Tracking Metrics for Your Marketing

If your Maserati is in the shop, it doesn’t matter how fast it can do 0 to 60. Being the coolest kid in school doesn’t help if you can’t line up a date for prom. And that million-dollar bank account might be great, but it doesn’t help if you just lost your wallet and cell phone.

What about your social media? Sure, based on all the ‘likes’ you’ve been getting you should be more popular than ice cream, but are the likes really helping you? You can’t eat likes, and good wishes don’t help you pay your staff or buy new equipment. You need to make sure that your popularity is translating into actual sales.

Are you?

To find out, you’ll want to check your marketing metrics. Of course, not all metrics are created equal. To get the most out of your metrics, you’ll what to know which ones mean what, and how to make sense of the data. You’ll also want to take a look at the best metrics for your industry and your situation. It may not help very much if you’re looking at metrics designed for a bricks-and-mortar retail store when most of your business is online. Likewise, the most valuable metrics for an established name in the field may be considerably different from those of a start-up.

Because there are so many variables, calculating ROI for marketing can be a little tricky. Even if you take into account industry-dependent differences, the numbers aren’t always cut and dried. Social media, for example, may not correspond directly to sales, and content marketing may help increase your visibility, but it may not pay immediate dividends. If you’re looking for a smart system that can track your very specific metrics, check out Wicked Reports.

Another great, and surprisingly easy, tool for ROI is the Revenue to Cost ratio. Simply put, it measures how many dollars of sales you generate for every dollar of marketing you spend. This ratio can be applied not only to your business as a whole, but to each channel (email, texting, traditional advertising, etc.) and to individual marketing campaigns.

What’s a good ratio? Well at the very least, you’ll want your sales to cover the cost of the marketing (a 1:1 ratio). If you’re a manufacturer or a retailer, you’ll also have to take into account the cost of goods sold, meaning you’ll need a higher ratio to break even. As a general rule, a 5:1 ratio is a good return and a 10:1 is a grand slam home run.

So don’t let all those ‘likes’ go to waste. Turn them into sales and make sure to check your metrics along the way!