It’s so important to measure your marketing results. Many people think marketing is all about being creative, and there is a fair degree of that, that’s for sure. But actually, a lot of it comes down to tracking and measuring what’s working and what’s not.

But, 

How the heck do I know what’s working?

I hear your cry….

How do you know what’s a good stat and what’s not?

Even if it’s not great how do I even improve it? How can I tell which bits broken.

And why should I even care?

Well let’s address that last one first, because if you don’t understand the importance of your stats then you’ll not do the work you need to do to make your marketing so much better.

Why are marketing stats important?

Stats show you whether your marketing is working if it’s not working then:

• You are wasting your time on marketing activities that are not growing your business;
• You may have one piece of your marketing jigsaw letting the whole thing down, meaning you are leaving money on the table as they say
• Once you understand your stats, you can work out what the quickest fixes are to grow your business.

So, if you don’t want to waste your time and you want to grow your business then marketing stats are central to that.

Now we have that sorted here’s a quick guide to getting some key metrics under your belt to help you out with this…

Firstly, before you measure anything we need a little chat about volume,

If you are measuring your marketing and you have less than 100 people in that action, it’s likely that you are not going to get valid results. So, whilst it will be good to start tracking your measures you need focus on driving that amount of people through that action first.

And of course, as with all stats the more people you have in the data the more reliable your results are, so it’s worth bearing that in mind.

So, assuming you have 100 people who do the following actions here are some key stats to get you going on measuring your marketing.

Action you are measuring	Formula	What is a good result?	What should I do if my results don’t meet this
Sales Conversion Rate	Percentage of people that buy based on the number of visits to the sales page	1-2% is average for ecommerce for colder audiences (i.e. they are not familiar with you or your brand) 3-5% is good for warm audiences.	If you are not meeting this target then it’s likely your audience is very cold when they are reaching your website so I’d focus on bringing warmer traffic to your site from your email list and social media.   If your conversion rate is below 1% and you are getting over 100 visits a day then I would advise walking through the sales process is it easy to buy from you. Are all the possible questions answered in the sales process, is there social proof or guarantees to help minimise the risk?
Email clicks through rate	Percentage of people that click your email that were sent the email	3% as they should be a warm audience.	If your click through rates from your email aren’t high enough, you need to think about your CTA’s, are they compelling enough to click are you using a variety so it’s not just buy now. What does the user get for clicking through. Is there more than one place they can click?
Email open rate	Percentage of people who open your emails of the total number of people who received your email.	30%	If you don’t clean your list via automated flows then you should do this first as your emails maybe going into the spam folder. If you haven’t done this in a while you need to do this gradually. You also need to be careful emailing your whole list in one go and you may need to go through a warmup exercise.   If you do have a regular or automated process for cleaning your list, then I’d focus on your subject lines are they good enough for someone to want to open you’re email.
Email sign up rate	Percentage of the number of people that sign up to your email list that see the sign-up form.	This depends on the type of sign-up opt-in incentive you have. You can find benchmarks for all of them here: Is your email opt in rate good?	If your sign up rate is below average and you are getting traffic to it, it’s time to look at whether it provides a benefit for your audience, whether those benefits are well communicated and whether it’s positioned at the right stage in the customer journey for where you are promoting it.
CTR on an ad cold audience	Percentage of people that click through from an ad if they haven’t come across your brand  before and therefore are a cold audience	1%	If you are not at 1% then you need to look at the creative of the ad, starting with the image, then the headline and then the copy. Use A/B testing to make improvements. Consider how you can encourage social proof on your ads.  If you don’t see improvements then it’s time to look at your audience targeting. Remember to test one thing at a time.
CTR on an ad warm audience		3%	If you are not at 3% then you need to look at the creative of the ad, starting with the image, then the headline and then the copy. Use A/B testing to make improvements. Consider how you can encourage social proof on your ads.  If you don’t see improvements, then it’s time to look at your audience targeting. Remember to test one thing at a time.
Social media engagement rate	Percentage of the number of comments and likes on a post over the number of posts in the account or for a period	8%	If you are not getting an engagement rate of 8% it’s time to look at your content strategy, firstly are you asking for engagement on your posts, if not start there. If you are then you need to consider your content strategy
Facebook Ad Click Through Rates	The percentage of people that click through your Facebook Ad to a landing page	1% cold audiences (i.e ones not familiar with you) and 3% warm audiences.	If you’re not getting these results then it’s time to look at testing your creative (image, headline, copy) and audiences. Only test one thing at once or you won’t know what’s delivering any changes in results.

Wow that was a little bit longer than I expected this email to be. But I hope it’s a super helpful reference for you.

The best thing you can do is set up a simple spreadsheet to track these things on an ongoing basis.

Once you hit the benchmarks, don’t stop there, keep looking at ways to improve your stats overtime. Think of it as an athlete’s mentality marginal gains will increase your sales overtime.

I’d love to know how you get on with this. Let me know in the comments below.