The last two weeks we’ve been discussing the standard business funnel of Awareness, Acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Retention. We started with the Search News Central article, Measuring Metrics for Success, and now here we are at last, wrapping up the whole kit n’ caboodle. We have a lot to go through today, so let’s get started!

The Standard Business Funnel and KPIs

Image source: wwarby on Flickr

“What gets measured gets managed” is a popular Peter Drucker quote. It’s been reused and modified to include such wonderful wisdom as:

• You can’t manage what you don’t measure
• What can be measured can be managed
• If it isn’t measured, it can’t be managed

(sigh) Yes, Originality ‘R Us…

As soon as you start looking at metrics and the massive amount of data that pours in from a well monitored site, you start to realize something is missing in the measure = manage equation. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should. More specifically, just because you’re getting data back doesn’t mean all the data is important at that particular moment.

As mentioned in Measuring Engagement and KPIs, one of the hardest parts of analytics is that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You have all these numbers:

• Time on site
• Click through rate
• Bounce rate
• Exit rate
• Entrance rate
• Cost per click
• Unique visitors
• Search engine vs referral vs direct visits
• Overall visitors
• Average sales
• Goal completion rates

Egads. The metrics multiply like rabbits. The data increases exponentially the more you track (you should see some of the raw files we dig through before pulling a report together for a client). Insanity looms close. Therefore, we discover and define Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, in order to make sense of what we’re seeing (and save ourselves from padded rooms).

Throughout this series, we’ve given you some potential KPIs to use as indicators of success. Obviously, you need to look at the tips and pointers we give in the light of your own business, but they should give you ideas at the very least. Each post talked about market segmentation, why it matters for that part of the funnel, and so on. Today, we’ll go a little deeper into that.

Defining KPIs? Goals Matter!

When testing computer performance, testers have a baseline. The number one goal for the computer is to achieve that baseline. Surpassing the baseline is a good thing. Below the baseline is a bad thing.

However, that goal is actually made up of several goals. The CPU’s ability to complete mathematical operations, how quick the disk reads/writes/seeks files and how efficient the memory is are just a few. Without a goal, none of that data would mean anything.

The same can be said for your marketing campaigns. You have to have a goal, as well as a baseline, before the data means anything. For example, if you’re trying to get a video to go viral on YouTube, would knowing the number of Twitter referrals coming to your site help you measure the success of the “viral video” campaign?

This is why Key Performance Indicators are fluid. They show the success of a particular action, and only the success of that particular action. They are forward-looking, not present-based.

In the standard business funnel, the chosen KPIs should answer the question: Was this step successful?

• Awareness – The chosen KPIs will show the amount of people acquired, based on the focus of the campaign. How many people responded to the TV ad, Facebook or Twitter campaign, newspaper ad, and so on?
• Acquisition – The chosen KPIs will show how many people engaged with the campaign’s point of focus (i.e. clicked around the website, made a blog comment, responded on social, made a phone call…)
• Engagement – The chosen KPIs will show how many people began the conversion process, based on the campaign’s point of focus (i.e. began filling out a form for more information, started into the shopping cart funnel, etc.)
• Conversion – The chosen KPIS will show how many people finished the conversion process (i.e. visits to the “thank you page”, money in your account, information in your email, etc.)
• Retention – The chosen KPIs will show how many return to repeat the process in some way (i.e. continue to engage on social, become repeat customers, return visitors to your site, etc.)

Once you define those KPIs, it’s time to set the benchmarks.

Benchmarks – You Are HERE

We’ve written about benchmarks before, although it’s been quite awhile. You can read more about them with SEO Campaigns, Analytics, Benchmarks and Changes and SEO Campaigns and the Ever Essential Benchmark. Simply, you can’t know how well a campaign is succeeding if you don’t know what results you had before the campaign started. This is why benchmarks are handy.

We’ve created a simplified benchmark and KPI cheat sheet (download link) to walk you through a simple benchmark/performance tracking set up.

The scenario:

You want to start a 1-month dedicated Facebook campaign with an exclusive offer to your FB following. The offer is for 10% off the total amount of their order or free shipping if they use the code FAN ME at check out. What are you going to use to track the success of this campaign? If you just use the final step (the thank you page with the FAN ME code) and the campaign fails, how are you going to know why it failed? -Or will you, like so many others, just assume that Facebook won’t work for you?

