48 Metrics

Defining Metrics

A critical component of IMC plans is the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the IMC campaign. They are qualitative and quantitative measures of success. An NPO that creates an IMC plan which outlines relevant metrics will allow them to monitor the progress of the campaign’s activities easier than one that doesn’t.

Importance

Many marketers have realized that they have a better chance of securing their desired marketing budgets if they can point to foreseeable tangible results. Additionally, KPIs and metrics put the purpose of the IMC plan into perspective. They can also add a layer of accountability to the marketers behind the IMC plan since they provide a direct benchmark for them to compare to. Otherwise, how can an organization measure the impact they are making?

Application

Increasingly, the single most important evaluation measure in IMC plans is the return on the marketing investment (or marketing ROI). Measuring marketing ROI helps marketers understand if their use of resources is yielding the most effective results. Below is an example of a nonprofit organization that used marketing ROI to assess its IMC campaign.

Metrics can also be utilized to measure other areas of an organization. Other areas to consider metrics for including social media, owned media, earned media, email marketing, paid media, and the online website. These are all other areas a non-profit organization might invest in marketing efforts. Some of these metrics found within these areas can also be utilized in other sections such as impressions, bounce rate, and click-thru rate. It is important to measure these accurately assess the effectiveness of an organization’s campaign.

Social Media | Owned Media | Earned Media Metrics

Reach

• Impressions: Measures the number of times your content appears on a screen, whether clicked or not. These help to determine how much of your content is being seen. Determining the level of your impressions is important because it can mean how effective or ineffective certain media posts are.
• Potential Reach: Amount of people you want your posts to reach to and who have yet to confirm. A target group of people you want to reach with your social media. These include Followers, Fans, Subscribers.
• Confirmed Reach: Amount of people who have already seen your post and you have reached out to and can be confirmed. These include views, Post/Page Views, Video Views.
• Repeat visits: Measures the percentage of visitors who have returned to your social media posts within a time frame.

Engagement

• Likes/Stars/Hearts: Measuring the number of likes a social media post made by the organization gets. This can be measured from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
• Followers: Number of users registered in the business’ social pages.
• Comments: Measuring the number of comments a social media post made by the organization gets. This can be measured from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
• Shares: Measuring the number of shares a social media post made by the organization gets. This can be measured from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
• Retweets/Reposts: Measuring the number of retweets and reposts a social media post made by the organization gets. This can be measured from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
• Positive/Negative Sentiments: Measuring the tone of voice received from those interacting with the organization. This measures the number of people who are happy with the organization as well as sad/angry/upset with the organization.

Email Marketing Metrics

• Open rate: The percentage of the total number of times an email is opened by a subscriber.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of the total number of the email that was not delivered successfully.
• Click-through rate (CTR) : Number of clicks on a link in the email over impressions.
• Email subscriptions: Measure the number of users who ask to receive future emails and updates from an organization.
• Unsubscribe rate: Measures the number of users who opted out of their emails from the organization’s subscription email list and declined to receive future emails and updates from the organization.

Paid Media Metrics

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Measures the average cost for each click on ads, made by the non-for-profit organizations, by users. Can be calculated by taking the total cost for clicks and dividing it by the total number of clicks on your content or ads.
• Click Thru Rate: Number of clicks on impressions.
• Cost Per Impression: Measures the cost a non-for-profit organization will pay for every 1000 impressions their ads achieve.
• Customer Acquisition Cost: The amount it costs for an organization to acquire a customer. In terms of non-for-profit, this could relate because it can calculate how much it costs from a marketing standpoint to gain a subscriber or follower to the organization.

Online Website Metrics

• Number of Visits or Sessions: A visit to a website is generally considered ended when the user does not click for more than half an hour.
• Number of Visitors or Users: Each user can visit a website more than once; this metric takes into account only unique visitors regardless of how many visits or sessions they have done.
• Number of visited pages: Total number of web pages seen in a time-lapse by visitors.
• Visits Per Page: How many times a single page has been visited in a time-lapse.
• Number of Pages Per Visit: How many pages are seen on average by visitors.
• Total Sessions/Visit: Cumulative Sum of all visits to a website. Informs you of the total number of visits whether in a day, week, month, or year.
• Average Time Per Visit: Calculated from the entire amount of visits to the website in a time-lapse. Measures the average time a user visits the website.
• Bounce Rate: Percentage of visits ended with a single page visited.

Evaluation

By evaluating marketing efforts on a given campaign through KPIs and metrics, marketers can tweak their efforts and allocate resources better. Taking from the example above, the NPO would have had to outline the desired marketing ROI in their IMC plan from the beginning. They could have identified that a marketing ROI of 5% would be considered successful for their campaign. In this case, an evaluation would show that they exceeded their target for marketing ROI.

Utilizing metrics to measure all sections allows a non-profit to gauge their intended target audience better. For example, if one were to create a social media post about the importance of emphasizing on world hunger, they would benefit from knowing how many users it has reached or how often it was shared or commented on. In the case of email marketing, one would want to know how many emails are being opened vs ignored, etc. Ensuring evaluation of metrics within all of these different areas, helps a non-profit organization understand what they are performing well in and what they need to improve upon within their campaign. Using the right metrics to measure these sections is important because it allows the organization to accurately assess the effectiveness of the organization’s campaign and the level of influence the organization has achieved over its intended target audience. 

The following metrics are broader that can help measure the overall effectiveness of various campaigns: