Understanding Marketing Performance Metrics for Conversion Gains

Feeling overwhelmed about which performance metrics to focus on to optimize your conversation rates? Here’s what to know about the ones we think are important and what they mean.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding the language of performance metrics is the first step to narrowing down which ones will support your company’s business goals. 
• There are many strategies on the road to optimization, but focusing on a few will help you make quick improvements.
• Day-to-day metrics are helpful, but forming long-term customer relationships through excellent customer support and loyalty programs is just as important. 
• Content can be used in a number of ways to optimize your conversation rates. 

Marketing jargon often gets thrown around, and that makes it hard to know what to focus on to improve your company’s bottom line. Executive leaders want to see an increase in revenue from the marketing team, but how do you get from executive expectations to actual results?  

Take time to learn the lingo and understand one of the most important performance metrics that will help you improve your revenue goals: conversion rate optimization (CRO). 

There are plenty of key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help with improving your conversion rate, but measuring and tracking everything would devalue what’s really important for your company’s goals. 

This guide will break down what the performance metrics are, how to use them to your advantage, and how to leverage your content strategy to optimize your conversion rate. 

Understanding performance metrics

So, you have a content plan and strategy, and it’s been sizzling for a while, but your instincts tell you everything is plateauing. It may be time to take a deep dive into your performance metrics to give yourself a baseline for content optimization and customer conversion. 

Performance metrics are values that measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns along your buyer’s journey. You choose what to measure based on the channels you’re using, your business goals, and the formats of your campaigns to get a specific picture of what’s driving leads, conversions, and revenue – and how to optimize for more gains. 

 These values of measurement are called KPIs, and we recommend paying attention to: 

• Conversion rate
  This is the percentage of visitors who completed a desired action. Calculate your conversion rate by dividing the total number by the total website visitors and multiplying by 100. But before any conversion rates are calculated, you have to determine what counts as a conversion for you. Is it a customer completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product? 
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  Your CAC determines how much it will cost your organization to attract new customers. Add the costs of sales and marketing and divide by the number of new customers acquired for a given time period. 
• Return on investment (ROI)
  This metric compares the amount of money you spend on a project with the amount of revenue you gain from it. 
• Website traffic
  This could include total pageviews, unique pageviews, new visitors, and returning visitors. 
• Engagement metrics
  This includes time on site and bounce rate, among other performance metrics, and can include using tools such as heat maps to see exactly where customers are spending the most time on your website.
• Social media reach and engagement
  Each social media channel has its own set of analytics tracking who views, likes, and shares your posts. You can break it down further and distinguish between paid and organic social, if that applies to your content strategy. 
• Email marketing metrics
  These include open rate and click-through rate, among other performance metrics, and. tell you who is opening your marketing emails or clicking on the links and going where you want them to.  

Performance metrics for marketing success

All of these KPIs are important to your content strategy, but the conversion rate is key to increasing your bottom line. The higher the conversion rates, the more revenue for your company. If yours is not where you think it should be, it’s time to create a conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan. 

There are many strategies to use to optimize conversion rates. HubSpot provides a long list of strategies and resources. Let’s focus in on just a few that you can implement right away: 

• A/B testing and experimentation
  One way to figure out what’s working in your content is to test it. Pick one variable per test. You might A/B test an email campaign by sending one email with one subject line and the same email with a different subject line. See which email is opened more and you’ll know it was the subject that inspired action. Play with headlines, copy format, colors, layout, or calls to action (CTAs), then capture the results and continue to listen to your audience.
• Optimizing landing pages and forms
  Make sure your value proposition is clearly communicated. Add a few multimedia elements to make the landing page content pop. The strength of your landing page lies in the strength of your CTAs. Make them inspire the action you want your customer to take, and make sure they appear above the “fold” and throughout your landing page.
• Streamlining the checkout process a
  This boils down to a quality user experience. Potential customers aren’t going to finish the journey if your checkout process has too many clicks and opens up too many pages. The less friction the better, especially when it comes to optimizing for mobile. A customer will likely come back when they can seamlessly make a mobile purchase.
• Personalization and targeting
  If your content is personalized and can get specific in geography, you’ll most likely see more conversions. People search on mobile for directions, phone numbers, and reviews that are relevant and close to them. The more localized and personal, the more likely a customer will choose you. 

