Measuring Success: 10 Crucial Business Metrics

The definition of success in advertising and marketing differs from one brand to another because success is primarily determined by how well your goal was met. The goal could include website traffic, reach, impressions, brand awareness, revenue, etc.

Your goal, which should be defined, will determine the metrics you will focus on to measure the success of your marketing endeavours.

This article discusses 10 important metrics you can use to measure the success of your business.

1. Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is about making your brand visible so your target audience can easily recognize, remember and associate it with your products or services.

Brand recognition and brand recall are the two main branches of brand awareness.

Brand recognition is how easily your customers or target audience can identify your brand when presented with various options and how fast they can recognize any change you make to the brand. Elements like your logo, colour, and tagline are important in brand recognition.

Brand recall is how easily your customers and target audience can remember and recall your brand. Can they name or recall your brand when your product or service is needed?

How to measure brand awareness

1. Direct Website Traffic: Direct website traffic comes from users who type your URL directly into their browser.
2. Search Engine: Track your brand’s search volume and ranking for relevant keywords.
3. Social Media: Track the number of likes, shares, comments and followers on your social media channels.
4. Brand Mentions: Monitor how often your brand is mentioned in blogs, social media and other places.
5. Share of Voice: Share of voice is how “loud” your brand is compared to other brands. It is how visible your brand is, how much it is being talked about or the share of the market you own compared to competitors. Track your share of voice by tracking the percentage of mentions your brand has in your industry or market.
6. Surveys: Conduct surveys that ask people directly or indirectly if they recognize your brand, and the products/services they can associate with the brand

2. Brand Perception

Brand perception is how people view and think of your brand. It is usually based on the customer’s experience and interaction with the brand.

How to measure brand perception

1. Direct Questions: Ask customers direct questions about how they perceive your brand. It is important to use questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no, and use slider or Likert scales to get responses.
2. Brand Attribute Ratings: Ask customers to rate your brand on attributes like quality, innovation, reliability, etc. This will help you understand how your brand is being viewed and help you make adjustments where necessary.
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS): Your customer’s perception of your brand will determine if they will recommend it to other customers. Ask them how likely they are to recommend your brand.
4. Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis analyzes digital text using natural language processing to determine the emotional tone of the message whether it is positive, negative or neutral. Monitor and analyze conversations about your brand to gauge the positive, negative and neutral sentiments. You could do this by analysing social media conversations and checking reviews relating to your brand on your website, social media or review sites specific to your industry.
5. Focus Groups: Facilitate group interactions among some of your customers to collect data relating to their shared perception of your brand.

3. Brand Performance

Brand performance is basically how well a brand is performing. How well is the brand achieving its goals and objectives?

How to measure brand performance

1. Market Share: This is the percentage of the market that your brand controls.
2. Customer Satisfaction and Purchase Intent: How satisfied are your customers with your products and services? Are they likely to purchase your products or services in the future?
3. Brand Value: What is the financial value of your brand?
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The total financial value a customer has added to your business over their lifetime.
5. Sales: Are you seeing growth in sales and revenue?
6. Return on Investment (ROI): What is the return on your investments, especially your investments in marketing?
7. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it cost to acquire a new customer?

Other metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) can also be applied here.

4. Reach

Reach is the number of unique individuals who have seen your content at least once within a specified period. It is used to understand the potential size of your audience and the purview of your marketing endeavors.

How to measure reach

1. Analytics: All social media platforms have built-in analytic tools to track reach. Website traffic and demographics can also tell you how your audience is reached.
2. Audience Feedback: You can get feedback from your audience by asking them how they discovered your brand. This will help you understand the reach of each channel.
3. Email Open Rates: Your email has not reached anyone until they open it. Therefore, open rates are a good way to track reach.

Other metrics like brand awareness and media mentions can be applied here. 

5. Impressions

Impressions measure the number of times a specific content, such as an advertisement, social media post, or web page, is displayed on a user’s screen.

Impressions are measured using cost per mille (CPM), where “mille” signifies 1,000 impressions. This means an advertiser pays a specific amount for every 1,000 times their content is displayed on a user’s screen.

How to measure impressions

1. Monitor the number of times your ads are displayed on various websites and search results.
2. Measure the percentage of impressions that were seen by users for a significant amount of time.

