The Dangers of Marketing Metrics Dependency. You know what they say about too much of a good thing, right? It's ... well ... not good. A glass of milk is a good thing; it's full of calcium and other vitamins that every body needs. But drinking a gallon all at once? Not so much. (Don't tempt yourself. The consequences ain't pretty.) When it comes to marketing, the same can be said for your attitude toward analytics. But wait ... is this even a problem for CMOs and their marketing teams? Better Technology Means More Data According to the latest CMO Survey, 65% of companies fail to leverage marketing analytics in their marketing projects. Given the rapid pace at which new technology and software is emerging for marketers -- and as a result, how much more data is available to them -- these statistics are totally understandable.
And the future for the adoption of marketing analytics looks promising. With Great Data, Comes Great Responsibility The misinterpretation of data is a common thing. Don't get me wrong. It's so true, right? 9 Search & Social KPIs To Start Tracking Right Now. If you don’t measure what you’re doing in search and social media, how do you know if what you’re doing is working? How do you know if you’re helping or hurting your business—or having no effect whatsoever? How do you know that all those hours and/or wages aren’t being wasted? How do you know you’re getting positive results?
At the end of the day, how do you know what you’re doing is worth it? Answer: you don’t! Measuring your SEO/social media successes and failures are the only way to improve — and to confirm that your strategies are helping your business move forward. And here’s where so many of you will answer: “But we are measuring! That’s great. If you answered yes… how do you know? Again: you don’t. Getting more followers, fans, search engine traffic, retweets, and subscribers can be an important part of your strategy; but, to see the big picture — how all those things are supporting your business — you’ve got to widen your scope. Search/Social KPIs To Track 1.
KPIs: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. KPIs: How to Calculate the Value of Your Social Media Followers [CALCULATOR] If you’re using social media for marketing and you’re not measuring your dollars-and-cents ROI , you’re doing it wrong. As my favorite rap quote says, “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.” Marketers wouldn’t dream of spending budget on banner or PPC ads without a measured and positive return on their investment; but for some reason, many of us still play dumb when it comes to the hard data about the performance of our social media marketing investments.
And even if you’re not spending budget on Facebook or Twitter, remember: Time is money, and you’re probably spending a significant amount of time. All too often, social media marketing advice comes from greasy, snake oil hucksters selling platitudes like “engage in the conversation,” or worse, “be awesome.” While advice like this is hard to disagree with, it’s not useful or concrete. How to Calculate the Value of Your Facebook & Twitter Followers Below is the formula and how it breaks down ... L (Total Likes) C (Average Clicks) The power of analytics | Ogilvydo.com. Metrics Are Easy; Insight Is Hard - Irfan Kamal. By Irfan Kamal | 12:00 PM September 24, 2012 Big data is great. But we should consider that we’ve actually had more data than we can reasonably use for a while now. Just on the marketing front, it isn’t uncommon to see reports overflowing with data and benchmarks drawn from millions of underlying data points covering existing channels like display, email, website, search, and shopper/loyalty — and new data streams such as social and mobile engagement, reviews, comments, ratings, location check-ins and more.
In contrast to this abundant data, insights are relatively rare. Insights here are defined as actionable, data-driven findings that create business value. They are entirely different beasts from raw data. Delivering them requires different people, technology, and skills — specifically including deep domain knowledge. Even with great data and tools, insights can be exceptionally tough to come by. 1. 2. 3. 4. Friends’ interests make ads more relevant. More >> 20 Stats That Explain Why Marketers Still Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI [Data] When it comes to social media, many marketers are still figuring things out as they go.
This is especially true in terms of justifying their investment of time and money into social media marketing efforts. But LinkedIn launched 9 years ago. We've had 8 years to get to know Facebook, and 6 to wrap our heads around Twitter. So why are so many of us still struggling to report on the value of social media ?
For quite a few reasons, it turns out. We've compiled data from a handful of different recent studies to break apart this question and zero-in on the key challenges social media marketers are struggling overcome. Let's dive in. 5) 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing. 6) 96% measure number of fans and followers, 89% measure traffic, 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice, and 51% track sentiment. What These Stats Say About the Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI What about you?
