Measure What Matters. Which Marketing Metrics Really Matter To Your CEO?

They key to managing marketing metrics is to decide early on what is important (ie: actionable) for you to measure, then track results and adjust accordingly. For most businesses, less is more.
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I’ll admit it, I didn’t get into marketing for the analytics of it all. In fact, if truth be told, I had hoped to spend my entire career as far away from facts and figures as possible.

I got jazzed by the creative end of marketing–by figuring out what made people tick, what energized and motivated them, and then working to deliver intrusive campaigns that grabbed an audience’s collective attention and compelled them to take action en mass.

And that, I thought, was done through a combination observational science and divine inspiration. Numbers? We don’t need no stinking numbers! Ah, the folly of youth . . .

As time went on, the harsh realities of the business world sunk in and I realized–reluctantly–that I had to make friends with numbers. That in order to continue to do the things I loved to do, I needed to show that what I was doing was making a difference.

I wasn’t happy about it at first, but the fact is numbers and I have long since become fast friends. Close pals, really. And like all close pals, there are only a few that really matter.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the “vanity metrics” that are floating around as a way to gauge the success of your efforts–things like time on site, shares, likes, repins, comments, pageviews, retweets, impressions, bounce rates, etc.–but the truth is they don’t matter all that much. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with tracking these measures, it’s just that in and of themselves they can’t give you an accurate picture of the overall marketing effectiveness.

The measures that really matter–the ones that will convince your CEO and CFO to continue giving you the marketing money you need to do what you love– are the ones that help you determine whether what you are doing is helping to profitably turn product into revenue.

Thanks to the good folks at HubSpot for putting together a cheat sheet to help math-challenged marketers like myself focus on the things that matter most.