The 3 Types of Marketing Metrics You Need for Data-Driven Wins

A marketing plan without careful consideration of metrics is similar to throwing barely cooked spaghetti at the wall and hoping it will stick. Metrics are powerful because they give us insight into what’s powering our campaign, what’s working, and what isn’t working. Every marketer should have a basic understanding of what these metrics are and how they can be used to track a marketing campaign’s progress.

When you are carefully able to track the progress of your marketing efforts, you reduce your wasted ad spend, are able to accurately determine your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and can definitively understand how your campaign is doing.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different metrics out there you can look at, but we’re going to focus on three categories of important ones you need to know. Let’s begin.

What are the Most Important Metric Categories?

As you set up your marketing campaigns, you need to keep two things in mind: your customers and their current position in the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is a great way to determine how your messaging is going to change depending on where your potential customers are in the funnel.

Many different versions of this funnel exist, but the most essential version is comprised of three phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. A customer or patient must first become aware of your services before they can evaluate them. Once your services are within their radar, they must compare alternatives and decide whether or not to schedule an appointment or consultation with you.

Each phase of the funnel has its own key metrics that you need to pay attention to.

Awareness

Once a customer becomes aware of your product or service, they enter into the Awareness phase of the funnel. If the goal of your marketing campaign is to maximize the number of people who are aware of your business, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to the right metrics.

These metrics include:

Impressions

Impressions are counted whenever an ad is served. Knowing the total amount of times your ad was served allows you to understand how often your ad is being shown to potential customers searching for your product.

Impression Share

Impression share refers to the number of times an ad was served divided by the number of times an ad could have been shown for the defined targeting or search queries. Created by Google, this metric is a great KPI for understanding how much your business is penetrating the local market.

Reach

The number of people who were served an ad is known as the ad's reach. Unlike impression, which counts the total number of times an ad was shown, reach counts the total number of people who saw an ad—eliminating instances where the same ad was shown to the same person more than once.

Consideration

Further down the marketing funnel, you reach the consideration phase. Once a potential customer becomes aware of your product or service, they add it to their knowledge base and begin to compare your business with others.

For healthcare specifically, this is where a patient is comparing different care options to determine which is the right fit for their needs. At this stage of the funnel, it’s important to pay attention to:

Conversions

A conversion is any kind of action that a potential customer takes that you define as valuable. Conversions differ by industry and type of business, but some common ones include filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, viewing certain pages on your website, and a phone call to a location.

Calls

Speaking of calls, the ability to track how many potential customers are calling you as a result of seeing a marketing ad online is highly valuable. Call tracking allows you to monitor which parts of your marketing campaigns are performing well, and which need improvement, allowing you to further optimize your campaigns to make them as efficient as possible.

Decision

Finally, the chance to turn a prospect into a customer. The decision phase of the funnel is where your potential customer decides if they want to do business with you.

Marketing efforts during this phase of the funnel should be highly targeted and trackable. If you aren’t able to track how and when prospects are becoming customers, it makes it impossible for you to duplicate those efforts to convert more prospects.

Of all the metrics you could use during this phase, we highly recommend this one as the most important:

Return on Ad Spend

Also known as ROAS, this metric is the key to determining how effective your marketing campaigns are. It is defined as the amount of money you make for every $1 you spend on marketing.

For example, Netsertive’s average healthcare ROAS is 16:1. That means, for every $1 our customers spend on marketing with us, they make an average of $16 back.

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