One of the most significant benefits of digital marketing is that results are highly measurable. You can track how much you’re spending and see the results you’re getting. You decide what leads to monitor depending on preset goals. Do you want more visitors to your site? Or more likes on your business Facebook page? Depending on these goals, you’ll track different results.
However, not all results are valuable to your business. You can measure many different metrics, but it is essential to recognize the ones that matter. Analytics that have little value are called vanity metrics.
Vanity Metrics: Why They Don’t Matter
Some metrics may look and sound impressive or exciting, but they are just empty numbers. Vanity metrics don’t bring any revenue to the brand or company. Some standard vanity metrics are registered users, downloads, page views, and followers.
Why don’t these numbers have value? Because they don’t bring you revenue. It doesn’t matter if a website has 10k registered users if only 1k are active users. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if your site has over 1k visits if only ten visitors are buying.
Vanity metrics to watch out for:
- Impressions
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Followers
- Open rates
- Views
- Traffic
- Time on site
- Bounce rate
A vanity metric will make you feel good about your marketing to spend and efforts, but will ultimately lead you to waste. The purpose of a marketing campaign is to bring in more brand recognition, website visitors, users, or followers to make you money. If you’re spending your budget and getting no sales from your efforts, you are losing your money.
Measure Return on Investment Instead
What matters when it comes to determining the success of a brand is a return on investment. Showing a good return on investment is crucial for any budget because it is the key to proving the effectiveness of a strategy or plan of action.
For marketing campaigns, you have to set your goals and metrics to measure your return on investment. Focusing on valuable metrics will allow you to see whether your marketing plan is working and bringing you money. The best metric to calculate your return on investment is conversions.
Conversions are King
A conversion refers to a website visitor, follower, or user who hits “follow,” but buys a product or service. They “convert” into a real customer, providing revenue from your marketing.
Conversions are vital for all businesses to measure. When you focus on converting your website visitors or social media followers, you create a better buying experience and a better product. Acquiring more customers is how you grow your business effectively.
Conversion rate is the opposite of vanity metrics: it is an actionable metric. You can act on it, and best of all, it brings you revenue.
The Reporting Tool You Need
Since data is power, having a robust reporting tool will keep your company focused on the right metrics by measuring your conversions.
Financbase has developed a reporting tool called Reporting Set to track results on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, all under one hub.
Reporting Set includes other technologies that make it possible for a business owner or a digital marketer to take advantage of the collected data:
- Advertising Intelligence
- Marketgoo
- Advanced Reporting
More importantly, the top features of this fantastic set are the following:
- ROI Calculator: Using Average Sale and Close Rate data collected from each unique user allows for a precise ROI for Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns.
- Executive Report Integration: View reporting for advertising and your additional products, right in Business Center. Now you can see what’s happening across all digital marketing channels all under one hub.
- Live ad reporting: Real-time reporting for your Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns.
Financbase offers reputation management, social marketing, responsive websites, review generation, listings management tools, CRM tools, and the best reporting tool to build a strong reputation and a loyal relationship with customers. Get the most powerful reporting and analysis tool, and grow your business better.