You also want to pay attention to more than just an individual stage. For example, in the imaginary scenario, your FB campaign brought 5 less than the benchmark average of 25. Hmmm. Although that’s not necessarily a failure, it doesn’t bode well, does it?

However, on average, 5 drop out of the funnel before they ever really get started, where as all 20 referrals stayed on the site in the month of the campaign. Fifteen found a product they wanted to buy and started into the shopping cart funnel from FB. 1 drops out, leaving 14 that complete the buying process from Facebook. 10 are clearly from the FAN ME campaign.

The exciting part comes down to the Retention stage. Of the 10 users, 8 of them are new. They create a user account, which then goes into your customer database where they become repeat customers. As a bonus, you also gain 3 FB customers that may or may not have come from the FAN ME campaign (you don’t know for sure, because they didn’t use the code).

Now, hopefully your campaigns will bring more than 14 sales (although, depending on the average product price, you could be looking at hundreds of dollars). If it doesn’t, you’ll at least have a clear understand of what stage (or stages) the campaign failed.

Setting Up Analytics for KPI Tracking

Of course, before you can fill out the parts of the cheat sheet, you have to have the numbers, right? –And it’s much easier to garner the numbers if you already have them set apart for easy retrieval, right? Right. So let’s do that.

New Profile

• Create a new profile called “Facebook Campaign” (don’t worry – you can delete the whole bit after you’ve done the walk through).

Add Filter

• Make sure the profile name is “Facebook Campaign”.
• Click “Filters”
• Select “Create new Filter for Profile”
• Name the filter “ALLFB”
• Choose “Custom Filter”
• Include Campaign Name in the Filter Field, with the Filter Pattern set to FANME
• Make sure it’s not case sensitive and save.

Create URL

• Create a trackable URL using Google Analytics URL Builder
  • For example, you might use:
    • Website URL: http://mysite.com/facebook (directs to an FB specific page)
    • Campaign Source: facebook
    • Campaign Medium: social
    • Campaign Name:  FANME

Advanced Segments

• Under “Assets”, click “Advanced Segment”.
  • Name it “Facebook” (remember, we’re original here). Include a source containing facebook.com OR m.facebook.com.
  • Name it “Facebook”. Include a campaign containing “facebook” OR a medium containing “social”.
  • Save.

Setting Up Goals

• Under “Goals”, click + Goal.
• Name it “Facebook FANME” (for an original flavor). Make sure it’s active.
• Choose “URL Destination” and enter the final “thank you” page.
• Set your first step in the goal funnel as the link to the facebook specific page on your site (as listed in step 2 of this walkthrough), as set it as a required step.
• Set your second step in the goal funnel as your shopping cart page.
• Save.

Custom Alerts

• Under “Assets”, click “Custom Alerts”.
  • Name it “Facebook” and apply it to the Facebook Campaign profile you created in step one.
  • Choose to send you an email, text message or neither when the alert triggers (if it’s neither, you’ll just see it in the reporting).
    • Set Alert Conditions to the “facebook” segment when visits are less 10.
    • Save the alert.
    • Set Alert conditions to “FANME” goal conversion rate of less than 5.
    • Save the alert.

Now, once you start the campaign, you’ll use the URL you created for your Facebook link.

Finding the Data

Now that everything is in order, you’ll want to be able to see everything, right? Right. So, how do you do that? In your profiles list, you will now find “Facebook Campaign”. On the Dashboard section, you can add widgets that will give you data at a glance; each widget links back to the data section.

As you click through the familiar pages of the Audience, Advertising, Traffic Sources, Content and Conversions tabs, you’ll start to see “Facebook” crop up everywhere. For example, you’ll see the goal funnel under Goals > Funnel Visualization. Under Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals, you’ll find Goal Sets with the Facebook FANME designation. Under Traffic Sources >Sources > Campaigns, it will say “FANME”.

In other words, there won’t be the distractions of your every day average data. The Facebook Campaign Profile will give you all FB data, all the time.

The Icebergs Are Profuse

We finish many articles with “and that’s just the tip of the iceberg”. We’ll be doing the same here. Analytics, optimization, the three T’s (testing, tracking, tweaking)… it takes a bit of delving in and getting dirty. There’s much to learn, and a majority of it comes from practice and continual use.

We hope you’ve gleaned some useful information from the Measuring Metrics for Success series. We hope you’re able to turn the walkthrough into successful tracking implementation, as well as strong marketing campaigns. Thanks for staying with us. To your success!

