Where did the year go? We’re wrapping up 2016 and there’s less than 10 days left in the year! Marketers are gearing up to close out the year strong with holiday marketing, a topic we covered in our post about holiday marketing. The sales cycle may vary for your business but year-end marketing opportunities are still available, so make sure to check out last month’s post.
The time for marketers to start the process of year-end measurement is quickly approaching. Measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs) at year end deserves time and attention to thoroughly examine and tell the story of your results this year – or for any given period of time, for that matter. Annual, semi-annual, quarterly, and monthly periods of time are common to measure if the data is available.
Not all web analytic tools will provide historical data beyond 90 days. That makes it important to examine your data sources, the types of data they will share, and the availability of that data. In today’s post we’ll look at common marketing KPIs and their data sources, and review some information about website analytics tools.
Engagement Data
Many social and website analytics platforms exist today. We’ll examine some of the most common and those that are most often free. Don’t see yours listed here? Take the information we share and see if you can’t back into finding the same data on the platform you’re using. Common data is measured across many platforms, but may vary slightly in name.
If we missed a measurement tool please feel free to add your two cents in the comment section below. We’re always looking to hear about new tools that offer a different viewpoint.
Mention
Time: Last Month
- Sentiment
- Reach
- Passion
- Unique Authors
- Retweets
- Average Minutes Per Mention (the average elapsed time between mentions)
Facebook Insights
Time: 5 Months+
- Total Reach
- Post Reach
- Paid Reach vs. Organic Reach
- Post Likes
- Post Comments
- Post Shares
- Post Clicks
- Page Engagement
- Page Likes
- Page Unlikes
- New Page Likes
- Video Views
- Video Views: 30-second
- Video Likes
- Video Shares
- User Demographics: Age Range, Gender, Location, etc…
Analytics for Facebook has been around for quite a few years so it should come as no surprise that it’s got a lot of bells and whistles under the hood. Pull reports about your fans that go beyond the usual metrics. Understand more about # of fans, shares and comments but also the people behind those actions by examining user demographics. As an example, for brands with KPIs that involve the # of female potential customers, Facebook Insights will help benchmark and review your progress overtime.
https://business.twitter.com/en/analytics.html
Time: 1 Year +
- Total Followers
- Retweets
- Mentions
- Tweet Impressions
- Profile Visits
- Top Mentions
- Top Tweets
- Engagement Rate
- Link Clicks
- Average Clicks Per Day
- Average RTs Per Day
- Average Likes Per Day
- Average Replies Per Day
- Audience Insight: Top Interest
- Audience Insight: Top Lifestyle Type
- Audience Insight: Top Buying Style
- Follower Audience Size
- Organic Audience Interests
Twitter Analytics allows marketers to dive deeply into facts and figures about their followers. Do you know who makes up your list of followers, their genders, top interests, and lifestyle types? With Twitter Analytics you can learn this and more about your audience. The data here can help in understanding how much effort to place behind Twitter social media marketing in 2016, too.
Time: Varies
- Average Daily Impressions of Pins
- Average Daily Viewers
- Average Monthly Viewers
- Average Monthly Engaged
- Followers
- Likes
- Comments
- Repins
- Pin Impressions
- Visits to your site from Pinterest
- # images pinned from your site
- Boards with pin impressions
Data on Pinterest is available after signing up for a branded account. The data should thereafter start measuring your results. It’s important to have your branded account set up ahead of time or else data won’t be available to review using the analytics platform. It’s still recommended that you take baselines and measure progress of things such as repins, comments, and likes which are easily viewed on your public profile.
Miscellaneous Measurement Tools
The following tools provide small pieces to the entire puzzle of measurement and some are arguably less insightful than others. The point of using these tools can often simply be to cross-check other data sets, validate what you’re seeing, or act as yet another insight.
Klout
Time: 30+ Days
- Klout Score
- Types of Expertise
Fresh Web Explorer
https://moz.com/tools/fresh-web-explorer
Time: 30 Days
- # Web Mentions
- Mention Authority
How Sociable
- Brand Magnitude
Bit.ly
Time: Varies
- Clicks
- Total Saves
- Where link was shared
- Geographic Distribution of Clicks
Email Service Provider
Time: Varies (depending on your provider, you may be able to go back more than 30+ days)
- Email Open Rate
- Email Click Through Rate
- Delivery Rate
- Forward/Shares
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Conversion Rate
Please note: Bit.ly allows you to set up your own account to customize bit.ly URLs. If you don’t have your own profile simply, add a + to the end of any bit.ly short URL to see your stats.
Website Analytics
The most common analytics program to understand what your web visitors are doing is Google Analytics. The platform is offered for free, however there are several paid tools available. The KPIs listed below may still be available with the type of program you’re using differing slightly in their naming convention or how they are tabulated.
Google Analytics
Time: Time of code install
- Total Sessions
- Total Direct Sessions
- Total Referral Sessions
- Total Organic Search Sessions
- Total Paid Sessions
- Total Social Sessions
- Total Email Sessions
- Total Users
- Total Pageviews
- Total Unique Pageviews
- Pages Per Session
- Average Session Duration
- Bounce Rate
- Time On Site
- Returning VIsitor vs. New Visitor
- Goal Conversion Rate
- Conversion Rate Per Traffic Source
- Goal Completions
- Goal Completions Per Traffic Source
- Goal Value
- Assisted Conversions
- % Exit
- Visitor Frequency
- Visitor Engagement
- Visitor Flow
- Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
- Event Tracking – if setup
- Social trackbacks
- Average Order Value
- Time to Conversion
- Form Abandonment Rate
Search Console/Webmaster Tools
Time: 90 Days
- Total Clicks from search engine results page (SERP)
- Total Impressions in SERPs
- Average Keyword CTR
- Average Landing Page CTR
- Average Keyword Position
- Average Landing Page Position
- # Keyword Queries
- Total Links
- Content Keywords
Marketing Automation Tools
Time: Varies, depending on your provider’s capabilities
- Lifetime Customer Value
- Leads by Source trending data
- Sales by lead source
- Campaign revenue reports
- MQL (marketing qualified leads) Sources
- SQL (sales qualified leads) Sources
- Website Lead to MQL Ratio
- MQL to SQL Ratio
- SQL to Quote Ratio
- Quoted to Closed Customer Ratio
- Visitor Flow
- Site Traffic: Lead Ratio
- Form Conversion Rates
Annual analysis can be an informative and insightful activity once you know where to start. Hopefully this list of resources will help you to see the data you can examine and where to pull it from. And take a look at Act-On’s eBook, The New Marketing Metrics for B2B, to learn which data and metrics really matter to the success of your business to help measure against your KPIs.
Go forth and start observing this year’s progress! What you learn should help in setting goals for the coming year and serve to set baselines too.
Happy holidays!