Valuable marketing metrics for brokers

Originally Published on 06/04/2021

KPIs, OKRs, there are all sorts of names for how to measure performance in business. These measurements, or metrics, occur in every part of the business, but they’re especially important in marketing. 

Marketing metrics are the way that you understand, analyse and communicate data about the success of your marketing efforts. Without determining the metrics that you want to monitor, it will be impossible to see whether or not your marketing activity has had an impact on the business.

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Valuable metrics to measure

The metrics that matter most will be different from business to business. They should relate to SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals for your marketing and should work as indicators of both business and marketing success. 

While each business and each set of goals requires a tailored group of metrics, there are some commonly used measurements for different areas of marketing. You can use these as a starting point when setting up reporting and monitoring.

Website 

These measurements for your website can help you better understand how attractive and easy to use your website is for visitors.

• Site visitors - number of people who come to your website
• Conversions - number of visitors who become leads
• Sources - where visitors come from
• Page views - the number of times a page has been visited 
• Sessions - a group of user’s interactions that take place in a certain timeframe
• Exit pages - the last page that users visit before leaving your site (this can give you an indication of how far along the user journey visitors get before leaving your website)

Email 

Metrics for emails can help you understand your audience and how engaging they find the content that you are sharing with them.

• Open rate - percentage of the people who opened the email
• Click-through-rate - percentage of openers who clicked on a link in the email
• Bounce rate - percentage of email addresses that registered as undeliverable
• Unsubscribes - number of people who have left the subscription list

Social media 

Social media metrics are useful for understanding your brand engagement and awareness within your ideal audience. When measuring these, pay attention to the types of accounts following, liking and sharing your content. Are these the people you were hoping to reach?

• Likes - number of people who have ‘liked’ your post
• Shares, including reposts on X - number of people who have shared your post with their network
• Followers - number of people who ‘follow’ your account to see updates
• Impressions - number of people who have seen your post
• Interactions - number of people who have interacted with your post (eg. comments, clicking links, expanding images)

Read more: What social media channel is best for your firm?

Content 

You should always be reviewing the effectiveness of the content you produce (blogs, guides, infographics, podcasts, etc.).

• Views - number of people viewing your content
• Time on page - how long visitors spend on the page (this can be an indicator of whether or not your content is read all of the way through)
• Ranking - this refers to page ranking on search engines and is useful for measuring SEO 

In addition to these metrics, measuring ROI (return on investment) is a key metric to use for all businesses. It can help by both proving the value in the work you have been doing and enabling your team to see when a change in direction is needed. You can work out ROI with this calculation:

ROI = (Gain from investment - cost of investment)/Cost of investment

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Using these metrics should give you a good jumping-off point to plan how you’ll measure success for your marketing. As you decide which metrics you’ll track and monitor, be sure to keep in mind the SMART goals for your business and tie success to the bottom line. Doing so will make these metrics useful, relevant and valuable to your organisation.

Read more: Key performance metrics to measure for success