People shy away from numbers and I often find in my work situations where people do not want to study dozens of tables, graphs and metrics, and they often ask me “Well, what is one metric that is important to me?”
There is no simple answer to this question, so the job of an analyst is just that – to find that one metric that gives the client the best answers to specific questions and helps him make business decisions. For some it can be the number of active users per day, for some the cost per specific conversion, for some the return on advertising spent, the average value of the cart, etc. Getting to such “star metrics” is not easy, and sometimes it takes months to define exactly which. metrics matter to us. At Bruketa & Žinić & Gray, we cultivate an approach called OMTM (One Metric That Matters), which translates to “One Significant Measure”, which makes it easier for both us and the client to find the main metrics that will guide us through the project. That doesn’t mean we neglect dozens of other metrics we care about, but that one metric helps us keep our focus on the project. But for me, one metric will always be the main one and without it I do not move on to further elaboration of all other metrics. It is a metric that records conversions, or the percentage of conversions or Conversion Rate. Of course, I do not neglect the other metrics, because I know very well how important each of them is to assess the performance of each participant involved in the process of creating and promoting the web.
Every website should have its own goal, more precisely the goal that our users should achieve, and that goal is Conversion. Without a defined conversion we just play and think we have a web, because a web without defined conversions makes no sense. Conversion is therefore the fulfillment of the goal of the web, and the metric that we need to follow is – Conversion Rate, or the percentage of visits (not people!) In which that goal was achieved.
Why do I think Conversion Rate is the most important metric for us? Very simple – if you measure and track the Conversion Rate, it usually means that you:
- You know how to prepare your website to have goals – conversions
- You have defined the purpose of your website, not only for you but also for your visitors (and that is conversion)
- You know how to measure those conversions and pass them on to the analytics tool
- You know how to attract visitors to your website, not only to generate visits but also to generate conversions
- You know which (marketing) channels are good for you to generate traffic, but you also know which ones are better for generating conversions
- You know what to invest your marketing budget in and how to get as many conversions out of it (looking at another important metric – ROAS)
- You know how to change the content of your web and campaigns in such a way that these changes best affect your online and offline business
- You learn new things every day and make new conclusions about all of the above, because these ratios change from day to day / week / month.
- You enjoy doing most of the things I’ve listed
Managing your marketing activities in a way that they bring better and better results, that is true Performance Marketing. Tracking only the number of users or visits on the web, as well as the number of followers, shares or likes, it is for marketers who have not yet managed to make that quantum leap from “classic” to “digital” marketing (although nowadays there should be no division between the two, because that’s all – marketing).
Manage your campaigns, don’t just passively watch what results they bring you.
Good luck analyzing 🙂
