There are dozens of marketing metrics you could receive to analyze sales performance, but there are some in particular that pretty much a waste of your time. Recently, I read a list of these in an article by Larry Kim and I agree that these six in particular are of little value to determine how well your marketing plan and program are performing.

  1. The first metric is Facebook likes. If the right people aren't seeing your content, how meaningful these?  This one isn't even good for bragging rights anymore.
  2. Next is the number of impressions for display ads. Just because you have impressions on your ads, doesn't mean that a human actually saw them. In fact, over 50% of paid ad impressions aren't seen by web viewers. What matters the most are click throughs and of course, conversions.
  3. Third, let's talk about keyword rankings. This is such a poor indicator of how much visibility your web content is getting in search results. Google is always changing rankings through natural shuffling and algorithm updates. There's no such thing as being #1 in search results.
  4. Then, there's segmented traffic numbers for referral vs. direct vs. organic traffic. Web browsers don't report accurately where all traffic comes from. There are many reasons why, and they're all beyond our control, so forget relying on this marketing metric to tell you where your web traffic is coming from.
  5. Finally, the last metric you should let go of is view-through conversions. In Google Analytics, it's in a window that's 30 days long. Web page visitors are usually influenced by many factors, and you can't drill down to which particular ad converted prospects to buyers. To further complicate this, remarketing is yet another factor that you really can't nail down.

Larry Kim also offers a bonus metric to stop paying attention to: Google Webmaster Tools. This free service from Google is good for several things - mostly to help you troubleshoot website indexing and crawling issues - but in terms of marketing, Larry reports that the numbers you see are accurate to +/- 500%.

I don't know about you, but that's much too far of a spread to put any trust into.

If you'd like to learn more about these points and other marketing program measurements,  contact Measured Results Marketing.