The terms of marketing metrics and analytics are often used interchangeably, but they do refer to slightly different concepts.
What is a marketing metric?
A metric can be defined as a single measuring system that quantifies a trend, dynamic, or characteristic.
A marketing metric is an individual measure of a result, input/output or other factor related to marketing performance or financial results.
Examples of marketing metrics
Some examples of marketing metrics include:
- response rate
- brand awareness
- sales conversion
- market share
- return on marketing investment
- profit margin
- market penetration
- share of customer
As you can see, marketing metrics are all individual measures and essentially act as inputs to the overall analysis.
What is analytics?
Analytics is the process of combining appropriate metrics to gain a better understanding of the market, to identify insights, to evaluate marketing performance, and so on.
Therefore, analytics is the process of interrelating various metrics and using them together, not the actual metrics themselves.
Probably the most commonly known analytics system is Google Analytics. For example, to determine the overall level of engagement of a website, a marketer would review the following marketing metrics in a combined set.
- User/sessions
- Number of page views per session
- Bounce rate
- Percentage of returning visitors
- Total time on sites
- Particular pages visited
Analytics = greater insight
By looking at multiple metrics at the one time, and perhaps interrelating them and even constructing additional metrics from them – acmarketer is able to generate far greater insight into the marketplace and their brand’s/firm’s marketing performance.