Analytics Bingo. John D'Arcy | October 9, 2012 | 1 Comment inShare28 If you love data then you're going to need to keep learning more tools so that you don't get left behind. Can you survive and achieve, just being an expert with one coding language, as a super-user with one product or tool these days? I've been having many discussions recently about the required skill sets and tools that the digital analyst needs to be a success in 2012. It's been driven both by recruitment discussions but also by the challenges posed by clients.
Well, gone are the days when you could make yourself a success in digital analytics and try and answer some of the challenges above just with a single tool or source of data. So how do you measure up? Web analytics. I could go on but I'm going to stop at these "conversion" tools. So what was your score?
A score of one? Got a score of two to five? Got a score of six to eight? Got a score of nine or more? Bingo Cards image on home page via Shutterstock. Top Inbound Metrics for B2B Marketers Webinar | Inbound Marketing. If you’re like most B2B marketers what you really care about most is cost effectively driving high-quality leads and growing your sales pipeline. So which metrics actually prove that you’re inbound efforts are doing exactly that? Which are important indicators of future success and which metrics are just noise?
In this webinar Optify’s Director of Marketing, Uri Bar Joseph , shares the top metrics you need to track to ensure that your inbound programs are making the right impact. With the right metrics to guide your journey you’ll know where to focus your resources and be able to prove which programs and campaigns are worthy of continued or increased funding. Want to watch the entire webinar? Click here to access the full recorded webinar . Presentation – Top Inbound Metrics for B2B Marketers Webinar. Digital Marketing: Understanding customer sentiment. Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM, understands analytics and metrics are, as he puts it, “a huge part of marketers’ lives.” He says the question then becomes, “How much time and energy should marketers spend checking out metrics and worrying about the analytics of their efforts?”
Yuchun adds, “I think the market trend has been moving towards incorporating more and more data and analysis of customers.” This includes learning what messaging is relevant to your customers. “Being able to analyze the data to understand a customer becomes paramount for every business,” explains Yuchun. This data analysis allows you to determine consumer sentiment, which in turn provides a framework for relevant communications. The “circles” of consumer sentiment Yuchun describes the analytics of consumer sentiment as a series of concentric circles that are a way to segment customers and prospects by their value engagement. - The Inner and Middle Circles. Metrics & ROI - Five Steps to Measuring B2B Marketing Programs. B2B marketers face myriad barriers to accurate measurement of marketing programs. But lucky for us, some help arrived last summer with Marketo's popular Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics.
In it, Jon Miller offers five sequential methods for building a "sensible framework" to answer the age-old marketing question, "Did this program deliver results? " In case you haven't memorized them, here's a quick synopsis of the five methods: Single attribution (first touch/last touch). This most common measurement method assigns all the value to the first or last program that "touched the deal," Miller says. Examples: First touch: If a webinar produces a deal one year later, it still gets the credit.
Daunted? The Po! Source: Marketo. → end article previewRead the Full Article Membership is required to access this how-to marketing article ... don't worry though, it's FREE! Conversion-Oriented Link Building. Analysis is a thought-process that has been widely used in SEO. This aspect of the practice allows many of us to outsmart competitors as well as the ever evolving field itself, including the drastic game-changing events/updates that Google continuously employ to its search algorithm. That’s one reason why Google Analytics has been tremendously useful to SEOs (and it’s great that the tool is free), as it supplies its users with their site’s usage data which can help them improve its performance. One of the main goals of many web-based businesses is to generate more revenue, conversions and/or transactions to their sites, and many of them invest on link building to serve as a 2nd tier to attain this goal (to mainly support the SEO process to achieve better search rankings).
That mantra for link building could be dead any time soon, seriously, seeing that links that can drive you conversions are the ones that will most likely impact your search rankings. Set up Goals in Analytics 1. 2. 3. Google’s Avinash Kaushik Talks Optimization Across All Channels at #SESTO. Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist at Google, took the stage at SES Toronto this morning to talk marketing program optimization across all channels. Where can we find audiences we care about and those that care about us? Once we connect with these people, how can we best influence them? Through a series of entertaining stories, he shared tips for marketers in need of a better way to connect, largely through a shift in your marketing mentality to multi-touch attribution. It’s not hard to see why they call him an evangelist; Kaushik had the standing-room only crowd hanging on his every word throughout the entire keynote. His passion and creativity in coming up with unique methods of measurement offer great insights for marketers.