As promised, the Measuring Metrics for Success series is now in eBook format. Get your copy today!

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Level343 Team

This account is where everyone involved with Level343 content marketing efforts show up. You can say there is no "I" in this team. Sometimes we will chat about a certain topic with a variation of ideas, suggestions, even opinions. Then one of us will start writing the post, hand it over to someone else who will continue the diatribe. Eventually it ends up on our editors desk who either chops the hell out of it, or you're reading it right now.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to see that your online marketing campaigns are working by looking at more than your company’s bottom line? When running concurrent campaigns (and you are, aren’t you?), you want to see how each of them perform. Otherwise, even when your bottom line says they’re succeeding, you could be doing extremely well with one or two and have third that’s failing miserably.

Yes, It’s a Red Flag

There isn’t a visible red flag. You don’t get an email saying, “Hey, campaign 3 is tanking.” No bells and whistles go off as the submarine sinks. –And since there aren’t any of these very noticeable signs, we turn to what does tell us all this and more: metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Conversion – Stage 4 of the Standard Business Funnel

“Conversion is similar to engagement. However, the definition differs slightly: a response that actively and directly affects the company’s business goals.”

~Measuring Metrics for Success

Conversion – that moment when all your marketing team’s hard work comes to fruition. It’s a beautiful thing! Doesn’t it just make you smile? Can you hear the angelic choir?

Conversion can sometimes be confused with Engagement. It’s often qualified as the sale; therefore, if it doesn’t bring dollars it doesn’t look like a conversion. However, there are multiple touch points in online marketing. A single site may have three or more actions that would qualify as a conversion because, simply put, a conversion is when the visitor does what you want them to do.

Conversions are here

Market Segmentation and How It Applies

The point of conversion is where all that market segmentation, multiple campaigns, multiple touch points and metric measurement starts to make some serious sense. Not only is this the bottom line (whether sales or lead generation makes no difference to analytics – it’s all numbers), but it’s also the place where you’ll first see when something goes wrong.

For example, you have three potential conversions on your site:

• Download a free report after filling out a short form
• Fill out a short form to request more information
• Buy a product

Note: these points won’t fall under the Engagement stage because they are the final steps you want your visitor to do.

You’re spending marketing dollars on six campaigns, two for each potential conversion. Are your marketing dollars being spent wisely? What’s succeeding? What isn’t, and why? If you’ve set up market segmentation and followed it for each stage, these answers will be easier to find.

Key Performance Indicators for Conversion?

If a visitor hits the “thank you” page without going through your sales funnel, is it a conversion? Of course it is! – But if you can’t tell where they came from, you don’t have much hope it growing that particular sales corridor, do you? This is what metric measurement is all about. It’s also why you:

• Set up goal funnels
• Create events alerts
• Use traffic segmentation

Conversion Action: Download a free report after filling out a short form

Market: Moms with hyperactive kids

Campaigns:

Campaign A	Business Funnel Stage	Success KPI	Campaign B	Business Funnel Stage	Success KPI
Facebook	Awareness	Follow you on Facebook	TV	Awareness	Visit your site
		Visit your link			Call your number
		Call your number
	Acquisition	# of visitors from FB and mobile FB		Acquisition	Visit download page
		# of UNIQUE visitors from FB and mobile FB			Discussion with customer service
		Discussion with customer service (phone)
	Engagement	FB traffic time on site		Engagement	Time on page
		FB traffic time on page			Conversation, Q&A with customer service
		Conversation, Q&A with customer service (phone)
	Conversion	Visitor info received with exclusive FB code		Conversion	Visitor info received with exclusive TV code
		Visits to "thank you for downloading" page with exclusive FB code			Visits to "Thank you for downloading" page with exclusive TV code
		Information given to customer service (along with the answer to "where did you hear about us?")			Information given to customer service (along with the answer to "where did you hear about us?")

As you can see, your conversion KPIs may be:

• Visitor information received which includes exclusive FB and TV codes
• Visits to the “thank you for downloading” page reached with the exclusive codes
• Final information given to customer service with the answer to, “Where did you hear about us?”

Of course, this means you’ll have to make sure exclusive codes are set up, the free report form routes to a thank you page, and the customer service department is properly trained.

