Marketing: Effectively Analyze Key Metrics for Your Marketing Campaign

1. Introduction: Have you or your team ever been presented with marketing data that was unclear or impossible to take action on. Or it's possible that you've been a part of a team. We're not a single person could agree on the success or failure of a campaign. Maybe the leadership team was focused on sales conversions and the demand generation team was focused on lead conversions, and the PR team was focused on engagement. Oftentimes, when it comes to working in teams, the lines of communication becomes dismantled. When not everyone is in alignment on what are the best metrics to focus on. In this class, you will learn how to effectively analyze key metrics and distinguished from metrics that are just a distraction. Hi there, My name is Jenny, and I'm a digital marketing instructor and I'm obsessed with goal-setting and metrics and analytics. In the digital marketing landscape, almost everything is measurable. But that doesn't mean we should be measuring everything for a single campaign. I'm super passionate about teaching this topic because it's one that comes up in almost every aspect of my day to day, whether I'm working with a client or teaching the class. As you go through the lessons, we're going to focus on the importance of actionable metrics versus vanity metrics will also go over how different metrics can be meaningful on one channel, but a vanity metric on another, you establish a framework for setting up goals that will help you and your team focused on the right metrics. You'll also learn how to create a plan that effectively helps you communicate. You're clearly defined goals and KPIs, what your team and upper management. I'm excited for you to take this class because having the skills to understand analytics, we'll make you a more competent marketer. Looking at metrics will no longer be a dreadful experience. As a part of this class. You'll also be able to work on a class project where you'll fill out a goal and KPIs campaign planner for an upcoming campaign that you might have. Once you've completed your class project, I encourage you to share it by uploading it into the project gallery. Free to ask any questions that you may have using the discussion board below. Does that all sound exciting to you? If so, let's begin. 2. Focusing on the Wrong Metrics: Do you ever have one of those moments where you find yourself just staring at your screen, looking into the abyss of metrics of an analytics dashboard. Well, you're not alone. It happens to the best of us. The fact is when it comes to digital marketing, there are many more metrics than we actually care to quantify. But just because they are a ton of metrics that we can use for measurement, doesn't mean that we should be using them all. In fact, more often than not, teams get into the habit of focusing on the wrong metrics and missing out on good opportunities to effectively optimize high-performing campaigns. When it comes to metrics, there are two categories that I like to recognize. Actionable metrics and vanity metrics. Actionable metrics are metrics that help you to make data-driven decisions. Ultimately helping you to make better decisions when it comes to budget and optimizations. Actionable metrics are more meaningful metrics because they lead you to making informed decisions. This is unlike vanity metrics, which are metrics that make you look good to others, but don't help you to make a data-driven decision and take actionable steps. For example, the number of likes on an Instagram posts. When teams focus on vanity metrics to determine the performance of a campaign tactic, oftentimes, opportunities are missed to effectively optimize a campaign or even keep a campaign running. When looking at digital marketing analytics, we want to be able to quickly distinguish from a vanity metric and identify what are the important, meaningful metrics that we should be paying attention to. Let's take for example, an email marketing campaign. Let's say this fictitious company, pet cafe, wants to plan an email marketing campaign. They want to invite everyone on their email list to their grand opening of the kidneys hooray. They plan to send out three emails. And they need people to RSVP using the link inside the email. They sent out an email number one, that got a 40% open rate. The team was excited. Then a few days later they sent out email number two with a similar subject line that was as catchy as the first one that received a forty-five percent open rate. Both of these open rates were very high, comparable to their other previous campaigns. The team is excited to see such a high engagement rate. However, the event hosts reported back that they have a very low RSVP count. Barely anyone has signed up for the event from that email. The team is shocked since the open rate were so much higher than what they've had before, they don't understand what happened. The analytics director takes a look at the emails that were sent. He notices that while rates were extremely high, click rates were extremely low. So what happened here? Well, the analytics director took a look at the campaigns again and notice two things. First, he noticed that the subject line was really catchy and it had a good element of surprise and a few emojis in there. This was the reason for the higher open rate, possibly. The second thing he noticed was that inside the e-mail, the call to action or the RSVP link was buried deep down in the email and did not stand out at all. The copy in the e-mail didn't even clearly state that the RSVP was required. So essentially, everyone that opened the email did not have a clear instructions on what actions they should take. Max, had the team been paying attention to click rates and investigating why clicks were so low after the first e-mail went out, they would have been able to catch this earlier on before the second e-mail went out. The mistake made here was that before this campaign was launched, there were no clearly defined goals, nor clearly defined metrics that would measure the achievement of that goal. The team was too busy looking at the vanity metric, in this case, the open rates, to notice that the campaign needed to be fixed and optimized. Here's another example. The same type of scenario happens quite often when it comes to social media. For instance, when measuring