Measure Things That Actually Matter Stop measuring hits. Don’t Bog Users Down in Things That Don’t Matter Kaushik used the example of Rogers website, where you could once find a 37-question user survey. Make Loyalty Your Primary Metric People aren’t hits. The Ultimate Glossary of Performance Metrics Every Marketer Should Know. Good marketers live by their data. Why? Metrics help us set goals and track progress, and numbers confirm we did a good job. Marketers should have control of their own data, as well as determine what metrics they might need to track before starting any new campaign. By digging into results, we can understand what worked well, what didn't work well, and then learn from it.
Now be strong, you data-driven marketer , you! Content 1) Blog Traffic - We all want to know how many people are visiting our blog day-to-day or month-to-month. 2) Blog Subscribers - The number of people who are subscribing to your blog (via RSS or email) is an indicator of the value of your content. 3) Views per Post - How many views does a particular blog post earn? 4) Post Views per Contributor - Nothing like stirring up a little competition among your employees, right? 5) Blog Post Comments - Comments are a good sign of how engaging your blog post is. Social Media 11) Percent Engaged - Time to get geeky. Everything You Need to Measure Twitter Marketing ROI. Unless you’re measuring your efforts along the way, Twitter marketing can be a shot in the dark for many marketers.
Only through analyzing Twitter marketing data can you pull insights and evaluate whether you’re spending your time wisely to benefit your business. Twitter, however, doesn’t offer a seamless way to see how your marketing is paying off. Closed-loop marketing is what you should be looking at to track the power of Twitter compared to your other channels, social media or not. This means tracking the path of a user clicking a link in a tweet, to visiting a page on your website, to filling out a landing page to become a lead, and, ultimately, to converting into a customer. And isn’t that ultimately why you’re using Twitter for business in the first place? Let’s take a deeper look into measuring that ultimate Twitter ROI . Use an Analytics Tool To see how many visitors are coming to your site via Twitter, you’ll need an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics or HubSpot .
4 simple steps to measuring social media success. Image on BigStockPhoto by suravid Most social media strategists agree that there is no one, established framework to measure social media success. However, there are tactics you can adjust and apply to any social media strategy to help create a framework that works for you. This article can help you develop an individualized, social media measuring framework. Follow these four steps: Know your goals 1Any good marketing plan starts with established goals. What do you want to accomplish through your social media efforts? Sell more productsGet more reviewsEstablish yourself as a thought leaderDrive more traffic to your websiteGenerate leadsIncrease your fan baseReach a specific demographic Outline very specific goals so you can measure the results of your efforts.
Establish your baselines 2Based on your goals from step one, establish measurable baselines you can use for comparison later. Create a spreadsheet that includes: Clearly, some things are easier to measure than others. Track your efforts. Metrics & ROI - Social Media ROI: How to Ensure Your Social Media Efforts Pay Off. Social media marketing can either be an extremely worthwhile investment for your business or a massive time sink that brings little or no benefit. Unfortunately, in the short term, telling those two extremes apart is not always easy. How much is a Twitter follower worth? Can you put a value on the number of times your business is mentioned on Facebook? First, you need to understand the social media strategy-development process. How can you start measuring return on investment (ROI) if you do not know the steps you need to take to create a campaign? Knowing the process allows you to look at each step from an ROI perspective. The clickable image to the left leads to an interactive visualization (courtesy of Simply Business) that provides a step-by-step guide to developing a social media plan.
Initial Steps Here are three initial steps to take that'll ensure your social media strategy is set up to measure ROI. 1. 2. 3. What Success Looks Like Traffic vs. conversions. 1. 2. 3. 4. The Metrics You Need to Measure Marketing Automation Effectiveness. Marketers Must Focus On Outcome, Not Output, Metrics. 5 Ways to Measure Social Media. Eric T. Peterson's Blog at Web Analytics Demystified. YouTube Replaces Insight With YouTube Analytics [Infographic] Social Media Monitoring - 10 Reasons to Track Brands Online. Mass Media's New Engagement Measures - Deb Roy.