Trim The Fat

A Case of Not Enough Information

Now, your “download a free report” page is hopping and traffic is up. You know because your marketing team did things right and created a benchmark report before the campaigns started. However, your campaign budget will be smaller next month and you’ll have to cut one or the other. Your job is to:

• cut the least performing one
• make the other campaign more productive

Simplify

First, let’s get rid of the phone calls. Because your customer service staff was correctly trained to ask, “Where did you hear about us,” you know 5 calls came from Facebook and 10 from the TV ad. Of those, two converted from Facebook and five from the ad.

Facebook: 2                        TV: 5

Look at the conversions.

You’ve had 600 conversions through the website in the past two months (don’t freak out at the numbers, we’re just using examples here). Where are they coming from? Because you set up those exclusive codes, you know that at least 300 came from Facebook and 200 from the TV ads. That leaves 100 that fell out of the sky.

Facebook: 302                   TV: 205                 Miscellaneous: 100

Although it appears Facebook is a clear winner, there may be something easily fixed in the TV ad that would make it outperform Facebook. Unfortunately, while FB was correctly tracked and the proper KPIs were chosen throughout, the only thing you can see on the TV ad is whether they used the code at the end or not. For that matter, your miscellaneous conversions could be from FB or TV, and the user just couldn’t remember the code.

Happy Thoughts

Food for Thought: A Question for YOU

How would you set up the TV ad to provide better tracking throughout the funnel? Because of ad placement, you know you have a reach of about 5,000 people in a month. You get about 10,000 a month to your site, and at least 20% of them visit your free report page. Don’t you want to know for sure what’s happening to them?

Stay tuned for Thursday, where we’ll wrap up the measuring metrics and KPIs series by walking you through the analytics set up for tracking a campaign through the business funnel. We’ll be including screen shots, setting up event alerts, goals and traffic segmentation, all this KPI goodness in an eBook, and lots of information for you to chew. We hope to see you there!

What You May Have Missed

Part 1: Measuring Awareness with Careful KPIs: An Info-Morsel on Metrics

Part 2: Acquisition and the KPIs to Track It: Metric Measuring Part Deux

Part 3: Measuring Engagement and KPIs | Performance-Driven Marketing
(You Are Here) Part 4: Measuring Conversion KPIs: Are Your Campaigns Succeeding?

And let’s not forget the post at Search News Central that started it all off: Measuring Metrics for Success

Level343 Team

This account is where everyone involved with Level343 content marketing efforts show up. You can say there is no "I" in this team. Sometimes we will chat about a certain topic with a variation of ideas, suggestions, even opinions. Then one of us will start writing the post, hand it over to someone else who will continue the diatribe. Eventually it ends up on our editors desk who either chops the hell out of it, or you're reading it right now.

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Measuring Engagement is Number 3

Today, we’re diving into part 3 of our metric measurement info morsels, the Measuring Metrics series. It all began with a guest post we wrote Measuring Metrics for Success for SearchNewsCentral. When the team got together to brainstorm for the next bit of blogs, we realized that a lot more could be said about metrics, business funnels and market segmentation, especially when it comes to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

A Note on Systematic KPI Discovery

If you were to pull together all the data from your online marketing efforts, you’d be scratching your head in confusion very shortly. Why? Because it’s too much. You’ll come across three data types in your analytics travels:

1. The important kind
2. The kind that’s nice to have
3. The filler that only data analysts and numbers freaks will enjoy pouring over although it really isn’t helpful

If you can’t learn how to distinguish them, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed. This is where KPIs come in.

Choosing KPIs is part training, part common sense and part intuition. It’s also having an understanding of what a Key Performance Indicator is, and what it is not. A KPI is a performance metric, but it is not just any performance metric or bit of measurable data. In online marketing, this important performance indicator helps us learn and improve upon our marketing efforts.

With all the data pouring in to your analytics, how can you narrow the choices? By asking yourself these questions:

• Is this information actually important to have? For example, it’s important to know 500 people visited your site from Poland last month. However, if you’re strictly located in a 300-mile radius from your home base, does it really matter what those people in Poland actually did on your site? Probably not. What matters is that you figure out why Poland is giving you better returns than the U.S., and how to change your campaign to compensate.
• What question are you trying to answer? One of the most frustrating things about KPIs for the non-initiated is the fact that they change depending on what you’re trying to find out. For example, would you track how successful a Facebook campaign was by looking at visits from search? No, because search and social are two different things.
• What goals are you trying to track? You can’t have a Key Performance Indicator if you don’t have something that you want to perform in the first place. You have to have a goal to know what questions to ask to know whether the information is important. It’s a vicious cycle of common sense that isn’t so common.

