One of the most important tasks to achieve success in your Marketing actions is the analysis of metrics, as they are what verify what is working well and what needs to be improved.
And, to be well defined, metrics must be aligned with business objectives, enabling strategies to work in perfect harmony with the company’s ambitions.
However, more important than simply choosing indicators and gathering data is carrying out an in-depth analysis of what has been collected.
With that in mind, I’m going to show you the importance of this process, highlighting how a good analysis can boost your Marketing strategies and business results, going beyond the conventional.
Ready? Come with me!
After all, what are Marketing metrics?
To begin with, metrics are used to measure the performance of specific activities or processes.
In other words: they help to measure how much the goals achieved bring the company closer to its current objective.
So, if the goal is to generate 20% new leads for the business in the next 6 months, it may be interesting to monitor the lead growth rate metric weekly, for example.
In this context, I highlight three fundamental metrics for Marketing:
- Conversion rate: measures the effectiveness of a strategy by the percentage of people who take a desired action. This reveals how persuasive your content is and how well your website is converting at each stage of the sales funnel;
- Sessions: are the set of interactions, activities or navigation paths carried out by a user on your website or blog over a period of time. Provides information about user engagement, topics of interest and the ability of your website to retain them;
- Average time on page: This is the average amount of time visitors spend interacting with the content on a page on your website. It gives you an idea of your level of user engagement and assesses your ability to attract and retain visitors’ attention.
How important is metrics analysis?
Analysis goes beyond simple data collection, as it requires a well-defined process, clarity about intentions and the ability to interpret numbers with quality.
In this sense, defining and analyzing metrics is one of the fundamental steps to verify whether, in fact, the actions are achieving the stipulated objectives.
Therefore, your analysis helps to increase digital efficiency, reduce costs and minimize losses. In addition, it guides decision-making and directs strategic adjustments, allowing for continuous optimization of Marketing actions!
If I were to sum it up in one sentence, I would say: analyzing Marketing metrics is only essential for companies that want to manage their processes, better allocate their resources and validate whether the strategies outlined are delivering the desired results.
Since I imagine this is your case, it’s time to delve deeper into metrics analysis! In the next topic, I’ll explain the step-by-step process involved.
The metrics analysis process
Now that the concepts are clearer, it is important to understand how the metrics analysis process actually works.
This procedure, sometimes underestimated, is the basis for boosting the performance of Digital Marketing actions! See the step-by-step guide:
Set clear goals
The basis of any metrics analysis is defining specific objectives.
They act as guides and direct the analysis towards more significant and tangible results.
Thus, by aligning each metric with specific goals, Marketing professionals can extract more accurate information to evaluate the success of the strategy, with less wasted time and without losing focus on what matters.
Identify what to analyze
Going beyond traditional indicators is an important practice when we talk about metrics analysis.
Emphasizing the importance of analyzing user behaviors, traffic patterns, and meaningful interactions broadens understanding of digital performance.
Therefore, understanding not just the numbers, but the context behind them, provides a much more complete — and intelligent — view of the process.
Perform the analysis periodically
It is not enough to analyze it once, it is necessary to maintain a frequency to ensure monitoring of the result over time.
Furthermore, different types of metrics require evaluations at different intervals , both due to the time required for significant changes to occur and due to seasonal influences.
So differentiating the need for more frequent analysis for some metrics and less frequent analysis for others is an important part of the process!
So, you need to understand why this happens and how certain metrics reflect faster changes, while others can be measured over longer intervals to get a truer picture.
Metrics and Market Intelligence
As we have seen, using metrics in Marketing makes all the difference, and their uses are defined according to the specific objectives of each strategy.
Thus, metrics are not universal in their relevance. For example, in a campaign focused on brand visibility , metrics such as reach and social engagement may be more important than conversion rates.
In a Branding campaign, for example, the most relevant metrics are impressions, reach, and social interactions, as they indicate the brand’s visibility and how it resonates with the target audience.
On the other hand, in conversion campaigns, it is more strategic to use metrics such as conversion rate or CAC, since the objective is to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) and the effectiveness of conversion actions.
In this context, an important point is to understand the difference between two types of metrics: real and vanity.
Real metrics are tangible and contribute directly to business objectives, such as conversion rate and customer retention. Thus, they provide information for decision-making and adjustments in operations.
Vanity metrics tend to be superficial and not directly related to results. Examples include the number of likes on social media and total impressions on posts.
The latter can create a false sense of success, leading to mistaken decisions and, therefore, have limited value in understanding the real impact of Marketing actions!
In other words, real metrics contribute to business intelligence, as they offer true information aligned with organizational objectives.
On the other hand, vanity metrics can be misleading, diverting focus from what is more strategic.
Hypothetical case: which metrics should you evaluate when the goal is to increase visibility?
As has become clear from everything I have said so far, there are countless metrics available for data analysis in Marketing.
Now, in a hypothetical scenario, imagine that a cosmetics e-commerce wants to increase its online visibility.