if Instagram is a success or not, teams often find themselves obsessed with how many likes a post received when in actuality, what's really more important for your brand growth and engagement on Instagram are more actionable metrics like CVS and shares. Likes on an Instagram posts is a big vanity metric for this channel. Why? Because it doesn't move the needle on your decision-making. If someone likes your post, what does it mean for that person? Are they actually taking any action other than showing others that your posts was well-liked. While at times this can be meaningful for you. More times than not, there are other metrics that actually move the needle even further when someone's saves your Instagram posts, they are telling themselves that this post is awesome and I need to keep coming back to it. Similarly, when someone follows your page, they are saying, I want to see more of this in my feet. And when someone shares your post there, evangelizing your posts and telling their friends, Hey, this post is awesome. I think you should have a look. These actions are ones that give you a deeper engagement with your audience. Always ask yourself, why is this metric important to me? Before using it as a measurement tool for your campaign? Have a look at this example. Can you distinguish the actionable metric versus the vanity metric? If you chose clicks to the website, then you are correct. This is because if your ultimate goal is to get people to RSVP, to your event using the link in bio, then you should be measuring how many clicks you've gotten from that post. The number of followers that you get is only a bonus, but not an indicator that your post is doing the job that you want it to do. 3. Understanding Metrics & KPIs: Before we dive deeper into vanity metrics versus actionable metrics, let's first get some key definitions. Establish. Metrics are measurable values that show the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. In other words, everything in your reporting dashboard is a metric. That's a fact. Now KPIs, on the other hand, are the select few metrics that you promote in order to be the best indicator of your campaign's success. So in other words, not every metric is a KPI. It's important to understand that every metric isn't a KPI because it tells us that every metric isn't, doesn't have to be meaningful just because it's there. When you're about to run a campaign. Have a look at the campaign dashboard and take inventory of all the metrics that will be available for you to measure. Think to yourself, which one of these can I take action on based on my goals? And easy way to establish your KPIs is to chart out a few of the top metrics that are available on the campaign dashboard. Then think to yourself, if they are actionable or not. Then also think to yourself why or why not. Have a look at the example provided in your workbook under step one. Then fill in the chart using an upcoming campaign that you may have. 4. Identifying Commonly Used Metrics: While metrics will vary depending on what channels or platforms you're running a campaign on. There are a few common metrics that you will likely see very often in the digital marketing world. Coal schedule has a very nifty metrics guide that you can use as a cheat sheet as you plan out your campaigns in the real-world. This guy is also available in your student planning worksheet. It's good to recognize that metrics vary by marketing channel. So not every channel will have the same metrics. Although there are usually some crossovers. It's important to note that for any given campaign, a metrics meaningfulness might change depending on what campaign goals are. For example, when looking at the social media metrics here, as I mentioned before, likes maybe actionable on Instagram. If the CTA of your posts was for the people to like the post and share with a friend. However, if your golf or the Instagram post was for people to click on the link in your bio. Than likes will merely be a vanity metric. And engagement rate of people clicking on your profile will be the more important actionable metrics. Have. A look at this example. Can you distinguish the actionable metric versus the vanity metric? If you chose a package sign-ups as the answer, then you're correct. While getting thumbs up on your webinar is a very exciting and it makes your video and page looks good. It really doesn't move the needle on the optimization of your live stream YouTube webinar, if you want people to sign up for your consultation package. But at the end of the webinar, you're not asking for people to sign up, then you're missing the mark on your goal. Seeing that there are a lot of thumbs up, can't tell you this. But seeing the number of package sign-ups, does 5. Making a Metric Meaningful: Now that we understand what KPIs are and we have a system for choosing the best KPI. You should now understand why it's important to keep the number of metrics that you are focusing on down to one or two by focusing on only one to two metrics, or KPIs. This allows us to think about what actions we're going to take next. For example, if you were to go back to my previous example in step one, where I narrowed down which metrics are actionable. The next thing that I'd want to do is think about what exact actions I would take to optimize the campaign to help reach my goal. Here you can see I picked out the two metrics that I chose from step number one to plug into this new chart. And step number two, the two campaigns that I'm running, I established at my KPI for my e-mail campaign would be email link clicks. And the KPIs for my Instagram stories would be Story link clicks. In order to make a metric measurable, you must have an action that you can clearly take. Now it's your turn. Using what you have from step number one. Fill in the chart on step number two, describe what actions you would take from the KPIs that you are measuring. 