Which Marketing Metrics Matter to Your Business Ep. 163

Some metrics matter more to your marketing than others. Listen to today's podcast to find out which ones you need to pay attention to and use to make decisions. Your online marketing strategy should be focused on the parts of the sales funnel that matter the most to your business - visibility/traffic, leads, and conversions if you want your business to grow. If you're an entrepreneur looking to grow, I'm here to help you make sense of your marketing. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. This is the last new episode of 2025. I am so excited to jump into this one with you, and then we're gonna have a couple weeks break as we go into the holiday season. I'm taking holiday vacation with my family. I'm actually off as of today, so I am excited to share this with you. And then. I am enjoying a couple weeks off, and we'll be back in January. So today I wanted to talk to you about the marketing metrics that really matter and those that don't matter because we've talked the last couple weeks about marketing your business online and how to kind of set up your funnel. And how to plan for next year and how to find the right kind of content ideas your customers care about, and marketing strategies you can use, and how to stop wasting time. Like we've talked a lot recently about marketing because in January we've got the Confident Marketers Club opening up, and I'm so excited to have you join me in there and really unravel your marketing so that you can. Really become a confident marketer and move forward and make decisions based on the data that's available to you, and get yourself to a point where you know that you're converting organically and you are ready to grow and scale your business and really make an impact in the world. So one of the most important things to understand is. Your marketing metrics and what numbers we want to track. So we are going to start by looking at the very first step of your sales funnel, which is going to be your traffic and your visibility. Because if people don't know who you are, if they can't find your website, if they can. Find you online, you are not going to grow. So you wanna think about the traffic sources that you're using to market your business. So are you on social media? Are you on, do you have a podcast like I do? Do you focus on blogging? Do you create content for your website? You know, where are you? Putting your message out there to try to attract the right customer and bring those dream clients into your world. So that's the first thing we wanna think about is where are you marketing your business? So go ahead and jot down where are you marketing your business? Where is your traffic or your visibility coming from? Then we wanna look to understand the nurture stage of your funnel. So we wanna think about how are people engaging, so we want to get them a. To the point that they know who you are. Now we need to get them onto your email list. And this is where we're gonna look at the emails. So we want to understand where is the traffic or the visibility coming from, and then how many of those people are becoming leads? How many of those people are joining your email list? So we're going to want to look at things like. The traffic coming from Google, the traffic coming from social, all of that. We're not just looking at how many people follow me on social, because that number could go up or down every day, but it could make no difference to your business. Bottom line, what we wanna look at is. Of the people who follow us on social, how many are actually coming over to our website? How much traffic are we getting from social? Because remember, social is all about building the social media channel. It's not about building your business. So we wanna look at that and think about that. So when, when I'm talking about this, I'm talking about how are they interacting with your website? How are they interacting with your business? So now. We've got traffic and visibility. Now we're getting into the email metrics. This is the leads. So of the people who are seeing your business on some channel online, how many of them are becoming leads for your business? So you wanna look here. You wanna look at your opt-in landing page conversion. So you want to see at least 30%. At least 30% of the people who visit your landing page should opt in. That tells you you have a healthy opt-in rate. What does that mean? That means that if you have 30 people sign up for your. Opt-in your freebie. Out of every 100 who visit the page, you are probably doing pretty good. If your opt-in rate is 10 out of a hundred, something's not working, and we need to troubleshoot that. Now, if you've already decided, you're joining me in the Confident Marketers Club, we're gonna troubleshoot that together. I'm gonna help you figure out, and we're gonna review the different pieces and figure out what to change. Now, let's say. That you're also using the ads for your freebie or your opt-in. We're going to want to look at a couple different things here so that we understand. Are we making money from those ads? So you're going to want to look at your CPL, which is your cost per lead. You need to make sure that it's low enough that your entire. Entire funnel is profitable because your conversion rates are going to be fairly low, especially with cold traffic, we generally see one to 2% of all leads are gonna buy in a cold traffic funnel. That means one or two out of every 100 people who get your opt-in, get your freebie sign up, et cetera, are going to buy. So that means we wanna keep that cost per lead low enough. That you are able to sell, you're able to generate enough leads and still be profitable. So for example, you sell a$27 product and you have a 1% conversion rate, your leads need to be under 27 cents each to break even because. Point two seven times 100 is$27. And remember, if you have a 1% conversion, you're getting one sale out of every 100 leads, so you don't have much room there for an ad spend. You also don't have much room for profitability. This is why so many people lose money with ads is because we don't really understand all the numbers to look at. Now, let's say you convert it 10%, you