How to read metrics?
Too much data, everywhere. What to make of it and how to read your numbers and metrics.
In digital, you are often flooded with data. Facebook Page Insights, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Insights, Google Analytics... etc.
We love data. But data is only a means to an end. And the end is not to create a nice chart but to understand the effect of what you’re running, how you can improve it and in general, how it’s affecting your business.
So it becomes clear that you need to filter through this flood of numbers to really assess what they mean and more importantly to determine which of this data is more important to the objective you are trying to achieve.
Classify Your Data
The first filtering you can do is classifying which data is tactical and which is strategic. Tactical data can be impressions and reach and so you move along from tactical to strategic, you go through active users, conversions to repeat orders and so on... Each metric will then have a different weight in your reporting.
It’s important to know how many people your ad campaign is reaching for example, but it’s more important to see how many actually clicked through, then how many stayed for enough time on your web page and ultimately who decided to actually convert. It gets more important: who made a purchase, who returned for another purchase or who’s “quality” was better and so on.
Decide on your Key Performance Metrics (KPIs)
It’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring. The easiest thing to measure is reach, impressions and even conversions. But perhaps it’s even more important to measure your multi-channel conversions. It’s not enough to know how many converted when your running a multi-channel campaign. You will need to know which channel is bringing in more conversions or even better quality conversion so you can better judge your ad spend. Define your key stats that you report on, especially to higher levels of management and don’t count every metric measured as key.
So in the end, accumulating all the data you can possibly get is not enough. You have to know how to read and then act upon it. As always, we’re very happy to schedule a chat to talk about your numbers. Get in touch now.