Chances are, you already have some kind of analytics reporting in place. But how many of these metrics are purely for “vanity” reasons and how many can actually help you measure your goals?
Find out how you can identify actionable metrics from vanity metrics, and how to start putting your data to work.
A three-step guide to identifying actionable metrics
Consider your business goals
How do you know in which direction to kick the ball if you don’t even know where the goalpost is?
To take marketing as an example, your goal might be to attract more users to visit your newly launched website. In this case, the number of unique visitors and top traffic sources will be most relevant.
Let’s say your website has been up for a while already, but you’re working on increasing value for your users through high-quality content. Given that value takes precedence over novelty for you at this point in time, the session duration and average page views per visit might be more important.
There’s simply no point in measuring specific metrics unless they can be paired to a specific business objective.
Weeding out vanity metrics
With concrete goals set in place, it’s time for a little auditing. Auditing your data to be exact.
With the wealth of information we have access to today, difficulty arises not in gathering the right data, but knowing which data to latch on to - and which to ignore.
What are vanity metrics, exactly? These are metrics that may look good and boost your morale, but don’t actually help you in getting closer to your goals. Vanity metrics aren’t necessarily useless, but marketers often have to rely on them when under pressure to show immediate results to their superiors.
For instance, you might consider higher email open rates a win for your newsletter campaign. However, the click-through rate might be a better metric - it shows how many users actually clicked the link they were directed to.
Visualising it right
So far, we’ve identified which metrics are most valuable according to our specific business goals.
Now, we need to zoom out from the details and look at the bigger picture. Visual data metrics help analyse trends and patterns in the sea of numbers.
Business Intelligence tools like Performance Plus by Blackbox help present your metrics in comprehensive and visually appealing graphics - so they make sense for everyone in the team.
Turning data into knowledge
Request a demo today to find out more about how Performance Plus can help you make better business decisions that’s data-driven.