have more wiggle room because your cost per lead can go up to$2 and 70 cents on average, and you're still gonna break even, but you're not yet profitable. So that's why you really have to understand the different numbers there. Paid ads definitely add more complexity to your overall marketing, which is why I always say make sure that you are converting organically, you're hitting all your conversion points organically. For you start doing ads because once you add in paid ads, now we have to look at the cost per lead. We have to look at the landing page. Um, we have to look at the cost per lead. We have to look at the click rate. We have to look at the landing page conversion rate. We have to look at, you know, if there's a webinar funnel, the webinar sign up, the webinar show up, like all the different steps that the funnel to figure out exactly where we're at and what the overall conversion rate is to make sure that we're not just spending money on ads to bring in. Customers that are going to be too expensive to break even. I've had it happen to me. Everybody has, the way that you become confident is that you understand the numbers and so you can look at it and you can say, this number is getting to be too expensive. I can't afford to do this. So that's something to think about from an ads standpoint. You need to understand the numbers in your ads funnel. Now when we're talking about. Email metrics, we want to understand more than the open rate. We really want to understand the click through rate because the open rate, as we've talked about, can be impacted because email service providers are basically pre-opening and testing different links to make sure that there's no, um. Viruses, no scams, nothing like that associated with them to make sure that they're safe. So that's impacted our open rates. They do that scan of it. So what you really wanna work on and watch with your email marketing is your click-through rate. Ideally, you wanna see 1% or higher on all emails with a clickable link in them. And what you need to remember here is. Not all emails will have a clickable link, but if you have a link in there, if your link click rate is under 1% and you've sent it to several hundred people, there's something about that email that's not, it's just not working. They're not interested in whatever that click is, so you wanna look at that and kind of troubleshoot it. You also wanna make sure if it's a delivery email for a. Opt-in. You want your conversion, your click-through rate to be significantly higher because people should be clicking to get whatever their freebie is, if it's a situation where they need to click. The other thing you're gonna wanna look at will be your conversion metrics. So you want to understand your sales page, your. Landing pages, your consult calls, you want to understand that final step of your sales funnel. So you wanna know of how many people, how many people visit my sales page. Versus how many people buy, how many people visit my sales page versus click add to cart. How many people add to cart versus complete the purchase? How many people book a consult call versus sign up for your coaching package, et cetera. You really want to look at your conversion metrics so that you understand what your conversion rates are. Conversion rates are going to vary based on your niche. Your offer and your experience as an entrepreneur selling, because I know sometimes selling can feel kind of icky. We don't wanna do it. I personally don't like bro marketing tactics. I don't do any of that stuff. I. I am here to serve. I invite people into my world. I tell them that I can help them. I can help you with your marketing. That is what feels authentic and genuine to me, because it is me. I don't want to say, you have to buy by Sunday. Sunday. Like, that's just not me. Here's this fake discount. Here's this, here's that. Let's not do any of that. So now. Let's talk about the marketing metrics that don't really matter. So we talked a little bit about this in the beginning, and that is honestly, your social media follower counts, your social media numbers, even in some ways your podcast downloads. Because podcasting, there are better numbers to look at than just your downloads. Now, with that said, I track my downloads and I do look at them, and thank you for downloading, because it's good to know, yes, your downloads are going up or they're going down. But with social media, I don't care, honestly, how many people follow you on any given channel because your followers don't equal sales. Your followers are just the people who are following you on that channel. It doesn't mean they're coming to your website. So remember when we talked about visibility, we talked about how many people are coming to my website from that channel, and then of those people, how many are getting my opt-in or making a purchase? Those are the numbers that matter. How much your follower count has grown does not matter. It's a vanity metric. Same for YouTube. Same for Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Unless you're at the point that you are absolutely monetizing your co, your business based on your social media traffic, your follower account, and all of that really doesn't matter to the bottom line as an entrepreneur. If you are trying to be an influencer, then yes, that's where more of the social media metrics maybe aren't as much vanity related, but as entrepreneurs. Follower count, follower, growth, all of that. It is a vanity metric. Um, we also don't necessarily talk just about website traffic for the same reason. Now, an increase in traffic does not always mean an increase in leads and sales because sometimes we're getting people to the wrong pages. So what I look at and what I teach my students to look at, yes, we look at the percentage share of SEO traffic, just so we know overall how are we doing. But I like to take it to that next step, and I like to look and see how many opt-ins, how many sales, and then which pages are getting the traffic. Because I've seen situations where I had one recently, I was working with a client and I was taking a look at. Their website, and they had a good percentage share of SEO traffic. So at first glance, it was like, okay, you've been