Part I: The High Level Executive Metrics
As you move from “old marketing” or “outbound marketing” (tradeshows, print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing) and embrace “new marketing” or “inbound marketing” (using the Internet to make it easier for customers to find you using your website, SEO, PPC, Blogs, etc.) it’s critical to know what metrics you should track to measure your success and progress. Here are the top five high-level metrics.
1) Overall Website Grade – The great thing about this score is that is it very easy to understand (who doesn’t comprehend a 1 to 100 score?), and it compares you against your peers (currently over 70,000 other websites), and it is based on a number of different metrics so it summarizes data to save time. This metric is available for free from the Website Grader SEO Tool.
2) Website Traffic – This is the total number of unique visitors to your website over a time period, usually a month. At a high level, this gives you a sense of the overall interest in your business, and if the marketing programs you are doing are working or not.
3) Leads – This is the next step in the sales funnel, and is the most important metric for measuring your marketing efforts.
4) New Customers – “How many sales did you close this month?” is probably the most important question you should answer for your business.
5) Customer Acquisition Cost – Many businesses don’t compute this on an ongoing basis, but knowing the total sales and marketing cost for each new customer (on average each month) is important. It gives you a good sense of how your business is going, and if it is getting easier or harder to grow.
Of course there are many more things you could track, but the goal of this list is to have 5 things that you should measure on a monthly basis to see a high level or executive view of your business. In the next in the series, we’ll look at more detailed metrics for measuring marketing a bit deeper. Importantly, make sure to measure these metrics as a trend, keeping track of how they change over time. The real value is not just in knowing where you stand, but also knowing if you are moving forward or backward.
