In a digital world where a lot of businesses are struggling to keep up with the trends and ever-changing algorithms of social media, data is one of the most important tools to survive. Data helps you understand and improve your business processes, make better business decisions quickly and solve problems faster.
But even though data has been widely used by businesses, it is often overlooked and misunderstood.
There are two types of data or metrics that businesses use according to Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup, one is vanity metrics and the other is actionable metrics.
Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that can help build or improve future strategies. These metrics make you look like you are improving but they often aren’t actionable and aren’t related to anything you can control or repeat in a meaningful way. In other words, vanity metrics will tell you what is happening but not why it is happening. On the other hand, actionable metrics are what you need if you want to exhaust and take advantage of data.
Actionable metrics are metrics that can be measured and linked to specific tasks that you can improve or tie with your business goals. These are data that can give you a clear insight into what changes you need to make or what strategies you need to duplicate and improve. To make it simple, actionable metrics can help you make better business decisions and help your business grow or reach its goals.
That is why actionable metrics are important to your business, it gives you a clear overview of what is happening in your business and gives you a comprehensive insight of what are the next steps you need to take to improve your business.
There are various types of actionable metrics that you should keep an eye on and use in your business. We listed 3 of the many actionable metrics that we think you need to look into to better understand your business data.
Visitor Behavior
Understanding paths and actions taken by your online visitors can help you streamline your conversion process. By collecting visitor behavior statistics, you can design a better sales and marketing strategy, one great example of this is being able to know what product or service attracts your customers the most. By knowing which product drives the most traffic, you will be able to create better marketing plans focusing on and improving that specific product.
Your ROI Metrics
Return on investment, better known as ROI, is a key performance indicator (KPI) that’s often used by businesses to determine the profitability of expenditure, thus calculating your ROI will give you valuable insights that could help you with your marketing strategy. Collecting metrics that indicate ROI is essential for your business operations to measure how your marketing plan is going, whether you are getting the result you want as well as allowing you to make a quick course change if it’s going the wrong direction. So knowing how to understand and calculate your ROI is very crucial for your business to succeed as it greatly helps you in optimizing your profitability.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors that have completed the desired goal out of the total number of visitors. It tells you more about the consumers you are engaging and by knowing the behavior of your visitors through conversion rates, you will be able to quickly find ways on how to help these visitors progress through your funnel and transition them into conversions that are more cost-effective than attracting new visitors. That is why conversion rate is also crucial to your business success, it does not only indicate whether your marketing process is profitable, it also reveals how your customers engage with your product, helping you make a change or improve your marketing strategy.
There are far more actionable metrics that are very essential to the success of your business, knowing which metrics to focus on and what processes suit your marketing strategy are ingredients to grow your business. If you wanna know more about how these metrics can help you with your marketing plan, get in touch with us and fill up this form below.