Metrics to Track when Working with your Marketing Agency
So you’ve signed up with a marketing agency and you want to make sure that you’re tracking the right metrics so that both you and your marketing agency feel like this is a relationship that’s working out.
That’s awesome! This is a vital part of creating a working relationship with your agency.
Depending on the agency you’re working with they will have templates to send you their standard reports of the results that they’re achieving or the actions that they’ve done in a particular day/week/month, if so, that’s great.
I’ve broken down this article into sections depending on what you signed up with your marketing agency. I’ve organized it by what I consider the most important metric for you to track as well as some information on the value of that metric.
Email Marketing
Result Metric – This will depend upon the service you offer. However examples include: # of appointments booked, # of opt-ins, revenue generated, revenue contributed to etc.
This last one is vital to determine with your agency – sending emails just to send emails does not serve you. The intention of email marketing is often to drive brand awareness however it also needs to be driving revenue in some shape or form.
# of Emails Sent – Are they sending emails and if so how many? If your agency isn’t sending the agreed-upon emails this will rapidly show up here. I recommend that you at an absolute minimum send out an email a month. Ideally, you’re emailing weekly or more often than that.
Open Rate – Target this to be over 20%. With small lists (less than 3k) this should be easily doable. If open rates are below this percentage it indicates that either more targeted emails need to be crafted, people who haven’t opened in a while need to be opted out, or better subject lines should be crafted.
Click-through Rate – Depending on the call to action you’ll want a click-through rate of over 3%. If you’re achieving a good open rate above and you have a pitch in the email you should then be able to achieve the 3% target easily. If you’re not hitting the percent target you should work with your agency on the offer or the frequency you’re hitting your list.
The above 4 are the key metrics to measure to ensure your agency is achieving the success you want it to achieve.
Social Media Marketing
I’m defining this as the organic side of social media. Meaning the agency is handling the content creation and posting for your brand on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
# of Posts by platform – Are they posting as often as agreed upon? Are they hitting all of the platforms? It’s important to be present in various different social media platforms so that your audience sees you where they are.
# of Engagements – Are the posts getting likes/comments? If this isn’t trending in the right direction it indicates that more work is needed to increase this. Just posting and getting views while helpful from a branding perspective, don’t track engagement which should be increasing.
Paid Ads (Google/FB or other)
When you’re running paid ads you can use them for many different objectives. Often times the intention is to drive traffic and lead generation. Here are the key metrics I track for Facebook.
Revenue Generated – Above all other metrics, your marketing has to drive revenue. Whether you track this in your CRM or connect your revenue data to Facebook, you should know if your marketing efforts are driving revenue.
# of Leads – This is both the leads generated on Facebook forms as well as conversion on your website. This means your Facebook pixel should be set up correctly. If you’re not generating leads in the quantities great enough with the intentionality high enough to convert what you need to achieve I’d recommend looking at some of the below metrics.
Cost per Click – This indicates whether your pitch/hook is driving traffic. If your cost per click is more than $2 a link click you’re likely running an ineffective campaign.
Conversion Rate Ranking – This should be at least “average”. This means how does Facebook rate your ads in comparison to other ads in general.
Cost per view – This is a metric to measure your brand awareness. I’ve had success with video ads at under 15 cents per view, especially with longer videos.
SEO
SEO tends to be something that takes more time. In the beginning, there will be a lot of work to ensure that your basics are in place, however, over time you’ll want to see an increase in organic traffic and then in leads generated from your website. So here are the metrics I find the most important to measure.
Revenue Generated – Above all other metrics, your marketing has to drive revenue. Whether you track this in your CRM or connect your revenue data to Google, you should know if your marketing efforts are driving revenue.
# of Leads from your website – This is something that if someone lands on your site, if they opt-in straight from your website, whether having arrived via a blog or your main page, they either convert by opting in, or making a call.
Organic Traffic – the intention of SEO is to actually drive traffic, ideally, that converts. If you’re driving more traffic to your website then you should be able to convert more visitors into prospects and clients.
Rankings of Keywords – The first change you’ll likely see when SEO gets started is increased rankings of certain keywords. As these start to pick up you’ll find that they lead to traffic, which should lead to leads and revenue.