8 Common Factors to Determine How to Track Your Data
We all know tracking marketing metrics is essential in guiding business strategy and optimising ROI. But too often, companies track the wrong analytics data, focusing on vanity metrics that look good, over actionable insights that improve and strengthen campaigns.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and different marketing metrics should be tracked, depending on the company. No matter what industry, some simple factors provide the information needed to know which analytics will be most valuable.
By considering the 8 common factors below whenever a new campaign or strategy is started; it’s easier to ensure the business data is tracked for continued success.
1. Choosing Metrics Based on Business Type
The type of business and industry a company is in will be key in determining which analytics are important to measure.
A real estate company, for example, that focuses on metrics such as likes and shares, won’t meaningfully increase their leads or property purchases by optimising social media. Likewise, a B2B company that bases its strategy solely on website views, rather than considering the bigger picture and analysing customer retention and acquisition, will miss vital chances at optimising its content and strategy.
There is often a fundamental lack of understanding that the same metrics don’t work across the board, regardless of industry. Crucially, the metrics chosen need to be informed by the business goals.
2. Business Stage: Tracking Priorities Across Lifecycle
Across the business lifecycle, different metrics will be important.
If a business is focusing on top-of-the-funnel content and the growth stage, then impressions, rankings, and general volume of traffic will be important for generating brand awareness.
Later in the business cycle, these metrics should no longer be the focus, as the ultimate goal is now lead generation and conversion. This is because impressions, rankings, etc. are no longer meaningful to this stage in the customer journey.
Instead, the focus should be on metrics and analytics data such as conversions, and customer acquisition costs to find opportunities to improve ROI and potentially reallocate budget to the most successful channels.
A big (but common) analytics mistake is to only track priorities across one stage of the business cycle. When Reporting Ninja asked Common Ground for help improving its organic traffic and SQLs, we quickly found the SaaS company had only focused on bottom-of-the-funnel SEO.
This had reduced brand awareness and thus organic traffic across the lifecycle. By understanding the priorities at the top-of-the-funnel needed to include specific keyword targeting for growth, Common Ground was able to significantly improve organic traffic for Reporting Ninja.
3. Aligning metrics to business needs
Above all, sometimes, it’s about proving that the strategies and techniques used are effective. Senior leadership and stakeholders won’t be getting into the nitty-gritty of analytics. Instead, they’ll rely on figures and reports that tell them the most fundamental and crucial piece of information: are sales/conversions/leads improving?
If this scenario sounds familiar, then it’s easy to understand the importance of being able to show increases, and that KPIs are being hit, to senior leadership. Without this proof, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade them of a campaign’s success.
The metrics tracked will form part of arguments for budget increases and new ideas, convincing stakeholders that changes and strategy optimisations are working.
4. Demand Gen Vs. Funnel Approach: Which Metrics Matter
The two broad areas a lot of campaigns and business strategies fall into are demand generation or the funnel approach. The one used should determine how and what marketing metrics are important.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation is about fundamentally driving volume and awareness, with everything filtering down from that initial strategy.
Companies that focus on demand generation usually rely more heavily on metrics that promote attracting potential customers, even if they won’t necessarily convert right now. To do that, the tactics used usually involve a mixture of brand awareness and traffic marketing, including social media campaigns, content marketing, and advertising to build authority.
What is the funnel approach?
The funnel approach splits campaign objectives into categories – top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. From there, wording and techniques are adjusted according to the stage a potential customer is at in their journey.
The funnel approach is therefore much more specifically targeted than demand generation. It relies on different content and metrics at each stage of the journey, with the ultimate goal being conversion.
This approach is most commonly used by SaaS and B2B businesses, like SaaS company Thomas International who asked Common Ground for help in optimising its funnel approach. Common Ground split the funnel stages into measurable KPIs and addressed each stage individually by considering different metrics for improvement.
By improving content creation, strengthening link building, and identifying important keywords through competitor research, Common Ground improved Thomas International’s engaged organic traffic by 89%. This strategy then fed through to the rest of the funnel doubling the number of organic conversions.
5. Type of Leads: Customising Tracking Strategies
What a type of lead is will determine what and when tracking is important.
A real estate company, for example, will usually have an offline component in their process. This makes the tracking process less intuitive and smooth, so they’ll need to customise strategies accordingly to ensure they’re getting the necessary information.
A company that is solely online will find it easier to obtain the necessary information from their metrics. But crucially, understanding which metrics inform optimisations is still important here.
6. Lead Time for Conversion
Analytics often have a default reporting window, and it’s normally relatively short. Facebook, for example, will only count a conversion if it occurs within 10 days of the customer clicking on a link.
In the case of B2B in particular, lead times are much much longer, and it can easily take months to a year for a business to turn a lead into a sale. Particularly in the case of costly SaaS products that will be a significant spend for the customer.
Unfortunately, analytics data will struggle to track that conversion all the way through from its inception, due to the large time period. Making amendments and establishing processes that mitigate this are essential.
7. Using Insights to Drive Action
At the end of the day, there’s no point to any of this, if the data gleaned can’t be used in some way.
Actionable insights are really the only insights that matter. Because they’re the ones that drive change, optimisations, and in the long run, more conversions.
Vanity metrics are metrics that look nice but offer no real insight. It may sound harsh, but if there are no plans to do anything with the data, why bother tracking it in the first place?
A specialist B2B company, like Veolia, for example, needs not only high traffic numbers but insights that prove that traffic is coming from the right place to drive conversions. Common Ground used keyword research insights and a focused approach to drive users from the right industries to Veolia, rather than meaningless high-traffic numbers from all over. By specifically targeting potential customers using this information, they could achieve an 84% increase in organic traffic.
8. Ability to Track: Overcoming Limitations
Businesses often face limitations that affect their ability to track data. Sometimes, it’s as simple as incorrectly setting up tracking, which can be easily resolved. When working with Veolia, Common Ground detected problems with its tracking, which made it impossible to measure the efficacy of strategies and campaigns. Fixing this was the first step to establishing an approach that would ultimately lead to higher conversions and traffic numbers.
In other cases, however, tracking issues can be down to something more difficult to fix; such as a company still using a legacy CRM system that doesn’t connect to its analytics platforms. This makes it impossible to pass data between the platforms and thus, impacts which metrics are trackable.
A good example of an industry that struggles with mapping data across platforms is education, particularly university systems. That’s because students usually apply through UCAS, but the university has a separate CRM elsewhere, and a website that’s not necessarily connected to either. That means tracking who applied through UCAS, vs. those who came to open days or downloaded a brochure, for example, is next to impossible.
Universities are often playing catch-up with modern platforms, using CRMs that are older and unable to integrate with new analytics like GA4. Apart from the obvious long-term changes like modernising CRMs, other techniques that could improve tracking would be things like setting up tools that can track across domains, and segmenting audiences to the best of their abilities with the data they have available.
Ultimately, considering all these factors when analysing a campaign or strategy, will provide the information needed to know which metrics to track. By understanding the role business type, goals and limitations play in analytics data, it’s much easier to adapt and alter strategies.
Actionable insights are always more important than vanity metrics, no matter how good those vanity metrics make the numbers look.
Want to learn more about the best ways to track your analytics data? We’ve got a full webinar on the subject here!