Why are we covering basics like these in the middle of the Measuring Metrics series? Because today, we’re moving on to stage 3, where the most data comes flooding in…

Engagement – Stage 3 of the Standard Business Funnel

“Engagement is a response that does not actively and directly affect the company’s business goals.”

~ Measuring Metrics for Success

We used YouTube comments as an example in the above article, but the long of the short of it is this: if it isn’t the actual conversion, it’s engagement. Examples of the engagement stage could include:

• Clicking through the pages of your website
• Watching a video you posted on YouTube
• Commenting on your blog post
• Asking you a question on Twitter

Now, these are just examples that could change drastically depending on your goal. For example, if the business goal you’re trying to track is to have more people ask you questions on Twitter, then this action is a conversion, not engagement.

Market Segmentation and How It Applies

Market Segmentation

By the time you’ve reached this article in the series, we hope you have a better understanding of how market segmentation works in business and analytics. The sum of it is that each segment of your market (i.e. parents, single, married, significant others, engaged are all market segments) will have their own reasons for using your product. Because their reasoning differs, you may find yourself needing a range of marketing tactics in order to reach the widest audience array.

For example, a TV ad aimed at kids might be great on PSKids or DisneyTV, but you sure wouldn’t spend the marketing dollars to run it on ESPN, would you? No. As you segment your market into various demographics and created targeted campaigns for each demographic, you could very easily be tracking hundreds, if not thousands of metrics. Therefore, doesn’t it make sense to keep your tracking segmented?

Market segmentation helps you define which demographics perform better, but performance can’t be perceived by demographics alone. Non-performance could be the wrong audience, or it could be the wrong ad for the right audience. It could be a confusing business funnel after the ad. It could be the inability to find a “buy now” button on the website. There has to be more than demographics, there is more, and they’re called Key Performance Indicators.

Key Performance Indicators – What Metrics Do I Track?

You know your website best. You know what marketing strategies you have in the works. You know what your hoped for return is. To find your KPIs for the Engagement stage, you have to look at what you want to accomplish.

Let’s look at a single page as a very simplified example for a campaign (click on the image to the left and a larger version will open in a new window). Your entire campaign is geared towards pushing traffic to this page. You need to make sure your marketing dollars are doing what they’re supposed to do, right? Right. What do you want your dollars to do? Two things:

• Bring engagement and interaction with your consumer base for building brand recognition/brand activists
• Increase conversions in order to increase the company’s bottom line

Looking at the possible actions on this page, where are the conversions? Where are the opportunities for engagement or further interaction? Quite simply, we have one call to action. Contact us. We want you to click the link to our contact page or dial the number on your screen. That’s it. Anything else is either a) engagement/increased interaction with the company or b) falling out of the funnel.

Some of the actions available on this page, such as clicking on our social networks, are not immediately trackable through analytics. A little tweaking will need to be done using onClick event tracking. Google has an in depth guide on event tracking for Google Analytics, but if it reads too geeky for you there’s always the Idiot’s Guide to Event Tracking.

For this page, our KPIs would be segmented because, although we want conversions, we also want interaction:

KPI Segment 1: Interaction/Engagement (highlighted in red in the image)

• onClick events to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or our blog
• on page movement to one of our other menu items
• clicking on the discovery form link
• clicking on the sitemap link
• using the search function

KPI Segment 2: Conversion (highlighted in green in the image)

• Clicking on one of the contact us links
• Calling our number and talking to a representative

How To Use These Metrics

Data is only as good as the use you put it to. For example, it does you no good to know that 20 people used the search function. What does do you good is knowing why they used the search function. What were they looking for? (To find out, visit Content > Site Search > Overview. Take a look and then dig deeper into Search Term and so on. )

Another example is the sitemap link. When people click on the sitemap, what you’re really seeing is a confused visitor. This number isn’t so much a metric of success as it is an indication of confusion on the visitor’s part. The page is not performing in the best way possible to move the visitor further down the business funnel.

Remember the True Purpose of the KPI

The job of a Key Performance Indicator is to point out areas that need improvement. If you have 430 visitors hit your home page and a steady 50% drop off for each click after that, you can’t afford too many clicks, can you? By the time the visitors are 4 clicks deep, you only have 26 left! –And, those 26 visitors still have to finish the buy now or contact us process, don’t they?

