It’s obvious that there are some marketing metrics that really don’t mean that much to your business. But these useless metrics often occupy our mind and time anyway because we feel that they are important.
Guess what? They aren’t.
But as you definitely know, there are also certain marketing metrics that mean the world to your business. And those are the metrics that we are going look at in-depth today.
The truth is that there are only a few metrics to follow when using the most important Internet marketing channels that include PPC marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimisation/content marketing.
Let’s get started.
Google Adwords Quality Score
As marketers, we all understand that traffic is the lifeblood of every business. Without high quality traffic, it’s going to be nearly impossible to sell your products and services.
So, many intelligent entrepreneurs have decided to turn to the holy grail of Internet traffic – i.e. Google Adwords – in order to beef up their page views so that they can turn these readers into paying customers.
After running thousands of ads on the Google platform, there is one thing that we can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt means more than anything else to advertisers and that is the Quality Score.
What is the quality score? Ultimately, it is the way that Google rates the relevance and quality of an ad based upon the keywords that are being bid upon for pay per click ads.
It’s difficult to tell you exactly how Google determines their quality score because as we know they like to keep everything very secretive. But after spending some time reverse engineering the process, we have learned that Google bases their quality score on whether or not your ad beats the expected click through rate at the position your bidding on.
Click through rate is an incredibly important factor when determining quality score because it’s the easiest way for Google to gauge how people are reacting to your ad. If the ad is not resonating and no one is clicking it, then it is going to receive a low quality score.
All in all, quality score is the way that Google assesses your ad quality. This is big to understand because it will determine your ad position and whether or not you’ll have to pay more to get clicks. As we all know with Google Adwords, the less you have to pay per click, the better chance you’ll have at creating an effective ad campaign.
Engagement Rate with Social Media Posts
To some degree or other, all of the biggest social media networks make putting the most relevant content in front of their users as their main focus. They will either do this in the newsfeed or do it on the activity stream.
Across all social networks, one of the biggest factors in helping these sites to rank content is the overall engagement factor. This lets social media websites know in real time whether or not people are actually interested in the content that they are reading or viewing. Think Twitter re-tweets, YouTube video likes, comments and subscriptions, Google plus ones, Facebook likes, comments and shares and you get the picture.
With Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, we know for a fact that the social network places tremendous importance on the engagement with posts. What does this mean? It means that the more people like, share and comment on a post, the better chance it will have at dominating the news feeds and possibly even reaching the trending feed.
Every interaction on Facebook basically endorses the quality of the content. So if you want your posts to get shown in other news feeds more often, you must create posts that have serious engagement. This holds true for every one of the social networks and not just Facebook.
Content/SEO Engagement Metrics
Finally, the more people love your website content and comment and share it socially, the better chance your content is going to have at ranking highly in the search engines.
Time on site and bounce rate are also huge factors that play a role in where you will rank in the search engines. If people are spending time on your webpage instead of bouncing away, the search engine will recognise this as positive engagement and reward you for it.
Pay close attention to these marketing metrics. Work on improving them and watch your business grow beyond your wildest dreams.
