3 Key Marketing Metrics Every Small Business Must Track Regularly

Small business owners try out various marketing channels (such as social media, emails, content marketing, SEO) and tactics to grow their business. However, unless you measure the performance of your marketing efforts, it’s difficult to know what’s working and what needs your attention. That’s where marketing metrics come in.

Marketing Metrics enable you to keep an eye on how your marketing efforts are doing, so you can easily optimize the ones that are doing well, and pull the plug on the ones that aren’t working out for your business. This saves you a lot of time & resources, and helps drive your business in the right direction. Here are 3 key marketing metrics every small business must track regularly.

1. Brand Search Queries

This stands for the number of times people specifically search for your business online. They may do it by directly typing your company name, or anything related to your business (such as your products & services) into the search bar.

It is a great way to measure the brand awareness and amount of interest people have about your business. The more brand queries you get, the better it is. It means people are genuinely interested about your business and want to find out more about it.

When you’re a new business, you’ll notice that you don’t get too many brand queries. That’s because people are not aware about your business, its products & services. As your brand awareness grows over time, more people will start using your brand name to find you online. For example, when people are looking for nike shoes, they don’t search for something like “blue sneakers”. Instead, they look for “nike blue sneakers”.

There are a couple of ways to track brand queries. You can type your business name in Google Trends to get an idea of its search volume over time. You can also use any of the free web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Google Keyword Planner to get the monthly search volume for your brand name.

2. Website Visitors

Website Visitors are the people who visit your website, by clicking on a link to your site, or directly typing your site address in their browser. Each website visitor is a prospective customer so it’s important to keep track of them regularly.

You can easily track this metric using Google Analytics. Once you install Google Analytics on your website, it will automatically track your website visitors and generate insightful reports for you.

In fact, it will not only tell you how many people visited your website, but also the amount of time they spend on your site and the pages they visited during that time. The more they stay on your site, the more they’ll engage with your brand, and the more likely they are to convert into actual customers.

You can begin by simply tracking the number of weekly visitors to your site. As you gather more data, you can begin comparing every week/month’s site traffic with previous periods, to see how your business is growing over time.

You can also use this metric to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. For example, you can analyze whether your website visitors increased or decreased after your latest social media campaign.

You can break down the number of website visitors by their source of traffic, location, age, browser & device. This will enable you to understand your target customers better – how did they come across your site? where are they located ? Are they young or old ? Do they access your site via mobile or laptop ? – and tailor your website to convert more visitors into customers.

In fact, you can even create marketing campaigns to target your best sources of website visitors. For example, if you find that most of your website visitors come from Facebook and not Twitter, then you can create custom campaigns for Facebook, or even try out Facebook Advertising, to drive more people to your site.

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is the percent of website visitors who perform a specific action on your website – it can be anything from signing up for your website, to downloading are ebook to even making a purchase.

For example, out of the 100 people who visited your user registration page, if 36 people sign up, then your signup conversion rate is 36%. You can measure separate conversion rates for each specific action on your website, like downloads, purchases, subscriptions.

The higher the conversion rate, the better it is. It means more people are engaging with your business and that you are successful in achieving your marketing objectives. For example, if you email 200 people to promote a discount offer, and 40 people end up using it, then your conversion rate is 20% (40/200 X 100 = 20%).

You can even measure conversion rate for each source of traffic. This can lead to some great insights. For example, you may find that although organic search drives a lot less website visitors than, say, Facebook, it has a much better conversion rate and drives more sales than the social media platform. This will help you identify the best performing traffic sources for your business and refine your marketing strategy.

Tracking the right metrics will enable you to monitor your marketing efforts, spot the winners & repeat them, identify the ones that aren’t doing so well & quickly do something about them. You’ll be able to get more bang for your marketing buck and grow your business faster.

Sreeram Sreenivasan is the Founder & CEO of Ubiq BI & Fedingo. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies in a wide range of areas such as Business Consulting, Sales & Marketing strategy. He’s passionate about Entrepreneurship and Online Marketing.