No matter how you slice it, a marketer’s job is never easy. On top of trying to make top-tier content in order to improve our clients’ revenue, we have to think about every variable — every detail that can impact the success and failure of each project.

For some of us, this simply means leveraging our data to check the site views, clickthroughs, or engagement and calling it a day. For others, there’s a lot more than that. Each of us has our own way of monitoring each campaign and trying to find the right way to bring our clients success.

Are we really doing everything we can, though? Sometimes we get so caught up in our work (or personal engagements — it happens!) that we can lose sight of the big picture, and not be as thorough as we would like. When I am trying to get a 50,000 ft view of any campaign, here are the first 5 things I look for. From there, our team can dive into the details and really determine the successes and opportunities to further capture market share for that specific brand we’re supporting. 

1: Leads

With everything we’re looking into every day (Overall ROI, Engagement, Conversion rate, etc.), it’s easy to overlook the importance of looking at our leads. The fact of the matter is, though, good leads lead to good sales, and good sales leads to a better bottom line which then leads to a better ROI.

Of course, you have to be choosy, since not all leads are created equal. Qualified leads (that is, leads that have the potential to lead to a sale) are split into two categories:

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – SQLs are leads that have a very high likelihood to be buying customers, and are vital leads to pursue so as to make a sale.

Market Qualified Lead (MQL) – MQLs are leads that have the potential to become a buying customer, and are interested in what you’re selling, but aren’t quite ready to make a full-on sale yet.

Navigating these two types of leads are essential to any successful marketing campaign, and keeping track of what leads you have available and which ones you want to pursue is extremely important.

Just make sure you check the Cost per Lead, too. Calculating how much it’s costing you to acquire customers can give you the foresight to plan your marketing strategy according to your budget.

It goes without saying that if your leads are getting expensive and you’re not seeing much success, that’s a good sign that you need to go to the drawing board and see what you can do to get things back on track.

2: Bounce and Exit Rate

I’m putting these in the same category because they go hand-in-hand.

The Exit Rate shows you the percentage that users visited a particular page last in an extended session.

The Bounce Rate shows you the percentage of users that left your website after only viewing a single page.

A lot of people get the two terms confused, and both are extremely important for judging how your brand’s website is doing. Is there a particular page that people leave the second it loads, even after they were flitting from page to page on your brand’s website? Is there a page that has a high volume of visitors (say, a page that one of your external marketing materials links potential customers to), but people leave without going anywhere else on your website?

In both scenarios, looking at these statistics will tell you that there is a major problem area and oversight on your brand website, and it’s turning customers off. With this information, you can go back, revisit the drawing board, and fix the problem before you lose any more potential customers.

Even if you think you fixed the problem after one of these incidents, it’s still a good idea to keep an eye on both of these, so you can keep track of potential issues and find solutions as quickly as you can.

3: Traffic by Source

As marketers, we want to know what part of our campaigns are working. One sign of success is traffic, but it isn’t always enough to just look at the overall numbers. Sometimes, we’re going to need to look at where the traffic is coming from.

Traffic by Source lists the traffic to your website based on…well, their source, and you can tell how many people are coming to your site, and from where. This is especially important when you’re using a lot of external sites or marketing materials that redirect customers to a website or domain that is the centerpiece of the marketing campaign.

Here are the sources that are tracked by Google Analytics:

Organic Search – Your customers clicked a link in a search engine, which brought them to your site.

Direct Visitors – These people typed your URL in their search bar, or even had your website bookmarked and are visiting your site multiple times.

Referrals – These are visitors who arrived at your site by clicking a link from an outside source.

Social – These are visitors who found your site through clicking a link on social media.

By checking your traffic’s source, you can get an idea of:

  • The success of your external marketing materials
  • Your site’s SEO effectiveness
  • The amount of potential return customers
  • The success of your social media campaigns

It may not be a full picture of these things, but even getting a rough idea can let you know where you need to rework your strategy, what’s working, and where you need to push even harder for better results.

4: Mobile Optimization and Effectiveness

With smartphones being a constant part of our daily lives, it’s inevitable that we would use them both for business and pleasure. Everyone checks their email on the bus, does their banking in the middle of a McDonald’s, and most of us use the web to do our research (usually over our phones) before we make major purchases or financial decisions.

Making sure that both your website and campaign are optimized for mobile users is absolutely essential for long-term success. Not only will this bring in more potential customers (I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to find myself caring about a company’s products if their website refuses to load properly or is badly designed), but Google actively prefers sites that are optimized for mobile users, which improves your site’s SEO and will raise it in the SERP rankings.

Checking your mobile statistics (traffic, conversion rate, total lead conversions via mobile devices) can give you a good idea of how effective the mobile side of your campaign really is. If your mobile numbers aren’t doing so hot, you might want to look and see why that is. Is your site not loading properly? Is your layout not mobile-friendly?

There are a lot of different factors that lead to an effective mobile strategy, but if you check your stats regularly, you’ll have a good bit of data to lead you in the right direction.

5: Conversion Rate

This is last, but most certainly not least. The conversion rate is one of the most important things of all — it measures the amount of conversions gained from a campaign. These differ from campaign to campaign, but conversions are where the money is. Whether it’s a subscription, a product purchase, or even a simple phone call, conversions mean revenue, and if you’re not making revenue, then your marketing campaign is a failure.

Having a well-designed website with high traffic, a good clickthrough rate, and an amazing SEO score is good by itself, but you need conversions — revenue — or else all you have is just a pretty website that people can marvel at without engaging or buying anything.

If you have a low conversion rate, that’s a good sign to go through everything and see what you’re doing wrong. Even if most of your campaign is solid, and only your landing page has a low conversion rate — do whatever you can to fix it, and bring those numbers up as much as you can.

If your conversion rate is high, then that means that you’re doing something right. If your conversion rate is high and your overall ROI is high, you have reason to celebrate, but not take it for granted. Check on problem areas and see where they can be improved; never stop trying to better yourself and your campaign.

If your overall numbers are low at the start, don’t give up! Use all the tools available to you to make sure that those numbers go up and your campaign thrives!