5 marketing metrics groups worth your attention

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is important to make sure you reach your goals. But which metrics are worth paying attention to?

Analytics has become the cornerstone of marketing. And with comprehensive reporting tools such as Google Analytics offering up incredible capability in terms of capturing and sorting data, there’s plenty of power at your fingertips. All the tools are there – it’s just figuring out how to best use them to your advantage.

With Google sunsetting Universal Analytics and prompting migration to GA4, there’s never been a better time to make sure you have a firm grasp of essential marketing metrics. But if you’re new to analytics, it pays to do a bit of legwork before you dive in.

The power of numbers

So we know metrics are vital for success in today’s marketing landscape – but what exactly do they do for us?

Put simply, they hold us – and our campaigns – accountable.

“Data make everything more accountable and give you the power to test and learn,” Jeremy Matchett, APAC Managing Director at digital growth agency Konversa and ADMA instructor, says. “So if you’ve got any hypotheses or campaign ideas, messages or methods you want to test, metrics give you tangible information that can help guide you on the best path forward.”

Look before you leap

All this power doesn’t mean much if you don’t know how to use it.

“Data points can be used to argue pretty much anything,” Jeremy says. “You can slice and dice data in a million ways to make things look like they’re performing, even if they’re not. And that’s not what we’re trying to do – we’re trying to build effective campaigns that achieve established goals.

“You need to have a solid foundation before you start using analytics, or you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Your analytics efforts start before you even begin collecting data. You first need to determine solid marketing and campaign objectives. Only when you know what you’re trying to achieve can you assign the proper metrics that will help you measure your progress toward accomplishing those goals. Jeremy points out that a clear understanding of the customer journey is an essential aspect of this preparation.

“When you understand your customer journey and your target audience’s behaviour, you can identify data points that reflect how customers interact with your product or service,” he says. “You can look at everything from awareness consideration right through to post-purchase and choose metrics that track that journey all the way through.

“You have to have a view of all of it to gain insight into what levers to pull from a marketing perspective.”

5 groups of metrics for marketers to know about

Once you’ve established your goals, you can start to figure out which metrics might be the most helpful in helping you accomplish them. Here are five of the most popular metrics for marketers, and how they can help you analyse your work.

1. Reach and engagement (and viewability)

Reach and engagement go hand in hand, though for a marketer to truly get value out of them, you need to take them one step further.

At a top-line level, reach measures how many people see your marketing material. Engagement shows you how many people act on seeing your campaign.

When this engagement takes place on your website, you can start to really harness the power of Google Analytics and other digital marketing analysis tools.

“Data such as engagement with product pagesads can help put a number on just how valuable that reach is,” Jeremy says. “And that’s where viewability can come into play.”

Viewability helps paint a clearer picture about how many people are seeing your online marketing. So, for example, if there’s an ad below the fold of a web page, people won’t see it if they don’t scroll down. Viewability only counts those actual human views of the ad – providing even more relevant insight into its effectiveness.

2. Conversions and assisted conversions

Conversions take place when your marketing achieves its goal – convincing or encouraging somebody to take a specific action, such as sign up to your service or buy your product.

Many marketers emphasise conversion rate – a percentage of how many visitors take the desired action. But that doesn’t always tell the whole story. For that you need assisted conversions.

“Assisted conversions shows upper funnel activity,” Jeremy says. “One of the most helpful aspects of Google Analytics is that it tracks everything down to the last interaction, but there’s a lot of work and influence that happens much before that.

“In a lot of instances, it’s going to be more beneficial to not only know what that last click was, but also what that first and second click were.” You might be getting a lot of conversions from organic search. But customers’ first click might’ve been from Facebook or paid search. This is where a bigger-picture view of the customer journey comes into play, especially when it’s a more considered purchase process. This helps you attribute your budget to the right place – not just the last place.

3. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is a version of return on investment (ROI) that’s more apt for digital marketing. That’s because it gives you an idea of how much revenue you’re generating from the money you spend on ads. Lately we’ve seen this changing alongside attribution capability.

Channel-specific ROAS is getting more difficult because Apple has allowed users to opt out of sharing data with third parties. That makes it harder to attribute conversions and other behaviours to specific aspects of your campaigns.

That’s making it even more important to keep the big picture in mind.

“This is another reason why you need to get your strategy right at the outset,” Jeremy says. “Even when we can’t drill down channel by channel, we can still measure ROAS across channels and get a good idea of what’s working.”

4. Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value is how much a customer will contribute to your revenue during their entire time buying your product or service. It is similar to customer retention, but offers more tangible evidence.

Customer lifetime value is becoming more important as the cost of advertising rises.

“Advertising costs are going up with inflation, but we aren’t seeing people pull back on spend in search,” Jeremy explains. “Big brands with big budgets are actually trying to spend more to win those customers. That makes the landscape extremely competitive, and spending less efficient across the board. That’s why lifetime value is so crucial – because it helps justify that spend.”

Let’s say you have a product or service a customer would buy four to five times a year. If you evaluated your ROAS for just one of those purchases, your marketing spend would be far too inefficient to even run a campaign. So to properly assess it, you need to factor in a longer-term view of their spending with you. 

Customer retention and lifetime value are important not only for how you spend your budget, but also for getting it. 
“If you have to present to a board or somebody at C-suite level, you need to be able to show them the return on their investment. And if you can’t do that at a single cost per sale measure, lifetime value will may help you tell the full story.”

5. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition is your media spend divided by the number of sales. It gives you a way to measure how much you have to spend to land a single sale.

This can almost be seen as a micro version of customer lifetime value.

“Lifetime value can be a better barometer of the value you’re getting from your marketing,” Jeremy says. “But there are some instances where cost per acquisition can come in handy. Week to week you might use CPA as a snapshot of how much short-term return you’re getting from your marketing. But long-term forecasting should be built on lifetime customer value.”

Numbers don’t lie – as long as you know how to apply them to your marketing objectives.

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