Marketing Metrics that Aren’t Worth the Headache

As all marketing professionals know, the world of digital marketing is about so much more than the bright, captivating ads we see day-in and day-out. The advertisements that consumers see are only the tip of the iceberg, they’re the products of weeks’ worth of analysis and planning. Hundreds of initiatives and metrics go into the production of any given campaign, and balancing all of them can be a headache—especially for those who are learning as they go. As you set out to plan, or just better understand, your company’s marketing initiatives, there will be several metrics you’ll need to take into consideration—and others that you’ll hear plenty about, but that simply aren’t worth the trouble. If you’re curious about which marketing metrics to take with a grain of salt when measuring your business’s progress, keep on reading. 

Bounce Rate

You’ll see a running theme among the marketing metrics that we mention here: they sound super useful at first, but ultimately don’t tell you anything that meaningful upon further investigation. This is certainly the case for bounce rate, which tells you how many people visit and then leave your website. Sure, it’s a useful piece of information in theory, but this statistically does nothing to help you get to the root of the problem: why aren’t people staying on your site? The answers could be – and likely are – varied. Maybe it’s the graphic design, or copy, or it may simply just not be what the viewer is looking for. Though bounce rate can be a reassuring (or perhaps unsettling) statistic to measure, it’s totally unhelpful when it comes to understanding why users are behaving the way they are.

Page Views

Again, this is another one of those marketing metrics that sounds essential, but that can often yield superficial or even misleading results. Page views don’t tell you how many individual users are seeing your site. As a result, a handful of very active users could produce a high number of page views. This, in turn, can easily give you a skewed sense of your viewership. It’s misleading and often not accurately representative of the user activity on your site.

Number of Users

Sure, it’s good to know the total number of people on your site – but that information isn’t nearly as valuable or as telling as the number of new users your digital spaces see every month. Overall user metrics include returning customers, and they ultimately do very little to inform you about how well your campaigns or initiatives are performing. New user data, on the other hand, gives you a much more accurate idea of how successfully new customers are being attracted to your website.

Acquisition Source

When Google Analytics measures acquisition source, it gives you a general sense of the origin of your website traffic; it doesn’t give you specifics, nor does it measure the many touchpoints that a viewer likely came across before deciding to visit your site. The most effective marketing campaigns are the ones that build relationships over time, meaning that someone who’s landed on your website has likely been incentivized by multiple ads and content pieces to get there. 

 

The game of marketing is one that’s full of statistics, and knowing how to weed out useful marketing metrics from ones that’ll waste your time is a tremendously useful practice. By knowing where the listed marketing metrics fall short, you’ll be equipped to ask informed questions about why your users are behaving the way they do – and what you can do to make your campaigns that much more successful. To learn more about how to design and execute an effective campaign, reach out to us! 

 

Read Kelly’s full article, Are Digital Metrics Driving You Crazy? Here’s What You Need to Know, on MarTechAdvisor.com