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Episode Details

Episode #

012

Date

January 27, 2022

Length

15 minutes

Listen On

Keeping Up With Key Business Metrics

There are endless digital marketing metrics to monitor, but which ones actually matter to your business. Rather than drowning in meaningless vanity metrics, let’s pay attention to data that helps you grow and thrive. Here are 8 business metrics to start focusing on.

1. Website traffic

  • For us, it’s mostly checking for red flags.
  • Basically, that’s any spikes in traffic, either good or bad.

2.  Engagement rates

  • This specifically refers to social media.
  • Engagement is when someone actually interacts with your posts.
  • Actions like sharing or commenting are always more valuable.

3. Sales Pipeline

  • We’ll talk more about this in our next episode.
  • This is a leading indicator for GreenMellen.
  • This is similar to a marketing funnel to track a customer’s progress.

4. Click-through rates

  • This specifically applies to email marketing.
  • Clicks are more valuable than opens, which aren’t as reliable.
  • Follow the users back to your website to watch what they do.

5. Cash balance

  • This is a trailing indicator, but obviously quite important.
  • Try to keep at least a quarter’s worth of expenses on hand.

6. Conversions

  • What are you trying to get your audience to do?
  • Eg. fill out a form, download a file, buy a product, call you
  • Find ways to measure these things—eg. Google Analytics events
  • Once you can measure, you can optimize by testing to see what increases conversions

7. Support tickets

  • This might not apply to your company, but we do a lot of support and maintenance for our clients.
  • We track both the number of tickets and our average response time.
  • GreenMellen uses Help Scout for that.

8. Return on investment

  • It’s difficult to measure but very valuable
  • This is a bit like the marketer’s holy grail—elusive and we’re not sure if it really exists
  • This is why marketing is often the first thing to get cut—it’s hard to accurately measure
  • This becomes easier if you can measure conversions and the customer lifetime value