Definition and Scope

Marketing Metrics are a key indicator of how well your marketing efforts for your individual product or service are delivering. Simply put, marketing metrics are a means to analyze your effort vs results in a qualitative and quantitative way enabling you to make decisions for improving productivity as well as profitability.

In this article, we will examine what marketing metrics entails in a little more detail and understand the hows and whys of the importance of having these statistical measurements in place for any business looking to make maximum profit.

Practical Applications

Take the example of the build up towards the launch of a new product or service. Employing metrics at this stage of the process would require that you have a goal or a target in sight in terms of how much of a Return On Investment (ROI) you are expecting. Measurements would not be of much use without a starting point in terms of where you are now and an end point in terms of what you want to achieve. It also becomes important at this stage to decide what exactly you want to measure as well as how and when you will do this. It is ideal to map out the metrics process at the planning stage so you have a solid framework to review once your campaign has ended.

An effective metrics process, additionally, has inbuilt mechanisms that enable you to make and track changes to variables for improved profitability during the course of your campaign. For example, if you find a product is not working at a particular price point or with a specific product name, how does changing or adapting these affect your campaign as well as revenue? Ideal metrics takes into account the actual revenue generated as well as quality as opposed to quantity. For instance, having a good number of email subscribers is of minimal benefit if the percentage of conversion to sales is not just as comparable.

For a new business starting out, manual metric tools can work well enough; however, as the business grows and expands, it makes sense to automate your processes so you are not left with the tedious task of gathering data as opposed to concentrating the chunk of your activity in profit building.

Having the right metrics in place is vital for any business entrepreneur who is looking to not just make profit but also to optimize marketing programs so they yield the best results possible as your Return On Investment.