6. Clicks

Clicks measure the number of times users actively engage with an ad or link by clicking on it. It is a good measure of user interest and is considered a starting point for evaluating your digital campaigns because it provides immediate feedback on how appealing the audience finds your content.

A major way to determine how well an ad or content resonates with your target audience is the volume of your click-through rate (CTR).

More clicks may not necessarily mean more revenue. However, it means you will have more opportunities for conversion and remarketing.

How to measure clicks

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR): You can calculate CTR by dividing the total number of clicks by the number of impressions. Higher CTR indicates that your campaign is more effective.
2. Click-Through Sources: Which channels give you the most clicks? That’s where your audience is most engaged.
3. Click-Through Destination Performance: You should track Click-Through Destination Performance to know what happens after the users click and to know if they completed the desired action.
4. Quality of Clicks: The quality of clicks shows you where and how you are getting relevant users.

7. Engagement

Engagement is the interaction of a user with your product, service, content or ad.

How to measure website traffic

1. Likes: The number of users who like your posts or content.
2. Shares: The number of times your content has been shared on social media platforms.
3. Comments: The number of comments left on your posts.
4. Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed on your website.
5. Unique Visitors: The number of distinct individuals who visit your website.
6. Session Duration: The average time a user spends on your website during a single session.
7. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
8. Follower Growth: The rate at which you are gaining new followers.
9. Reply Rate: The percentage of recipients who reply to your emails.
10. Active Users: The number of users who actively use your website within a specific timeframe.
11. Retention Rate: The percentage of users who continue to use your website over time.

Other metrics like CTR and email Open Rate can also be applied here

8. Website Traffic

Website traffic is the total number of visits to your website within a specific period.

How to track website traffic

1. Website Traffic: Total volume of users who visit your website within a specified period and how often they visit.
2. Demographics & Traffic Source: Demographics and Traffic Sources give you insight into the peculiarities of your users and the sources through which they access your website. 
3. Conversion Rate: What is the percentage of your website visitors who completed the desired actions? The conversion rate can be further broken down into conversion by traffic source.
4. New Users vs. Returning Users: This helps you differentiate between new users and the regulars on your website thereby measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts at retaining existing users and attracting new users.   
5. Exit Pages: This metric can help identify the pages on your website where users exit thereby helping you identify areas for improvement.  
6. Top Visited Pages: Knowing the most visited pages on your website gives you an understanding of what resonates the most with your audience. This will give you insights into the type of content you should create.

Other metrics like Bounce Rate, Unique Visitors and Session Duration can also be applied

9. Conversion

Conversion is the process of turning a visitor into a customer by encouraging them to take a desired action. The desired action could include making a purchase, signing up for an email newsletter, filling out a contact form, downloading a resource, booking an appointment, watching a video, etc.

How to track conversion

1. Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. The formula for calculating the conversion rate is (Number of Conversions / Number of Website Visitors) x 100.
2. Conversion Cost: How much does it cost to acquire a conversion? Here’s how it is calculated: Cost of Marketing Campaign / Number of Conversions.
3. Conversion Time: How long does it take for a visitor to convert after their initial visit?
4. Conversion Source: What channels drive the most conversions?
5. Conversion Funnel: What steps did the visitor take to complete a conversion?

10. Sales and Revenue

Sales is the income a business generates from selling its goods or services to customers. This could include the transactions and the amount generated from them while revenue is the total income a business generates from its core operations before any expenses are subtracted.

How to track sales and revenue

1. Total Revenue: How much does the business generate over a specific period?
2. Revenue by Product or Service: How much revenue is generated by individual products or services?
3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): What is the cost of acquiring a new customer?
4. Sales Cycle Length: What is the average time it takes to close a deal from the initial contact with a lead, to the final sale?
5. Win Rate: What is the percentage of deals won by the team?
6. Revenue Growth Rate: What is the rate at which revenue increases over time?
7. Average Deal Size: What is the average value of a closed deal?
8. Recurring Revenue: How much revenue is generated from recurring payments like subscriptions, maintenance fees, etc. monthly, annually, etc.

Other metrics like conversion rate, customer lifetime value, and net promoter score,  can be applied here.

Conclusion

To measure the success of your advertising efforts, you must use the right metrics every time so you can know which of your efforts produce the best results, and then measure the impact of the effort on your overall goal.

This will help you make better marketing and budget decisions by drawing your attention to your most productive marketing efforts.