Getting additional page.
Getting additional page.
When it comes to marketing data, there is a never-ending supply of analytics available for businesses to digest. Yet, despite the vast amount of available data, many businesses fall short when it comes to tracking the right marketing metrics and using them to drive growth for their business.
Here are some tips to help you determine whether the metrics you’re tracking are a good use of your time, or if your business should start paying attention to other statistics that provide more value.
Not all metrics are created equal. Unfortunately, many business owners fall into the trap of solely looking at vanity metrics. Hubspot defines these type of metrics as “analytics that are satisfying on paper, but don't move the needle for your business goals.” Kissmetrics takes it one step further in referring to vanity metrics as “all those data points that make us feel good if they go up, but don’t help us make decisions.”
At their core, vanity metrics are a form of “peacocking” among businesses. Although, this doesn’t mean that they’re inherently bad and that you shouldn’t track them. There are plenty of smart ways to use vanity metrics like when measuring your content’s reach or the rate at which you’re acquiring new social media followers.
However, vanity metrics alone should never be used to make financial decisions for your business or measure return on investment (ROI).
Below are some common examples of this type of metric.
Keep in mind that these metrics shouldn’t be considered vanity metrics 100 percent of the time. Whether they are or not depends on your marketing goals, what you’re trying to accomplish, and how you use them.
For example, let’s say you had 500 people download your free guide. That’s great, but what value does that download number give you? It doesn’t tell you where people came from to get to your download page. It doesn’t tell you how many people actually read your guide or the number of leads you obtained as a result of the download. Ultimately, a vanity metric like in the example above leaves the most important question unanswered of, “What effect did this have on my bottom line?”
Because vanity metrics only show a snapshot of your marketing efforts rather than the big picture of how your bottom line is affected, they lack any real actionable insights or traceable outcomes. Just because your guide was downloaded 500 times doesn’t mean it was an effective use of your time and other resources. You have to dig deeper in order to see if it was truly worth the investment.
To dig deeper, you should make actionable metrics the focus of your marketing analytics. These metrics are vastly different from vanity metrics. Litmus defines them as those numbers that “tell the story of what action needs to be taken to meet your goals,” while Upwork describes them as the metrics that “show you what you need to do to improve your bottom line.”
Here are some examples of actionable metrics:
One of the major differences between actionable metrics and vanity metrics is that actionable metrics measure quality over quantity. Rather than just showing large aggregated totals, actionable metrics, sometimes referred to as clarity metrics, tell you more about your customers’ behavior and their path to purchase. These metrics aren’t surface-level metrics and require more effort to obtain. When defining your business’s KPIs (key performance indicators), always use actionable metrics since they are the analytics that provide you with the clearest course of action.
Although actionable metrics might not always appear as glamorous or as eye-catching as vanity metrics, they’ll always lead you to the cold hard truth. More importantly, they’ll allow you to better gauge the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Five hundred downloads doesn’t mean much, but 50 new leads that entered your sales funnel by way of those downloads is worth its weight in gold. That’s the difference between actionable and vanity metrics.
Unlike non-Accredited businesses, you have instant access to a variety of actionable metrics specific to your business via your Accredited Business Dashboard. This incredible resource is full of personalized analytics to help guide your business decisions by giving you more information about your customers and prospects. Here are just some of the many useful data points available to you on your dashboard:
Remember, you can access your Accredited Business Dashboard to view your business stats via the “Monthly Stats and Insights” emails. Depending on how your email is set up, you’ll get to your dashboard by simply clicking the “See My Dashboard” button located at the bottom of your email, or the “View Detailed Report” button at the top of your email.
Which actionable metrics you focus on will depend on your business, your industry, and your goals. Here are five best practices to remember when identifying and using these metrics.
1. Have well-defined business objectives.
Before ever deciding which actionable metrics your business is going to track, you first need to have clearly defined business objectives. Otherwise, you’re going to have a difficult time knowing what to measure. Your list of metrics should then stem from your business objectives. If you’re tracking something and can’t tie it back to how it helps fulfill one or more of your primary objectives, then you’re wasting your time on a vanity metric that doesn’t matter.
2. Make sure your metrics follow the three A’s.
Before adopting any metrics, make sure they are actionable, accessible, and auditable to all members of your team who are involved in tracking and influencing them. If a metric is actionable, that means you can A/B split test it to pinpoint exactly what needs to be changed. Metrics that are accessible imply that anyone at any time can find and understand the key data, while auditable metrics can be reproduced through simple report generation.
3. Track conversion rates by pairing your metrics with monetary goals.
To ensure that your metrics are leading to conversion and helping you meet your business objectives, it’s important to tie them into monetary goals. You can easily set this up in Google Analytics. Attaching a monetary goal to your key metrics will give you a tangible overview of what kind of effect your marketing efforts are having on your bottom line.
4. A/B test your content.
A/B testing is a big part of what makes actionable metrics actionable. This process allows you to compare multiple parts of a marketing campaign with one another and identify which variable(s) you should change in order to achieve higher conversion rates. Without this crucial step, you’re flying blind and won’t know what action to take when a metric increases or decreases.
5. Regularly examine and prioritize your metrics.
To avoid slipping back into focusing on vanity metrics, it’s essential that you regularly examine what metrics you’re spending your time on. This practice will help you stay aligned with your business objectives. As your business grows, your objectives will change, causing your actionable metrics to also shift. It’s important to take the time to re-evaluate whether you should continue tracking a metric or move on to another.
To give you an idea of whether or not you’re tracking the right metrics for your business, here is a list of important questions to ask about each metric.
If you can answer those eight questions about each of your metrics, then you’re on the right track. Otherwise, it’s best to take a step back and start again with your business objectives in mind.
Once you develop a pattern of being able to track actionable metrics, you’ll be able to better understand the needs of your customers, create stronger marketing campaigns, and increase your bottom line. Those three benefits are the end goal and should be your motivation for looking at data in the first place. As you seek to improve the quality of metrics your business uses, remember these wise words from Douglas W. Hubbard, author and expert in decision sciences.
“If a measurement matters at all, it is because it must have some conceivable effect on decisions and behavior. If we can't identify a decision that could be affected by a proposed measurement and how it could change those decisions, then the measurement simply has no value.”
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