Its easy to get overwhelmed with the different metrics coming at you from your email marketing, social media, and website analytics. Its even easier for agencies to generate bloated reports with a lot of stats that dont mean much.
Ive written here and here about avoiding vanity metrics and focusing on what actually matters.
A good rule of thumb is if you dont understand the metric, it doesnt matter to your campaign.
Macro metrics tell you if your strategy is working, micro metrics help you diagnose problems with your execution, and vanity metrics are pointless
A good rule of thumb is if you dont understand the metric (or your digital advisor cant explain it to you), it doesnt matter to your campaign.
Heres a breakdown of the key metrics in each area of your digital marketing that every campaign should keep an eye on.
Email & Online Fundraising
Email should be your number one channel for online fundraising, so you want to focus on the number of donations being generated by your emails. As long as this number is growing, you shouldnt worry about any other email marketing metric.
If its not, then you can look at open rates and click through rates to determine whats going wrong.
Email List Building
Dont get hung up on cost per acquisition as your key metric for list building. It can often be a distraction because we really want to add new, valid and unique email addresses. This cost is going to be higher than what your Facebook ads account shows.
You should use your email marketing platform (like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor) to keep score here, then simply divide the amount you spent by the valid, unique email addresses added.
Online Advertising
If your advertising goal is building your list, getting RSVPs, etc, see above.
Otherwise, when youre trying to change minds through persuasion, you want to look at the reach (how many voters saw this ad) and frequency (how often did they see it). Most every other metric is a distraction.
BPD subscribers can access this guide to decoding Facebook advertising objective terminology which adds another layer of jargon to decipher.
Social Media
Engagements, shares, comments, retweets, likes, views...theyre all artificial and have minimal (if any) bearing on the outcome of your campaign. Effective social media for a campaign is all about reaching an audience you are borrowing from the platform, so you should focus on reach how many platform users encountered your content and good content sends people to your website or other owned properties.
Website Analytics
You really only need to focus on the pageviews (growth is good) and where your traffic is coming from. There are thousands of other metrics in your Google Analytics dashboard that wont help you, so dont lose the forest for the trees.
Im a minimalist when it comes to key performance indicators (KPIs) but in my experience, its really difficult to improve key components of your digital strategy if youre not able to optimize based on one metric.
Ive also helped out plenty of campaigns who are overwhelmed with the reporting metrics theyre getting back from agencies, vendors, and platforms and dont know whether theyre good, bad, or ugly. Simplicity is the key and its important to communicate to your partners the metrics that matter most to you.