals
Tink Taylor, Founder of dotMailer
My favourite metric is ……. ROI Because …… Sales is what matters… not opens, clicks, reads, visitors etc
Dave Chaffey, CEO Smart Insights
Customer satisfaction rating (with online experience or overall multichannel brand experience).Why? Since marketers need to go beyond the web analytics and commercial metrics to get direct insight from consumers to get their perception of your online brand / multichannel experience.
Building Customer and Fan Relationships
Matthew Einer Global Marketing Manager Startupbootcamp.org
Favourite Metrics: K-factor/viral coefficient – if you can create a product where users onboard each other, all you have to do is hit a single node in each network of people to gain adoption.
One metric to rule them all?
Matthew Tod, Director at D4td PLC
My favourite metric is ……. one that I know impacts the whole business not just a digital channel. For example the number of people who are doing high quality pre-purchase product research in a digital channel prior to purchase in ANY channel is always interesting. Because …… single channel thinking is for numpties, those who don’t want to progress and those who are to lazy to figure it out!
So what next?
Interesting right? For any marketeer, metrics, data and all those numbers can quite frankly give even the most astute data geek the night sweats! If you want to find out more about Google Analytics and how to report more effectively to the board, we have a number of free resources ready for your download here – enjoy!