6. Analyzing Metrics by Platform: One important thing that we should address is that metrics have different meaning and value based on the platform or the marketing channel that they're being measured on. Just because one metric is a vanity metric on one channel, doesn't mean it's a vanity metric on another channel, and vice-versa. Take TikTok and Instagram, for example, likes on your posts, while they may be considered more of a vanity metric on Instagram, likes on TikTok posts can be extremely meaningful. That's because TikTok bases its entire algorithm on who engages with and likes your posts, making it less important about the relationship with your followers. Just because someone follows you on TikTok after seeing one of your posts, it doesn't mean that your future posts will be seen by that person, nor does it mean that your posts will appear at the top of their feed. So this is something that you have to think about before rushing to choose your KPIs. You want to first think about what does this platforms algorithm encourage? What does the platform want users to do more of in order for your content, for your page to get more traction. You can usually tell what's the most meaningful metrics for a particular platform. Looking at the dashboard and seeing what are the first few metrics that are shown to you to identify this by looking at a recent platform, whether it's TikTok, Instagram or e-mail that you use for recent campaign. 7. Setting up Your Goals & KPIs: The key to making sure you're sticking with meaningful metrics is to make sure you're always setting up a goal for any campaign that you do. Now we've spoken about the importance of setting goals in earlier lessons. But now let's go over how to set up an effective and measurable goal. Before starting any campaign, you should first establish what your goal will be and what TPI will you use to measure success. When creating goals, it's always best to use a framework to make sure you have all the right elements in your stated goal. A common framework used for creating goals is the smart goal. And that stands for specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. Every goal that you create should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. If pet cafe wants to get 50 RSVP's to their cat swap array. Then for every tactic that they run, they can create a smart goal for that tactic. Let's have a look at the preliminary goal that I created back in less than one. How would I turn this simple goal into a smart goal? Well, let's dissect it and go step-by-step. First, we want to be specific that the goal is to get RSVP's in order to make it measurable, let's make it 50 RSVP's. People have to click on links in order to RSVP. And we can measure link clicks so that makes it actionable. The number 50 is reasonable since the last event, we got 40 RSVP's. And to make it time-bound, we want to get this by end of the month. Okay, so now let's form this into an actual goal that can easily be communicated and understood. Let's make this goal smart. Collected 50 RSVP's to our cat, swept away by the end of the month by broadcasting a total of three emails to our email list and posting an Instagram story at least once per day promoting the event. Now I'd like you to do the same. Use the smart framework provided in your workbook in step number three to create a smart goal for your next upcoming campaign. 8. Communicating KPIs to Your Team: One of the most important parts about campaigns and analytics is making sure that you and your team are all on the same page at all times. Before setting up any campaign, make sure that your team is on board with the metrics that are being looked at and the KPI's that are being chosen. The best way to do this is to share your smart goal with them. If everyone is on the same page about the goals, then it'll be easier to get everyone on the same page about the KPIs or metrics that you'll be focusing on. This will ensure that when campaigns are being analyzed, everyone is looking at the campaign with the same viewpoint. Let's have a look at this example showing how one single campaign can be deemed successful and the failure at the same time by two different people looking at two different metrics are having different KPIs. If two people on the same team are looking at a campaign without having any idea what the goal for the campaign is, then the campaign can be deemed success by one and a failure by the other, perhaps person a. Just want to see that purchases were made from this Facebook ad campaign that ran. So seeing that the regenerated ten sales is a win for that person. However, Person B knows that they spent quite a bit of budget on this ad. And therefore, in order for the ad to be deemed a success, it needs to meet the return on ad spend goals. Person B is focused on the return on ad spend. And seeing that the return on ad spend hasn't even hit one, tells him that this ad is clustering them way too much and not performing as well as it should be. In order to avoid this type of confusion and misalignment, it's best to stay out your goals in a planning sheet and make sure everyone on your team agrees on the smart goal, the KPIs, and the actionable steps that you will take to optimize it. Now let's put this all together. In the final piece of your workbook for your class project, fill up the smart goals and KPI planning sheet for a campaign that you'll be running soon. Create a smart goal for your campaign and choose one to two KPIs you will measure. And in the final column, describe exactly how you will measure success. You'll be able to use this planning sheet with your teams to make sure everyone is in alignment with the same goals and KPIs. Once you've filled out your smart goal planner shirt below in the class projects section of this class. 9. Final Thoughts: I hope you've enjoyed this class and that you now understand the importance of choosing actionable metrics to measure your campaign versus vanity metrics. You should now be able to communicate more effectively with your team on campaign goals and outcomes by applying the tactics learned in this class. You will also become a stronger marketer because you'll now be able to make more data-driven decisions about tests and optimization. Remember that if you have any questions about any of the lessons in this class, please post your questions in the discussion section below. Also, don't forget your class project assignment, where you will create a smart goal for any upcoming campaign that you're working on. Choose one to two KPIs that you will measure. And then describe exactly how you'll measure success. Then share your completed campaign planner in this class projects section to get some feedback. Thanks for attending this class. Please also feel free to leave a review and provide any feedback that you may have.