Analytics are essential for any business that’s trying to transform their marketing. That’s why today we’re going to dive into the five metrics that are essential for the growth of your digital marketing.
It’s all about giving the right message to the right consumer at the right time.
Death by Data
Death by data essentially means we get analysis paralysis. Meaning, we connect Google Analytics and different software programs and then all of a sudden, we’re collecting so much information that we don’t know which metrics actually matter.
There are a ton of blogs and there’s a ton of videos that you can watch online. They’re going to help you understand and go through analytics.
But the five metrics I want to talk about today, deal with some of the numbers that we look at as a company that are behind the scenes, that really helped us get the full picture of what’s working and what’s not.
I believe that these are often ignored. And so what I want to do is talk about them and why they bring value.
Software used to collect data
We collect analytics information from a variety of different sources. The first one is Google Analytics. (link to ep. 2 where GI is discussed?)
The second software we use is HubSpot. HubSpot allows us to be able to figure out not only how many visitors are coming to our website, but who they are by name, how they are engaging and how they are lead scored. It allows us to set up marketing automation and measure all of the details at a personal level.
Next, we have Semrush, which we use in combination with Google Analytics. This gives us our macro information, which allows us to produce our monthly and quarterly reports. We get a deep dive into SEO, social media, and a variety of other different approaches that we do in our unique process.
Wistia is all of the analytics that we use to measure video and allows us to find out different analytics. We can find when people are leaving early, who’s watching the video by name and when they rewind.
They also have technology that allows your video to be captured in SEO, which is much better than doing it simply out of YouTube.
Finally we use Tube Buddy. This year, we are investing into live streaming and specifically how to grow our YouTube channel. Tube Buddy is a platform that allows us to know all the data that we’re looking for before we get involved.
It allows us to optimize our content and to do a lot of things that we would have to use other pieces of software to do.
Now, you don’t have to use all of those softwares, but I did want to mention them. So if I’m mentioning data, and you’re wondering where I am collecting it from, it’s commonly from those platforms.
The 5 Key Metrics
Let’s dive into some of the numbers here and some of the metrics that I was talking about earlier. I want to break them down one by one, and not only say what it is, but also why it brings value.
Having thoughtful digital marketing tactics is what sets you apart from your competition.
New & Returning Customers
So the first one is new and returning visitors. With new and returning visitors, obviously, we have tons of clients that want so much traffic and they want their organic traffic to grow month over month, year over year, and the right to do so.
But my main point, and my main objective is to not only drive new traffic, but to bring more qualified traffic. And one of the main reasons that I’m focusing on qualified traffic is that sometimes site visits can be a glamor number.
If I’m getting the right message to the right client at the right time, we believe that it’s going to affect sales and your volume while also helping you transform your business.
But why I measure new and returning visitors is because almost 80% of the number of people that come to your website are not in a position to buy. So they are in the awareness stage or the consideration stage, but maybe not in the decision level stage.
And yet a lot of the clients that I work with in the beginning think that if they’re on their website and they’re ready to buy, but that’s just not so.
Why I put so much energy in returning visitors is because what we do is we put a piece of tracking code on their website using Hubspot or another software and then we monitor every single engagement that they do.
I look at a variety of different things such as look at every page that they look at and see what videos they watch.
But that can only be possible if they return to the website. On the first try, they often don’t have that essential cookie, or the tracking code on their website. So monitoring return visitors is a critical metric for us.
Client Lifetime Value
With client lifetime value, a lot of people that we work with are always talking about return on investment, and we’re one of them. But one of the things that we try to always say is what the lifetime value of a client is.
For example, if you spent $100,000 with our organization and you only make $80,000 back in new revenue, you might say that is a poor performing campaign or that’s not worth the energy, the effort or even the expense.
But what I’m trying to say is, if they make you $80,000 in revenue but the lifetime value of your client is set up in a way that you keep the client for five years, it’s $80,000, times 5.
What happens here is that the value of the client, when you measure it across the lifetime value, is significantly higher than when you put out $100,000 this year, and want to get $200,000 in return in the same calendar year.
The questions that are important is to understand are:
- What are my products and services?
- What is the price and margin of my products and services?
- How long do those clients actually stay with us?
When you know the lifetime value of your client, you’re going to know the worth of your client. And when you know the worth of your client, that is how you can get more dependable ROI.
Visitor:Leads:Sales
The next metric that we’re looking at here is the ratio of visitors to leads to sales.
When I work with a client, we develop a gap assessment. And a gap assessment essentially, is your three to five year roadmap to scale your business and your sales.
But what we often say is, essentially, it’s a numbers game. And what I mean by that is, let’s say hypothetically, you have to make $20 million dollars in new revenue. What I will do is I take that $20 million of revenue, and I subtract where you’re at right now.
