More Metrics That Matter — Asset Performance

As good marketers, we want to know how our marketing efforts are performing and what activities are driving the most interest and engagement. In our last metrics conversation, we discussed ways to optimize your campaign metrics by ensuring that you can accurately identify and track your marketing activities back to the campaign source. Now that campaign performance metrics are in place, the next question you are likely to ask yourself, and get asked by your internal stakeholders, is: How are my assets performing? 

For this conversation, we will define marketing assets as any items that you use in your marketing efforts to educate customers and prospects about your company and promote your products, services, or brand. In digital marketing, these include items such as emails, downloadable whitepapers, banner ads, blog posts, website content, videos, and images. 

Email performance can be measured by the standard metrics you will also use in your campaign metrics: email opens, clicks, and conversion data. You can use the native reports from any marketing automation platform to understand how well your emails are being received by your audiences. Pay careful attention to your unsubscribe rate; this is an indicator of your creative asset missing the mark either with a particular audience or with the overall perceived value of your offer. Campaign Monitor provides a good industry-based table of Email Marketing Benchmarks by opens, clicks, and unsubscribe rates to evaluate your email metrics. You can check it out here to see how your email metrics stack up. If your results are not where you want them to be, consider A/B or multivariate testing to determine optimal design, subject lines, and content to drive greater engagement.

Let’s face it; you spend a lot of time, energy, and money creating valuable content to provide to your audience. Those whitepapers and blog posts don’t write themselves! And videos, banner ads, and engaging images take time, effort, and imagination to be engaging. The last thing you want (or can afford) is to have underperforming assets. 

The metrics you should be tracking are:

• Completed form submits (for gated assets)
• Landing page—time on page (for ungated assets)
• Closed won opportunities where your asset is in the marketing activity
• Video content performance
  • Percentage of video watched – 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%
  • Completion rate
  • Number of plays
  • Number of bounces (less than 10% viewed)
  • Average view duration

Take a good look at your gated content conversion rate: how many promotions for that asset have been sent vs. how many completed form submits to download/view that asset. For those that are not generating the expected Return on Investment (ROI), consider refreshing the content or utilizing the content in “sound-bite” fashion by creating mini downloads/views or delivering the content in pieces in an ungated manner while offering the full piece in exchange for contact information. For those assets that are ungated, consider tagging them with blind form submissions <link to Kim’s blog post?> where no overt form is presented to your landing page visitor, but click activity is captured for cookied visitors within your marketing automation platform. 

Lastly, for paid ads and social promotions, your metrics will be a bit different. You will want to pay attention to:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Reach
• Download
• Engagement
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Clickthrough Rate
• Cost per Download

Most of these metrics will come through your channel providers for you to analyze the effectiveness and engagement of your assets via these promotion vehicles. And don’t forget social metrics of reposts, comments, and followers. While a bit less directly tied to actual asset performance, understanding what is being shared socially will help you determine your best performing assets. 

Essentially, throughout all of these metrics gathering and analysis, you are working to determine two things: 1. The effectiveness of each piece of your creative content in leading customers to a conversion and 2. Sentiment or positive reaction rate of your audience to your creative content. With this knowledge in hand, you can tailor your future marketing creatives to optimize engagement rates and generate more engaged, high-quality leads. 

Because it is not only important what you present to your audience, but also where you present it, we will discuss Channel Performance Metrics in our next post. In the meantime, if you need help with measuring your metrics, reach out! We’re here to help.

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