Here’s the deal. If this is happening to you and you aren’t tracking anything, all you know is that you have a marketing bucket full of holes. You can shove a ton of money into the bucket, but unless you fill the holes it’ll all leak out. If we worked like that our clients would quickly run the other way, and rightly so.

If you are tracking, but you aren’t segmenting, you’ll have a bunch of data piled up in the big old laundry basket of analytics. Unless you take each piece out and look it over, you’ll never know what all is in that basket. If you’re segmenting, but you aren’t tracking the right KPIs, you may very well be tweaking the wrong things, or tossing successful campaigns because they looked like they were crashing.

Correct KPI tracking will give you the ability to dig into each step of the failing process and pinpoint where it’s failing. In other words, it provides smart management for your marketing efforts. It provides a birds-eye view as well as an in depth view of how well your business funnel is working, every stage of the way.

What You May Have Missed

Part 1: Measuring Awareness with Careful KPIs: An Info-Morsel on Metrics

Part 2: Acquisition and the KPIs to Track It: Metric Measuring Part Deux

We hope you’re enjoying our series on Measuring Metrics, and we hope to see you back next week. Monday we’ll be talking about conversion tracking, and Thursday we’ll tie it all together for you. Don’t miss the final blog of the Measuring Metrics series, where we’ll be offering the whole bit in a handy eBook for easy reading. Until then, to your success!

Level343 Team

This account is where everyone involved with Level343 content marketing efforts show up. You can say there is no "I" in this team. Sometimes we will chat about a certain topic with a variation of ideas, suggestions, even opinions. Then one of us will start writing the post, hand it over to someone else who will continue the diatribe. Eventually it ends up on our editors desk who either chops the hell out of it, or you're reading it right now.

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Tracking your KPI

Welcome back to the second installment of our metric measurement info morsels, Acquisition and the KPIs to Track It. Our disclaimer is as follows: the last one was less of a morsel and more of a meal. Sorry ’bout that.

Part one recap: we discussed Awareness, the beginning of the standard business funnel. We talked about market segmentation and gave a few examples of how it could help your marketing campaigns. We also discussed some Key Performance Indicators to track in order to calculate reach and your growing online presence. They are:

• Increased number of social network followers
• Number of unique visitors to your site from referrals
• Number of people who call your business

These KPIs track the success of the Awareness stage, based on the result (i.e. moving into the Acquisition stage). Now that you have this information, let’s go on.

Acquisition – Stage 2 of the Standard Business Funnel

Acquisition is the second stage of the business funnel after a potential consumer finds out about your company. As described in our Search News Central article, Measuring Metrics for Success, it’s the point when your potential visitor becomes an actual visitor. It’s the point where contact is made, whether they follow you on social networks or walk into your physical store for the first time (for this to be reliably measured, your metrics have to cover first time visitors only).

The Reality of Error

It’s seems easy to track. After all, people either follow you or they don’t. They either visit your site, or call, or not. However, if you count every visit, every call and every follow, you’ll skew the numbers from reality.

Easy to Track

The reality is one of error. People accidentally follow you and then quickly unfollow when they realize their mistake. Individuals may accidentally click on your search result. They may click and, upon landing on your page, return the SERPs because it wasn’t what they thought it was. Phone numbers can be accidentally dialed. Keep that in mind when looking at the numbers.

Market Segmentation and How It Applies

If you read the preceding article in this series, you’ve seen how market segmentation applies in the Awareness stage. If you have a broad audience, you aren’t going to catch them all by using a single social network, lone T.V. channel or radio station. Direct mail flyers sent to one zip code have little chance of reaching other neighborhoods.

Market segmentation not only allows you to decide how to best reach a niche audience (i.e. parents whose school age kids play sports), it also allows the tracking of that segmentation. In this way, you gain much better insight and a narrower view of each campaign, no matter where that campaign is.

Here’s an example:

You have a bustling business and website that sells sports and athletic equipment. You’re getting ready to run a series of TV ads targeting parents with school age kids. You could run the ad and see an increase in visits to the site around the same time the ad airs, and then assume the entire increase comes from the ads. On the other hand, you could make sure your returns are traceable…

Set up an exclusive action on your site for use during those ads:

• “Visit sports.com; click ‘MyKids’ (picture shown of where this button is) for a 10% discount and free shipping on all of our high school sports products!”
  • Include a unique visitor TV page cookie
  • Track the visitor using the cookie all the way through to the sale
• “Use code ‘MyKids’ at checkout for a 10% discount and free shipping on all of our high school sports products!”
  • Track ad success based on code use

Key Performance Indicators – What Metrics Do I Track?