Let’s say particularly your 10 million, so I have to get $10 million of new revenue to get to $20 million of revenue. If I know what $10 million is worth, I’m going to say how many sales does it take to get to $10 million?
Once I know how many sales it takes to get 10 million, I need to figure out how many leads it takes to get a sale. And once I know how many leads it takes to get a sale, I have to figure out how many visitors it takes to get a lead.
Ultimately, it’s how many visitors it will take to get a sale, so the three numbers are in ratio to one another.
If I work backwards, I can find out how much marketing essentially I need to do to mathematically reach my sales targets.
Decision Level Form Submissions
The next metric is decision level form submissions. I am going to explain it in a way that fits the HubSpot vocabulary.
When you have different forms, you think of the stages of the buyer’s journey. You have awareness, consideration and decision level content.
In the awareness stage, we’re using what’s called top of the funnel offers. These are downloadable pieces of material that you exchange for your name and your email address.
Then MoFu, essentially is when you talk about the middle of the marketing funnel. What I’ve done here is hopefully nurturing them out of the awareness stage into the consideration level stage.
All right, and so now they’re more qualified when they download content in the middle of the funnel. I know that they’re more engaged, and they might be ready for a sales call.
Finally, I get to the decision level stage. Ideally, it’s a scheduling appointment or consultation, where it’s essentially saying what I want to buy or at least I’m interested in buying.
What we find a lot of the time is that when we develop SEO, they then look in the analytics of the metrics later and say how much qualified organic traffic there is.
But one of the things that we do at Farotech on the decision level is, we set up goals on the thank you pages of all of our decision level forms so that we can say, this is how much mobile traffic we drove through SEO or social media platforms.
Finally, it also ultimately led to a decision level form, where we are able to say how we measure conversion off of our lead generation and our lead nurturing.
So a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re keeping these analytics isolated, and you’re not able to find out what the full buyer’s journey is and if it actually converts.
If you have decision level forms, you have decision level goal setting. And when you have decision level goal setting, you can essentially find the effectiveness of all of your marketing.
Touch Points to get to Ideal Sale
Finally, we want to look at how many touch points it gets and how many touch points to get to your ideal sale.
When you start to think about your ideal sale, what we do is we look at all the metrics of everybody who’s bought from you in the past. Then we use a tool like HubSpot to figure out how many times they have engaged with your brand. Otherwise known as the touch points with your brand.
When I know what the ideal number of touch points are, I can look at my entire database and say these are the people that are probably at a lead score of 20 or 30. There, they haven’t exactly warmed up.
Out of the five critical touch points, they probably only have two of the five. This being said, I’m going to nurture them through touch point three, four, and five, where I might say, I have a good portion of my database that has four touches.
So what I can do from a pipeline perspective, or a sales perspective, is say that we’re probably right on the cusp of something really great here because we have so many people that are so close to the pin, or so many potential clients so close to the pin.
So when I’ve counted how many touch points it takes to actually become a sale, I can look at my database and understand the health of my database a whole lot better than just names and email addresses.
This is much better than just guessing that we have some marketing, we have some names to the list, and these are the hunches on whether they’re going to close or not.
There’s a lot involved in measuring your touch points. But when you wrap that with really great technology, it makes that quest a whole lot easier.
Key Takeaways
Let’s go back and try to talk about what are the key takeaways from this video.
The first takeaway is that you have to find metrics that are important to you and your organization. What I mean by that is, is that I’ve shown you the five metrics that we believe are great for our clients. But, that might be very different from you and for your story.
And so if you’re working with an agency, or you have a CMO, taking some time to say the numbers that matter, that’s going to be one of the most essential things that you do. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’re always gonna get what you’ve always got.
So, it is essential to have that meeting early so that you can be measured correctly.
We covered the five metrics that mattered to us. What you should know is that we believe that the metrics that I just talked about are often very overlooked. Talk about them with your team and review:
- What of these five metrics?
- How many are we doing?
- Are we doing two of the five, three of the five?
- How do we implement the metrics that we’re not measuring?
The biggest takeaway is to make data driven decisions.
If you don’t have analytics set up correctly and haven’t had those critical meetings to find out what match metrics matter, you’re ultimately going to probably be chasing new ideas, new hunches, new hacks, and you’re probably gonna be doing something that we call RAM, which is random acts of marketing.
The alternative to that is to make your marketing based upon making data driven decisions. Data driven decisions essentially allow you to say you have five metrics that matter.
You can tell what the data is telling you and how you should shift and pivot to double down on the things that are working and then add a little bit more strength to the things that might be weak. This marketing strategy ensures success.
Please contact us with any questions about applying these metrics to your company or agency. We would love to help you soon!
