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5 Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking According to These Actual Marketers



Look online, and you’ll see a bevy of resources with all sorts of marketing metrics you should track. But there’s no way you could (or should) track them all.

It can be a nightmare combing through all the online resources and nailing down the marketing metrics that matter, especially since many of them come from unqualified sources. The sheer volume of marketing metrics examples and different types of marketing metrics out there can make this a dizzying effort.

So, instead of wagging our digital finger and telling you to focus on a specific set of marketing metrics, we’ve filtered through the noise to give you real opinions from marketing professionals. Here are five marketing metrics that marketers really use—and how to track them on your own.

What Are Key Metrics That Marketing Professionals Use?

To answer this question, we’ve compiled opinions from five different marketing professionals. They’ll offer insight into important marketing metrics you should be tracking as part of your marketing strategy.

Bounce Rate

Neil Patel says understanding your bounce rates correctly “can tell you if your marketing strategy is effective and if your visitors are engaging with your content.”

Your bounce rate is an important marketing metric because it tells you the percentage of visitors that viewed one page on your website then left (“bounced”) without taking any further action.

This marketing metric can also reveal gaps in your website’s marketing funnel since visitors are not being directed deep enough to convert. This can impact other metrics like your conversion rate, especially if you’re seeing a high bounce rate on your homepage.

Bounce rate can also pinpoint technical flaws in website UX, content strategy, or optimization. If your website doesn’t have strong CTA buttons on all pages to direct people deeper into the website, then you’re not properly moving visitors through your funnel. If blog posts or website content don’t include internal links or CTA buttons, then visitors may read your content and leave. Again, this means you’re losing out on an opportunity to convert those prospects.

Finally, if your website isn’t optimized properly for both technical and on-page SEO, you may be losing visitors due to long page-loading times, broken images, 404 errors, or published title tags and meta descriptions that don’t describe the page content accurately.

How To Track This Marketing Metric:

Alexa tracks bounce rates so you can simply go into the Site Comparisons tool, find your website’s bounce rate percentage, and see how it measures next to a maximum of nine industry competitors:

Marketing Metrics Bounce Percent

Conversion Rate

Mallory Busch, content marketing manager at Amplitude, says that conversion rates are useful because it helps her recognize what type of content provides value, so she can “double-down and create more of it, or work to spread its reach farther.”

Conversion rate is the percentage at which you turn visitors into buyers and paying customers.

The easiest way to convert visitors is through content. And all content should prompt users in some way to become a buyer. To direct the visitor toward a conversion, all content needs to include a direct path to the conversion with clear CTAs. If you have a high conversion rate on a particular piece of content, it can help guide your decision to create more topics in a similar vein or expand your efforts to promote the piece.

Examples of points that could increase conversion: submitting a contact form inquiry, clicking a phone number, or completing a purchase. Dominic Kent, director of content marketing and communications at Mio, says he tracks “product waitlist signups and conversions from blog to sales landing pages.”

Each website conversion may be associated with a dollar value since we’re generating qualified leads or completing purchases. If our conversion rate is low, then we’re missing opportunities to drive the business’ bottom line.

How To Track This Marketing Metric:

A quick and simple formula to calculate the conversion rate for your overall website is to take the number of completed conversions and divide it by the total number of website visitors.

Keep in mind that the conversion rate for most industries isn’t generally very high, either. In the home improvement and legal industries, for example, the average conversion rate is only 3.3%.

Qualified Leads

Andrew Montalenti, chief product officer at Parse.ly, says, “Understanding what leads translate to sales meetings and how quickly they move through our sales process” are positive signals to his marketing team. He adds that qualified leads tell the marketing team their campaigns, content, and messaging are working.

Qualified leads are one of the best marketing metrics to measure success. A qualified lead is someone who may be interested in buying a product or service from your company. For example, a website visitor who downloads an eBook is a qualified lead because they offer personal information (usually an email address) in return.

Qualified leads are more likely to become customers because they’ve already engaged with the company in some way. Maybe they’ve already spent significant time on your website learning about your product or service or had a sales call to discuss pricing at some point.

By getting qualified leads into the sales funnel, we can also pinpoint whether our marketing campaigns are working. Different analytics tools can help us attribute qualified leads with the source traffic (e.g. Facebook Ads, organic search traffic from Google, Mailchimp email campaigns).

How To Track This Marketing Metric:

An easy way to measure qualified leads is by using CRM software, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. These software provide extensive reporting so you can see how prospects progress as leads in the sales funnel.

Return On Investment (ROI)

Rena Gadimova, senior content marketing strategist at Adobe, underlines the importance of ROI and says, “Marketing ROI now needs to be thought of right from the outset, and in a closed-loop fashion.”

Your ROI tells you how much money you’ve spent on a marketing campaign versus how much revenue it’s brought in. Simply put, ROI is the engine that drives all your marketing efforts.

This marketing metric ensures that your marketing efforts are profitable in order to contribute to a company’s bottom line. It also confirms you’re doing the right type of marketing and targeting the right people.

How To Track This Marketing Metric:

Harvard Business Review provides a formula for tracking marketing ROI:

Marketing Metrics Roi Formula

Source: Harvard Business Review

For example, if we wanted to measure the ROI of a recent Facebook advertising campaign, we would start with our total revenue generated from the ads of $750. If the total cost of the campaign was $100, we’d subtract this number from our total revenue, and then divide by $100. This gives us an ROI of 650% for the Facebook advertising campaign.

Share Of Voice

Ian Lurie, CEO & founder of Portent, says that share of voice “is one of the only ways to measure performance across entire channels, or in cases where you need to track exposure.”

Ian Lurie, CEO & founder of Portent, says that share of voice “is one of the only ways to measure performance across entire channels, or in cases where you need to track exposure.” Click To Tweet

Share of voice is a marketing metric that helps your business determine how much exposure your brand is receiving. The primary goal of looking into your share of voice is to gain insight into the overall visibility of the brand. With that in mind, it’s also a useful marketing metric to utilize when conducting competitive analysis.

Understanding the level of exposure your brand has among competitors is an integral piece for building your marketing strategy. The greater your share of voice, the more authority it will give you among your target audience. This can help you build loyalty as customers are likely to trust your brand more because of its strong brand visibility. This brand affinity is the same reason a basketball player might gravitate towards Nike sneakers—they know the brand and trust it.

If you’re looking to increase your share of voice, you have to raise awareness of your business name and the product or services you provide. One way to do this is to create educational blog posts that provide value to your target market segment.

How To Track This Marketing Metric:

Alexa’s Keyword Research tools provide access to your website’s share of voice. You can use the software to find your website’s share of voice for a specific keyword. And you can use the Competitor Keyword Matrix tool to see how your share of voice for all your site keywords measures up next to industry competitors:

Marketing Metrics Keyword Share Of Voice

Why Your Marketing Metrics Matter

At their core, perhaps the importance of marketing metrics is best summed up by Fio Dossetto, senior editor at Hotjar: “In general, the key marketing metrics you want to track are the ones that confirm whether your business is growing.”

It might sound like a simple conclusion, but it’s an important one to remember when deciding which marketing metrics you want to implement for your marketing strategy. If your marketing metrics are driving growth within your business—both in terms of your internal production and customer base—that is the result of great marketing metrics in practice.

If you’re looking to enhance your marketing strategy, Alexa can track a wide range of valuable marketing metrics, including bounce rate and share of voice, that you can easily track to maximize your marketing efforts.

Try a free 14-day trial today and discover which marketing metrics work best for your business!



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