The greatest challenge with marketing metrics, particularly with regard to internet marketing metrics, is gaining the understanding of which ones will actually improve performance and which ones can be dismissed. Additionally, a company needs to know how to use the marketing metrics they have in order to drive performance and profitability.

In order to best judge which marketing metrics to be used by a company to measure their areas of success and areas that need improvement, they need to consider what is measurable. There are, truly, four basic conditions that are measurable. A company should take a look at its current marketing metrics, see which condition the measurements meet, and add, subtract, and revise accordingly.

Volume

For internet marketing metrics, volume is a useful one. The amount of traffic generated to a site can help the company understand what, and when, their sites are appealing to the public. Examples of volume metrics include number of page views, new visitors, repeat visitors, and, with social media, “likes” (such as with Facebook), and “Retweets” (such as with Twitter).

Quality

The quality of visits is another measurable element that can be used to figure out which pages are the most read, most popular, and can give the company hints and ideas on what direction the company can reach into. Measure what happens during each website visit – such as click-throughs, exit pages, entries, and what kind of users are visiting the page. Tracking the browsers and platforms is a highly useful way to see what kinds of consumers are visiting the company’s website. Another form of quality marketing metrics is seeing the average time spent on certain pages.

Sources

This is another area of very important marketing metrics – from where the viewers and potential customers come. A crossover example from quality and sources here would be click-throughs – define the original source (an advertisement on another site, a search engine, a blog, etc.) to get a feel for one’s consumer base or potential consumer base. Additional source metrics include search terms, preferred languages, countries, and referral sources.

Results

This is probably the most obvious element in marketing metrics – what happened as a result of the visit. Which pages were the most popular, generated the most leads, which pages lead to orders being placed, what information on the site is downloaded, and similar measurable results. Yet without the other conditions being measured, it can be difficult to see exactly how those results came to fruition.

Getting the full picture requires all four of these foundational marketing metrics.

If a particular metric does not meet, or cannot be revised to meet any one of these conditions, then it will not likely aid in pushing performance or profitability. Of course marketing metrics matter, but they need to meet these criteria in order to be useful to the company’s bottom line, and put together properly in order to build “the big picture” overall for the business.