What Metrics Should I Track?

In choosing your KPIs, ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve from this activity?” Quite simply, now that you’ve caught their attention and they’re on your site, following your networks or calling your phone number, you want them to engage with you. You expect them to:

• Talk with you, retweet, share, like, etc. on your social networks
• Read your blog and talk about it, comment, share it, etc.
• Visit your product pages or otherwise interact with your site
• Interact with customer service on the phone

Based on these actions, your Key Performance Indicators might be:

• The number of new followers that retweet, share, like or contact you on social networks. Track using platforms such as:
  • Hootsuite
  • Facebook Insights
  • Monittor
• Number of citations since tracking began. Track using platforms such as:
  • Blog Search
  • Social Mention
  • Spiral 16
• Average shares, comments, etc. on your blog
• Visits to your product pages based on various referrals (using exit, entrance paths and others to track)
• Question/answer with customer service on the phone, answering the question, “how did you hear about us?”

Measuring and Metric Caveats

Let’s be blunt, m’kay? A computer program is only as good as its programmer and is only as useful as its user knows how to make it. Analytics programs of any type, whether they’re site analytic programs or social monitoring programs, are subject to error. With that said, make sure you read the documentation and help files of any analytics and/or tracking program you’re going to rest the success of your business on.

Moving Forward

You gotta have goals

You’ll be gaining a lot of information as you begin to set up and implement the various tracking sections and funnels. That’s okay; don’t let it get overwhelming. To keep that from happening, maintain a list of goals and steps per funnel. For example, in Awareness, the goals are to get them to connect with you in some manner. The result is following, visiting, calling.

If the expected result doesn’t happen, there’s something wrong in that part of the funnel. –And this is really what tracking is all about. At some point in time, you aren’t going to meet the expected level of satisfaction as much as you’d like to. You’ll see this when you notice that the result, and thus the next point of the funnel, isn’t being reached.

Use your metrics and the data you’ve gathered to find out why. Start A/B testing, use short surveys, whatever, but find out how you can better satisfy your customer base at each level.

Until next time, here’s to your success!

Level343 Team

This account is where everyone involved with Level343 content marketing efforts show up. You can say there is no "I" in this team. Sometimes we will chat about a certain topic with a variation of ideas, suggestions, even opinions. Then one of us will start writing the post, hand it over to someone else who will continue the diatribe. Eventually it ends up on our editors desk who either chops the hell out of it, or you're reading it right now.

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In Measuring Metrics for Success (SearchNewsCentral), we wrote about the standard business funnel of Awareness, Acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Retention. We also covered how satisfaction is an integral part of each funnel stage. For the next few posts on the Level343 Article Archive, we’re going to go more in depth on individual stages of the business funnel, as well as the Key Performance Indicators of each stage. We’re excited and we hope you are, too. Let’s get started!

Awareness – Stage 1 of the Standard Business Funnel

Psst… I’m in your business!Image via Dave Sizer on Flickr 

SearchSOA defines Awareness, or Reach, like so:

“In Internet marketing, reach is how many different people visit a Web site to see an ad and also what percentage of these people fall into the audience to which an ad is targeted. A common measure of reach for a Web site is its ‘unique visitors per month.’ “

-But is this true reach? We don’t think so. To be honest, we agree more with the Business Dictionary’s definition:

“Estimated number of the potential customers it is possible to reach through an advertising medium or a promotional campaign.”

Let’s pull out some important parts of this definition.

Estimated number – The number will never be exact. Why? Here’s an example: even if you have a group of 30 people where 10 are not your target audience, this doesn’t mean the 10 won’t buy. It just means they aren’t likely to buy.

Potential customers – You have current, loyal customers. You love your customers. They pay your bills. However, current customers only play their part in reach by how many people they come in contact with. In other words, reach looks at that big, exciting “potential” pie.

