What Metrics Are You Optimising Toward?

Anyone who sells anything online jumps over the moon when they get their first sale, and so they should it’s an incredible feat. Over time once their online store get’s more traffic and sales begin to flow, everyone introduces some form of an online marketing strategy.  Often aligning this strategy to the right metrics is where people either get hoodwinked by agencies or are missing a beat themselves when trying to optimise towards their digital goals. 

So what are the different metrics you can optimise too?

Impressions

Number one and at the very amateur level of the marketing matrix is optimising towards impressions. What this means is that every dollar you put into Adwords, Display or Facebook, will give you an amount of times your ad will be shown. Impression numbers are usually huge, for example you may spend $6 and end up with your ad being shown 1,000 times on the internet. For acquisition purposes this metric doesn’t mean anything as you don’t know for every $1 you put in, how much return you get on your investment.

Clicks

Slightly better than measuring based on impressions, is measuring clicks. With this you can optimise a strategy based on cost per clicks and web traffic. From here you are able to find cohorts of people whom are most likely to click on and browse your website. Using this optimisation strategy still does not allow you to measure the value your media spend is generating.

Revenue

This is the most common metric marketers optimise too and is significantly better than the previous two noted above. Google Analytics will give you all the required information you need if you have enhanced ecommerce set up to run a formidable strategy. You can find out quantities of each product sold, the conversion rate on each product by channel and much more. From here you can set-up a test and learn methodology to figure out which marketing channels have the highest conversion rates for certain products. For any business, optimising towards revenue is a solid option and you will generally return you strong results.

Margin optimisation

One step above optimising towards revenue is optimising towards  product margin. Not all product revenue is created equal, some products have much higher margins than others when you take varying costs into consideration, therefore your digital optimisation should acknowledge this and follow suit. Optimising towards profitable margins is how you can turn the needle and start to magnify and accelerate your business goals instead of just your online and revenue goals. To do this effectively and accurately you need to closely align your digital analytics with your business data and objectives. It’s a tough and timely way to optimise but once you have a framework set, it can be immensely more profitable for your business in comparison to optimising towards revenue and other metrics.

Life Time Value

So you acquire a customer at a cost of $5, sell a product that costs $10, and make $5 margin. Getting really savvy and data centric you can work out who of your users have a higher lifetime value and return to your store more frequently. If you can find more of those customers with a high lifetime value, you would be willing to spend $7, $8 or even $12 to acquire them, as in the long run there life time value will be worth much higher than the $5 margin you would have made initially not optimising towards LTV. Optimisation strategies centered around lifetime value work incredibly well for businesses that are not under a short term cash flow squeeze.

Summary

Whatever you are doing in digital may be working. But too often companies and agencies rest on their loral’s once they reach initial success. You can always push the boundaries further and turn the digital side of your marketing into a testing laboratory. Think bold, consistently aim to gather insights and turn your marketing department data and IP led.