Measuring the metrics

As small businesses and SMEs continue to navigate 2023’s challenging economic climate, it’s more important than ever to ensure that every pound of those increasingly precious budgets is being spent well and driving results.

By HANNAH DAVIES

WHILE MANY BUSINESS OWNERS AND MARKETING TEAMS may be tempted to focus on metrics like social media ‘likes’, ‘comments’, ‘shares’ or ‘page views’, these vanity metrics provide little insight into whether their marketing efforts are actually driving revenue. It's crucial to dig a little deeper and prioritise the measurement of conversional marketing metrics, which will allow you and your team to better evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns and ensure a better return on your marketing investment.

As we are approaching mid-year, it's a great time to take stock and to analyse how your 2023 marketing strategy is performing so far. Shifting your focus to tracking conversional, performancebased metrics will offer you as business owners a clearer understanding of which marketing channels, tactics and campaigns are driving the most value. This also allows you to keep a close eye on areas where your marketing strategy may need to be adjusted, in order to maximise results and stay on track towards those 2023 goals.

Here are just a few recommendations to start measuring month-on-month:

Click Through Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who click on a link such as an ad or a call-to-action button after seeing it. CTR is an important metric for helping you understand how effective your advertising or marketing efforts are at getting people to take action.

If you have a high CTR, it means that people are interested in your message or content and are clicking through to learn more or make a purchase.

Visitor Acquisition by Traffic Source: www.brightmondaysltd.co.uk hannah@brightmondaysltd.co.uk

This refers to the different ways that people arrive at your website (search engine, social media or direct traffic) and how many visitors come from each source. This information can help you understand which marketing channels are most effective at driving traffic to your site and to consider reinvesting your marketing efforts or spend back into these channels for maximum results.

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Event count: Event count can represent how many times someone has clicked on a button on your website such as ‘subscribe’, ‘download’ or how many times someone has made a purchase through your online store. Monitoring your website’s ‘Event count’ is really useful, because it can help you track the success of specific actions or campaigns and assess the overall health of your marketing funnel – from awareness (social media post/digital or printed advertisement, for example) to consideration (website or email campaign CTR rate) to conversion (website event). This can help you understand what areas are working well and which might need some tweaking.

Which leads us nicely onto…

Visitor to Lead % Conversion: This is the percentage of website visitors who take an action that indicates interest in your product or service, such as filling out a contact form or subscribing to your email list. This action taken turns them from a visitor into a potential lead.

Lead to Customer % Conversion: This is the percentage of leads (people who have shown interest in your product or service) who actually become paying customers. For example, if 10 people filled out a form on your website and two of them became paying customers, the lead to customer conversion rate would be 20%.

Free tools such as Google Analytics 4 paired with regular customer insight from places such as your CRM system, customer feedback, polls, surveys, testimonials and other forms of ‘usergenerated’ content will help you to measure all of the above.

Frequent analysis of your web and social media analytics will tell you WHAT is working – understanding your customers experience, attitudes and behaviour will tell you WHY. A better understanding of your customers’ behaviour and journey will offer you greater clarity and confidence when it comes to marketing. You can then begin to identify new patterns of buying behaviour and engagement, as well as areas of improvement, and reinvest this analysis and research back into your marketing strategy.

Hannah Davies Bright Mondays brightmondaysltd.co.uk

hannah@brightmondaysltd.co.uk