Running a business in a tech-saturated world where everything is competing for attention is fraught with challenges. Marketing a product, generating leads, and gaining conversions are but a few components of a larger puzzle.

Finding ways to stand out is essential and requires more enhanced methods to accomplish such a difficult task. Thankfully, leveraging marketing metrics and data can be the shot in the arm your business needs to get the job done.

Using conversion funnels and heat mapping programs can be helpful, but metrics is the best tool you have to truly enhance your marketing.

Getting ahead in business—and obtaining/retaining those valuable customer connections—is inherently challenging. Fortunately, understanding marketing metrics can help! Here are five vital marketing metrics to use at your business.

Cost Per Lead

As a marketing metric, cost per lead is very important. Measuring the cost of your campaign helps you optimize your marketing, making it one of the most crucial marketing metrics to use for any marketing strategy. By understanding your cost per lead, it’s easier to budget your marketing strategy. For every lead you potentially bring in, you’re going to spend a certain amount of money.

When you’re overspending on lead generation, that could be an indicator that your strategy needs to change. If you’re under spending on it and not making enough conversions, that’s an indication his strategy also needs to change. Therefore, cost per lead and cost per acquisition can be very effective for determining the return of investment (ROI) on any marketing initiative. Cost per lead works in conjunction with cost per acquisition (how much you spend to get the business of a new customer) and other ROI measurements.

Using it to understand how much you’re spending to find and generate leads is useful for influencing other aspects of your marketing strategy and enhancing it across the board.

Click-Through Rate

When users visit and engage with a side, they may be inclined to click on a link, add, photo, or product. The number of times this is clicked compared to the number of impressions it makes is considered the click-through rate. It is also one of the most useful marketing metrics. Click through rate is one of the most critical marketing measurement KPIs, and for good reason.

Enticing and effective text can lead website users to actually click through and engage with the content you wish them to see. This can effectively lead them to put something in their card, take them through a conversion funnel, and ultimately purchase an item/ service.

Goals

Setting goals with your marketing plan is integral to your overall strategy. A goal can be as simple as creating a certain number of conversions or more lofty, such as selling a certain percentage of products. A significant part of measuring your marketing success is to weigh whether or not you accomplished your goals against other key performance indicators.

Key performance indicators like audience growth, reach, lead generation, conversions, and sales/revenue can all help you measure your marketing campaign effectively. Setting and using goals as part of your overall strategy can be beneficial for any marketing campaign and initiative.

Social Media Engagement

If you’re not already using social media for marketing and advertising your product or service, you’re missing out on a very lucrative opportunity. Engaging on social media is beneficial for many reasons. When you desire to connect with your larger audience and build relationships, social media becomes a powerful tool.

Indeed, it’s a very crucial part of any successful marketing strategy. Leverage social media to create loyal followings and generate potential leads or customers is a pretty solid marketing strategy. It also helps you build brand visibility online. Measuring your success through soft metrics such as likes and comments can help you gain insight into customer interest. Other key performance indicators can help you measure your social media engagement and use it appropriately to meet your goals.

Leveraging social media engagement is a great way for customers to connect with your brand, along with having a robust website or web presence. It also provides more avenues into developing marketing strategies that might actually work effectively.

Conversion Rate

In marketing, a successful conversion truly is the ultimate goal. When a conversion happens, it means that you’ve actually found a new customer. But that’s just a basic definition. There’s a little bit more to it than that. Why it is such an effective marketing metric comes down to how much it can influence future marketing plans.

Consider that higher conversion rates will ultimately save the company money, inform its strategy, and ultimately improve many other aspects of the business. There are some caveats to using this metric exclusively, however.

Sometimes, high conversion rates can cloud or obscure the performance of other metrics in your marketing measurement tool kit. That’s why it’s essential to use other KPIs like the ones on this list (and others like bounce rate) to gain a comprehensive overview of your strategy’s performance throughout its life.