Clicks, impressions, likes; all these measurements are held in high regard by marketing teams and brands, and with good reason - they’re often excellent indicators of brand awareness, engagement, and marketing effectiveness. However, while they’re all valuable metrics, they don’t tell the full story, and you need to be measuring the right metrics if you’re going to secure long-term marketing success.

Read on to find out why it’s important to measure more than the ‘classic’ metrics, and how you can make it work for you.

Start with your objectives

Without clear objectives, measuring any metrics at all will be meaningless, as you’ll have no yardsticks or signifiers to apply them to or compare them with. Establish the goals you want to achieve through your marketing: do you want to boost brand awareness, increase lead generation, or strengthen customer loyalty?

Clear objectives give you defined goals to meet and distinct criteria to measure performance against. They make it so much easier to assess performance on the fly and make necessary adjustments to improve your campaign’s performance; leveraging social media for greater brand awareness, for example, or tweaking your paid marketing strategy for better lead generation.

Match your metrics to your objectives

Depending on your goals, some metrics will be crucial to you, some will be worth monitoring, and some will be irrelevant. Let’s take a look at what’s what when it comes to applying metrics to objectives.

Awareness: Brand awareness is best measured through reach, impressions, and brand recall.

Engagement: Social shares, clicks, and website events are the best indicators of engagement.

Acquisition: To gauge acquisition, you’re looking for conversion rate and cost per acquisition (CPA).

Revenue-focused goals: Customer lifetime value (CLV), cost per lead (CPL), and return on ad spend (ROAS) are the metrics you need to measure for revenue-focused marketing.

Benchmarking

So, we’ve established that metrics are meaningless without objectives, but once you’ve got objectives in place, you need a point of reference to compare with your numbers. The easiest way to measure performance in your marketing is by comparing your numbers with past campaigns and activity, so you can see how your progress (or lack of) stacks up against them.

But what if this is your first ever marketing campaign, and you don’t have past performance to refer to? If this is the case, then start looking at industry benchmarks to see how you compare to your competitors. It’s important to limit your comparisons to brands of a similar stature - there’s no point comparing the performance of a new business to an industry giant.

Quality over quantity

Driving activity is a positive, but that activity needs to support your customers’ journey to the action you want them to take. Seeing a large number of clicks on your latest campaign can be exciting, but a click doesn’t necessarily equal value.

For example, if you’re running a lead-generation campaign, then you’re looking for high-quality leads, not just pure clicks. A handful of good leads is infinitely more valuable than thousands of unqualified clicks, even if the numbers don’t look as impressive.

Focus on what you want your customers to do, and then base your objectives and measurements around how they align with that goal. It makes it easier to assess what’s working and what isn’t, which in turn means you can keep making improvements to make your campaign more effective.

Attribution and context matters

Attribution models are useful tools when it comes to reviewing the effectiveness of your marketing. These models track all the touchpoints in a campaign - from social media ads to email marketing - to determine what, if any, role each one played in generating a conversion.

This is where context plays a key role, because it’ll give you a greater understanding of what steps you need to take to improve the performance of certain touchpoints. For example, let’s say your click-through rate (CTR) has dipped a bit: that on its own might be cause for concern, but if your conversion rate and ROI are up, then it’s actually a net positive.

Our recent article about integrated campaigns has more information about the benefits of multiple touchpoints in a campaign - click here to read it.

Final thoughts

To distil this entire article into three words, we say measure what matters most. Bigger numbers and higher percentages are only worth something if they work in the context of your objectives as a brand, so it’s crucial that you align your metrics with your goals.

Adaptation is a must, too; make sure you’re always assessing your metrics and your goals as your business grows. It’ll ensure your strategy and your campaigns stay fresh and effective, and you won’t have to waste time and money playing catch-up through reactive efforts.