Promotional campaign – This is important because of the word promotional. When you think promotional, you might think advertisement as well. However, we live in the digital age of communication. If you’re using Twitter and Facebook to build your audience and customer base, they are promotional campaigns. So are:

• Newsletters
• Ads on other sites
• Guest blogging
• Social media activity
• Offline flyers
• Newspaper ads
• Direct marketing

Market Segmentation and How It Applies

Target. Market.

If you’ve done your marketing research, you should already know who your target market is. What if you’re trying to reach a broad audience, though? Well, this is where segmentation comes in. Segments can include:

• Age (kids, teens, adults, elderly?)
• Gender
• Education (high school, Associates, Bachelors, Masters?)
• Income level
• Marital status (single, married, divorced, significant other?)
• Family situation (newly married, married for a long time, kids, no kids?)
• Lifestyle (conservative, trendy, thrifty, on the edge)

Example:

You sell a wide variety of sports and athletic equipment. Your entire audience, then, has only one thing in common: the urge to be athletic. Note that they don’t actually have to be athletic; they just have to want to be. However, you already have segmentation: those that are athletic, and those that want to be. Within these two segments, you might have:

• Young, newly married couples with a medium income level, who enjoy rock climbing, cross-country skiing and extreme sports
• Moms/dads with school age kids who play sports. This can further segment into things like:
  • Married or single moms/dads with low incomes who are thrifty
  • Married or single moms/dads with medium or high incomes who look at quality over cost
  • Single/married men who want to buff up
  • Single/married women who want to lose weight

How it applies

Once you’ve segmented your target audience, you need to find them. Where are they? Where do they hang out? For example, if your market segment is single men and women who want to tone and lose weight, you can increase your market reach via ads on:

• Dating sites
• Health and nutrition sites
• Niche exercise sites

Facebook is a great place for the family-oriented. Twitter is great for business and family. Google + is great for business-minded IT folks. LinkedIn is all business. YouTube is fantastic for “how to” videos and other viral goodness (thrifty or DIY people often visit here).

Key Performance Indicators – What Metrics Do I Track?

So many metrics, so little time to track…Image via RVWith Toto on Flickr 

When you’re tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you want to make sure you have the right metrics. Tracking the wrong metrics can give you such inaccurate data that you’d think a campaign was failing when it was succeeding and vice versa.

The first question when defining KPIs for any stage of the funnel is, “What do I expect to happen from this activity?” In other words, what’s the hoped for result? Awareness is at the beginning of the business funnel. The hoped for result is that your target audience takes the next step of Acquisition:

• Follow you on your social networks
• Visit your site
• Call your number

Based on these three, your Key Performance Indicators would be:

• Increased number of followers on social networks: Generally, we wouldn’t recommend follower numbers as a metric. However, the purpose of the Awareness stage isn’t to engage. Not yet. The purpose is to increase the potential level of engagement. The more followers you have on your networks, the wider your potential reach is, if you use social wisely.
• Number of unique (new) visitors to your site from your chosen referral: In your analytics dashboard, mark the sites you’re actively using to reach your target market. For example, if you’ve posted a guest post on LiveStrong.com, you’ll want to mark the URL. You’ll want to mark visits from social networks, the niche exercise sites and so on. Keep in mind, however, that you’re looking at new visitors, not return visitors. The purpose is to increase, not maintain, your reach.
• Number of people who call: Call tracking is a booming business for one big, whopping reason. It helps businesses keep better track of where the sales are coming from. It can be expensive, but with call tracking solutions such as ReachLocal, Twilio, and CallTracks (among many others), there are plenty of options to choose from.

The Tip of the Metric Iceberg

We hope you enjoyed the first installment of metric measurement info morsels. Of course, not everyone sells sports equipment, and not everyone has a broad audience, so this article is a guideline, not a systematic guide.

Take the time to exercise critical thinking; how would this process work for you and your business? How far can your market be segmented before it ceases to make sense? Where can you target each segment to gain the best reach? What places have you missed that might bring high returns?

Stay tuned for Monday’s installment, where we’ll cover step 2 of the business funnel- Acquisition and the KPIs to Track It. Until then, add the measuring metrics RSS feed to your inbox!

Level343 Team

This account is where everyone involved with Level343 content marketing efforts show up. You can say there is no "I" in this team. Sometimes we will chat about a certain topic with a variation of ideas, suggestions, even opinions. Then one of us will start writing the post, hand it over to someone else who will continue the diatribe. Eventually it ends up on our editors desk who either chops the hell out of it, or you're reading it right now.

More Posts - Website