Keeping Up With Key Business Metrics

• 1. Website traffic
  • For us, it's mostly checking for red flags.
  • Basically, that’s any spikes in traffic, either good or bad.
• 2.  Engagement rates
  • This specifically refers to social media.
  • Engagement is when someone actually interacts with your posts.
  • Actions like sharing or commenting are always more valuable.
• 3. Sales Pipeline
  • We'll talk more about this in our next episode.
  • This is a leading indicator for GreenMellen.
  • This is similar to a marketing funnel to track a customer's progress.
• 4. Click-through rates
  • This specifically applies to email marketing.
  • Clicks are more valuable than opens, which aren’t as reliable.
  • Follow the users back to your website to watch what they do.
• 5. Cash balance
  • This is a trailing indicator, but obviously quite important.
  • Try to keep at least a quarter’s worth of expenses on hand.
• 6. Conversions
  • What are you trying to get your audience to do?
  • Eg. fill out a form, download a file, buy a product, call you
  • Find ways to measure these things—eg. Google Analytics events
  • Once you can measure, you can optimize by testing to see what increases conversions
• 7. Support tickets
  • This might not apply to your company, but we do a lot of support and maintenance for our clients.
  • We track both the number of tickets and our average response time.
  • GreenMellen uses Help Scout for that.
• 8. Return on investment
  • It’s difficult to measure but very valuable
  • This is a bit like the marketer's holy grail—elusive and we're not sure if it really exists
  • This is why marketing is often the first thing to get cut—it's hard to accurately measure
  • This becomes easier if you can measure conversions and the customer lifetime value