The Most Forgotten Metrics (And Why You Shouldn’t Overlook Them)

By Richard Parkin

Whether you’re analyzing data for optimization or putting together performance reports, you’re probably looking at a defined, unchanging set of metrics. Consistency is vital, but it can stop you from getting the full picture. In this blog, we’re exploring some frequently missed metrics and exploring what they can tell you about your digital marketing performance.

With an almost limitless range of metrics to consider for digital marketing, keeping it simple can be appealing, particularly when you’re reporting on performance. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the metrics exist for a reason – knowing how to use them can seriously improve your marketing.

Here are four metrics you need to be looking into, and some information about what makes them so important for measuring your marketing performance.

As always, some of these points may not be entirely relevant for your company, but understanding them can often help make a difference.

Understanding Chargeback Rates

Increasingly common in the age of eCommerce, chargebacks are a way for customers to reclaim the money they’ve spent on a product or service. They’re designed to protect against scams and mis-sold products, but they can also cause real problems for legitimate companies.

A chargeback is often a complete loss for a business – you’ve paid for PPC advertising, you’ve shipped a product out, you’ve seen your profit wholly taken away, you may get charged a fee for the chargeback, and (in the worst-case scenario), your card processor might decide that you’re too high a risk to deal with.

In other words, getting chargebacks under control is essential – it’s hardly dramatic to say that fixing them should be a top priority. 

Depending on your industry, expected chargeback rates can vary hugely. That said, if you see anything above 1% regularly, something may be going wrong. It’s not natural for 1 out of every 100 customers to decide that they need to get their bank to provide a refund – you need to figure out what’s causing the problem.

Improving Your Bounce Rate

Successful marketing isn’t just about bringing people to your website – it’s about keeping them there, bringing them through your funnel to make a purchase. If most of your visitors leave your website just after arriving, you’ve got a real problem.

Bounce Rate is a metric for measuring how much of your audience leaves your site immediately. While cutting your bounce rate down to zero is impossible, a high rate means that you’re missing out on potential sales. As the bounce rate is a ranking factor, it’s also going to affect your SEO performance – search engines don’t want to send users to sites they leave immediately.

What causes high bounce rates? There’s no single answer, with several different potential issues to consider. Your site may be loading slowly – no one wants to wait around for a site to load, especially on mobile. 

Alternatively, if your site content doesn’t match what your visitors expect to see, they’re not going to stay on it. Make sure your landing pages get to the point quickly and that they’re accurately described/ advertised where possible.

Building Absolute Top Impression Share

This one’s exclusively for PPC. In mid 2019, AdWords and Bing Ads both phased out their Average Position metric (a measurement of which slot your ads usually achieved). 

They both replaced this measurement with the rather different Absolute Top Impression metric. This metric shows you how frequently your ads appear in the top slot for a search.

Naturally, the top place is almost always the most clicked, no matter how good your ads are, so there is real value in understanding how often you appear here.

It’s not entirely possible to achieve a 100% rating for this metric. PPC platforms require competition, so they won’t let one advertiser monopolize the top position.

Developing Email Deliverability

Measuring email performance shouldn’t begin with your open rate. Take it back a step – how many of your emails are actually delivered? 

Your Deliverability Rate measures this, letting you determine how much of your subscriber base has been reached. 

Depending on how your business operates, your Deliverability Rate will vary. Overall, it’s estimated that about four-fifths of marketing emails are delivered, but certain industries can aim at a much higher (or lower) score. 

In advanced email platforms, you should be able to segment Deliverability Rate by the email service your customers use. Given that every service uses different spam filters, you’ll often find a massive difference in deliverability between Gmail, Hotmail, and other options.

Deliverability is dependent on your reputation as a sender – if your messages are frequently marked as spam, expect your domain’s reputation and deliverability to drop. That drop doesn’t have to be permanent – it is possible to gradually build back up to a higher rate.

Need a marketing approach that takes forgotten metrics into account? We’ve helped clients around the world take their profitability to a new dimension – get in touch for a free consultation.

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