Another performance metric that improves your conversion rate is to consider the longevity of the customer relationship. It’s easier to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one. The customer lifetime value (CLV) shows the total revenue a company can reasonably expect from a single customer throughout the business relationship. Understanding the CLV allows you to leverage the value of each customer during the buyer's journey. 

Here are a few strategies for increasing your CLV: 

• Enhancing customer experience and satisfaction 
  If your CLV is low, it’s time to improve your customer support strategy to meet their needs.
• Implementing loyalty programs and incentives
  A loyalty program and incentives such as discounts for returning customers can also increase your CLV. 
• Upselling and cross-selling
  A customer who is already buying from you knows your products and trusts you. They are more likely to consider an upsell if they have a long-term, good relationship with your business. 

The next performance metric that helps improve your conversion rate is the customer retention rate.  It indicates the percentage of existing customers who remain after a determined period of time and is valuable because it sheds light on why customers stay with your company. If the rate is low, it gives you more insight into where you can make improvements to your customer support strategy. 

Give these tactics a try for improving customer retention:

• Effective communication and customer support
• Implementing post-purchase follow-ups
• Providing exclusive offers and rewards

Brand awareness is also important because it determines whether potential customers know your brand, products, and services exist. You can measure brand awareness  through social listening, conducting brand awareness surveys, and getting earned media coverage. KWhen done right, it can provide a bigger picture of how your brand is perceived and where you can improve. 

Optimizing content strategies for conversion and revenue

When it comes to content optimization, the first step is to make sure you are doing keyword research and SEO analysis. Here’s what to know about this process:

• A quick SEO content audit can make a difference if customers can’t find you because your content is working against the Google algorithms. 
• Keyword research and SEO analysis should now be the first step to ensure you’re at the top of the SERPs when customers search for your goods and services. 

You want the content you do produce to be valuable and engaging. Use it to build trust with your customer. Add data that makes sense. 

If you cite sources, link to reputable reports and articles. Answer questions and provide solutions to pain points. It should also be error-free, informative, and educational. Your copy shouldn’t be too salesy, but don’t forget to add a strong CTA so your customer knows exactly which action to take next. 

Here are a few tips for improving your content’s SEO value:

• The next step is to choose relevant keywords to boost your content. It’s best to avoid keyword stuffing, but do add them to your H1s and H2s throughout your content. 

• Optimizing meta tags will also help improve conversion rates. Paying attention to meta titles and meta tag descriptions is key to optimizing content SEO strategies and will let robots and customers know what the mata page is about on the SERPs. 

• Improve your content strategy by taking advantage of your content distribution channels. Use your social media channels to promote content, whether it’s an organic or paid social campaign. There are also analytics and targeted audience demographics you can use to get the right message in front of the right customer at the right time. 

• Drip email campaigns and consistent newsletter sends also boost conversion rates, especially if the content is useful and informative. 

Once you’ve optimized your content, it’s time to monitor and collect performance metrics on your new and improved content. You’ll have an opportunity to analyze user behavior and collect feedback on its effectiveness, as well as keep an eye on your conversion rates. You can then improve and iterate your content to make it even better and convert more customers. 

Turn to the experts at ContentBacon for enhanced performance metrics

It’s important to understand which performance metrics are important to your company’s goals. Digging into the CRO means you can use strategies like A/B testing, landing page optimization, and creating a frictionless checkout process to help improve your conversion rate. It’s also just as important to keep the CLV and CRO in mind as well. 

Optimizing your content strategy also helps improve your conversion rate. Conducting the proper keyword research and SEO analysis, creating quality content that’s engaging, leveraging your social channels, using a guest blogger to boost your content, and taking advantage of consistent email drip campaigns and newsletters will also help. 

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by how to optimize your conversion rate and hit your business goals, ContentBacon is here for you. We’ve got teams of professional writers, editors, and strategists ready and willing to craft quality branded content that will help optimize your conversion rate. 

Whatever your content needs, we’ll fry it up and serve it on the best BLT sandwich we can create. Let’s talk about how the right content can support your team’s conversion rate optimization. Schedule a call with us today!