This is a 3 part blog series that explores popular metrics for different avenues of online marketing, whether they matter for your business, and the one metric that rules them all.

If you are looking for an analytics tool to help you measure your online marketing, then you're in luck. There are hundreds, if not thousands that measure various online marketing strategies. Heck, there are hundreds that you can use just help you measure your Twitter activity. But the question is, which metrics are just for show and which ones actually affect your bottom line?

To view Part I – click here | To view Part II – click here

PART II|

SOCIAL METRICS

When it comes to social media marketing, there are tons upon tons of analytics tools that will help you measure a variety of metrics. The three most measured and talked about are as follows.

Fans & Followers

The number of fans and followers your business has is important, assuming you or your agency has not resorted to buying fans and followers for your social accounts. While it’s easy to compare yourself to a competitor and wonder why you have 10,000 followers when they have 100,000, the actual number isn’t always the most important.

First of all, you want to look at trends. If your business is increasing in popularity, it should be increasing in fans and followers as well. Tools like TwitterCounter can help you see your Twitter account’s growth in followers over time.

Sharp changes, such as a drop in followers, can indicate potential issues. Sometimes they are out of your control, such as Twitter pruning accounts they consider inactive or bots. Others, they could be within your control, such as whether you posted a tweet that might have offended your active followers. Be sure to revisit your activity on the date of any major shift in follower count to see if there is a message you should – or should not – consider sharing again.

More important than your number of followers, you should be tuned into if they have engaged with your business.

Engagement

You could have a million followers, but if they are not engaged with your business, then they are not necessarily valuable beyond just being a number. You can measure these using Facebook Insights and social media management tools like HootSuite and Buffer.

If you are not receiving engagement with your updates, you will need to consider whether the problem is with the relevancy of the audience you have built or the type of status updates and posts you have been sharing with them. If you’re sure you have a relevant following, experiment with different types of status updates as well as different posting times to find out the right combination to lead to more engagement.

THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC

If you were to only choose to measure one particular metric throughout your entire marketing campaign, what should it be? The answer is simple. Conversions.

Tracking conversions is the key to discovering online marketing ROI.

Conversions are the most important metric because they tell you what makes the biggest impact on your business. If you are tracking conversions, you can find out:

The landing pages lead to the most conversions.
The website referrals amount to the most conversions.
The organic and paid keywords have the highest conversions.
The social networks drive traffic that lead to conversions.

This can help you determine what online marketing strategies you should focus more or less upon. For example, if one of your goals is to collect opt-ins, you can add it as a goal in Google Analytics, an event in KISSmetrics, or whatever analytics program you use.

Once set up, you can find out if your video opt-in pages convert more visitors into opt-ins than your text-based opt-in page. Or you can find out if visitors coming to your site by searching for your business name convert more visitors into opt-ins than your optimized keyword anchor text. These discoveries can be the most valuable in making sure you are using your marketing dollars wisely.

What metrics do your business focus on most, and how do you measure them? Please share in the comments!

Marketing Analytics Tools Mentioned in the Blog Article:

Email Marketing

Pinpointe – www.pinpointe.com
Track your email marketing campaign results with Google Analytics and get comprehensive activity reports for all of your email marketing campaigns.

Facebook Insights & Social Media Management

HootSuite – www.hootsuite.com
Provides a dashboard to manage and measure your social networks.

Buffer – www.bufferapp.com
Shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often.