To achieve this purpose, it is important to understand and closely monitor the metrics that can inform about the performance of actions focused on this objective.
But it is important to remember that each channel — whether organic or paid — requires an individual analysis for a more specific and true view!
The ideal is to understand what you want to evaluate, start with a few essential indicators and, as the work progresses, evaluate which metrics are not so interesting, which ones stand out as business thermometers.
Remembering the hypothetical example I gave, see below which indicators I would prioritize:
Organic traffic (unique visitors)
The metric used to measure organic traffic is the number of unique visitors coming from organic search.
This number is important because it represents the size of the target audience you are attracting and how effective your blog’s promotion and the strategies you use are.
In the case of cosmetics e-commerce, for example, if person A accesses your website once, and person B accesses it five times, you will have six total visits, but two unique visitors — in other words: two people effectively impacted.
For digital actions to be effective, they need to be seen. Increasing organic traffic indicates better visibility in search engines, which suggests an increase in brand awareness.
Therefore, unique visits are the first numbers you should measure!
Search engine positioning (SERP)
Good positioning in search engines can increase brand visibility when users search for related products, services or topics. Therefore, significant improvements in your position in the SERP indicate that your content has been optimized for the search engine algorithm.
Therefore, the metric that evaluates positioning in the SERP is the average position in the search results for relevant keywords.
In other words: in the case of e-commerce, by being at the top of Google, for example, the brand will appear more to people when they search for cosmetics, beauty, well-being and other relevant topics.
Click-through rate (CTR) in search results
Click through rate (CTR), called click rate, is an important indicator for evaluating the appeal of an action for the target audience.
Therefore, a high click-through rate indicates that people are interested in the content displayed, which can increase brand visibility and relevance.
The more people view and then click on the link (which could be an ad or content), the higher the CTR.
Therefore, the metric to be used to evaluate the CTR is the percentage of clicks in relation to impressions in the search results.
This is very relevant in the case of a cosmetics e-commerce, as it indicates that your products are attracting enough attention for people to click on the brand’s pages instead of others!
And this, in turn, contributes to increasing the public’s visibility and awareness of what the company does, sells and the issues it addresses.
Bounce rate
The metric used to measure bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing just one page.
With this metric, you can find out why people are leaving your site, improve navigation, and create more engaging content.
A low bounce rate suggests that visitors are finding what they’re looking for, are curious to learn more about other things, and are having a positive experience on your site. This contributes to good brand visibility.
Therefore, reducing the bounce rate is extremely necessary for your business, as each lost visitor is also a lost sales opportunity!
Average time on page
The average time visitors spend on the site metric informs the average duration they spend consuming the content made available there.
This allows you to understand whether your content is being read and, therefore, whether it is truly useful.
After all, a longer average time suggests that visitors are engaged with the content!
Social media shares
User behavior on social media can be very relevant to your business!
To measure shares, the metric used is the number of times the website content is shared across platforms.
By knowing this number, you can expand your brand’s reach to different channels, increasing its visibility among different audiences.
New Visitor Conversion Rate
This is one of the most important metrics for your business!
Conversion is when a user performs a very important action, be it a sale, a registration, subscribing to a newsletter, among others.
In this sense, the percentage of new visitors who perform a desired action measures the success of your strategies at different stages of the funnel.
If it is low, it is a warning that an investigation will be necessary to resolve the problem. If the rate goes up, profitability usually follows!
In our initial example, a cosmetics e-commerce can achieve a much better conversion rate by constantly measuring the percentage of visitors converting into customers on its website.
By having access to this information, you can understand the context that influences decision-making and then act to reduce friction in the journey, increasing the chances of a purchase happening.
This will also directly contribute to the brand’s reputation, as it influences customer satisfaction.
Tools for metrics analysis
Metrics analysis requires the support of specialized tools that offer resources to monitor and interpret data.
Therefore, I brought the main tools for a good analysis:
- Google Analytics: is a robust and free tool that provides a complete view of traffic, user behavior and performance of website pages;
- HubSpot: ideal for Marketing automation, offers detailed analysis on leads, interactions and effectiveness of Inbound Marketing strategies ;
- Semrush: specialized in SEO, it allows you to analyze keyword performance, monitor competition and evaluate online visibility;
- Facebook Insights: works to analyze metrics on social networks and offers important data on the performance of posts, reach and audience engagement;
- Tableau: a data visualization tool that facilitates the visual interpretation of complex metrics, aiding in decision making.
Remember: choosing the right tool is just the first step! Success in metrics analysis depends on integrating these tools with a well-defined strategy.
Do you want to analyze your Digital Marketing performance?
As we have seen, the ability to interpret data is a competitive advantage! That is why metrics are so relevant to Digital Marketing.
Through them, it is possible to understand how strategies are progressing, optimizing resources and, of course, time!
And with a specialized perspective, like EnjoyMinder’s, data analysis will bring even better results.
So, don’t miss out on this opportunity! Complete our Digital Marketing Strategy Session right now, completely free of charge, and count on our help to take your strategies to the next level!