doing really well on your own, even though they hadn't done a whole lot. But when I dug in and I looked at it, they had a lot of old podcast episodes that we're getting traffic, but there were no opt-ins on those pages. There was nothing for the person to do, to work with them or to connect with them. And their pages that were going to be tied to their revenue, their coaching offer, their course, things like that. Were not getting organic traffic, so we were getting traffic, but it was not to the pages that were going to tie to revenue that were going to help them grow their business. I also had another student who had this happen. We actually saw a decrease in her overall website traffic because. It was strategic. When she first came to me, she'd been doing SEO on her own, and so she was doing pretty good, but she didn't understand all the numbers. She was confused, and it was like, help me understand, like, why does it look like this has gone down so much? And it's like, you know what? You don't even need to worry about that because that traffic that's gone down doesn't tie to revenue anywhere. It doesn't make a difference. So just ignore that. And oh by the way, don't count on the search console report. Let's go to analytics and get the actual true data'cause that's more relevant. And that's what I, I want you to focus on. So we talked about that. What we looked at overall was we need a different strategy'cause. The pages that are getting traffic are not the pages that are gonna make you money. So we focused on optimizing the pages that were gonna make her money rather than the pages that were getting traffic. So she ended up ultimately with a 52% increase in revenue, which was over$150,000 in extra revenue because we were able to get the coaching page. The homepage and the coaching pages to rank higher to drive the right traffic. So we were able to use the right keyword to bring people in who were more interested in paying. So think of it as, do you want the window shopper or do you want the shopper? We don't necessarily want the window shopper. We don't want the person who's just gonna come and peek and look. We want the person who we're able to help. So those are the metrics. That's why I say some metrics matter more than others. So the metrics that are going to be the most important from a visibility standpoint are going to be how are people engaging with your website, your leads, your sales, your contact page, your conversion points on your website. That's the most important. When we get into the email funnel, how are they connecting with us? Um, and clicking the links in the email because that's gonna be the most important. We also wanna see overall email list growth, because that tells us we're increasing the number of leads we have. If you do consult calls, we wanna see overall increase in consult calls. And then finally, conversion. What are the conversion points? In your business and how are we working? And then remember, if you're doing ads, there's additional complexity because now we need to also make sure we remain profitable. So I know this is a little more involved than some of the episodes that we've talked about. There is a blog post that goes along with this, and then like I said, this is all the mess we're gonna start figuring out inside the Confident Marketers Club. We're gonna unravel it. You're gonna be able to stop going based on hunches or having those gut feelings that tell you something's not right, but you don't know what it is. I'm gonna teach you how to look at all of this to understand and confidently be able to make the decisions like some of my other clients where, you know, I've been doing Pinterest for three months, Rachel. I've created five pins a day. It's 150 pins a month. I've created almost 500 pins. How is it working? My Pinterest is growing. I'm seeing more people over there. My Pinterest numbers look good. And then when we go to the website, we see well. 500 pins has generated eight visits to the website, and not a single one of them has signed up for an opt-in or a consult call. So. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of time and effort. And in that case, she was paying a VA to create all of the pins and to do all of the optimization. So she had spent thousands of dollars on her Pinterest strategy, strategy when she could have gotten. Eight visits another way for a lot less money, and maybe those people would've been more interested in what she was doing. This is how I ended up with a podcast was about three years ago. I did this exercise. I went through and I looked and I identified channels that were not working for me and I freed myself up from them. And I reallocated that time to creating the podcast. It'll be three years in February. It's a top 5% podcast. It generates thousands of downloads a month, and it also generates a lot of leads and sales for the business. Because it's here, it's helpful. It's something that you look forward to each week, and I want you to be able to have that same type of confidence that I had to make that decision because. Honestly, if I could tell you anything, I wish I had started the podcast sooner based on how much better it worked than some other marketing channels I tried over the years. But that's part of marketing is testing and looking and understanding the data. And that's what I wanna teach you how to do. Because right now, so many people are teaching specific channels, but nobody's really teaching you how to look at the. Overall picture and put all the pieces together and understand what you need to track to understand what's going on so that you know, I know that this is working. I know this is not working. I know I can let this go and you're not. Afraid that if you let this thing go, it's the one thing that was making money for you. So that's the goal here with the Confident Marketers Club, is to help you unravel everything that you're working on and really zero in on what works, what doesn't. Free up your time and make more money. Alright, that's it for today. I will see you back here. In January if you celebrate the holidays, I hope you have a wonderful holiday break with your family. If family, friends, whoever you celebrate with your dog. If you don't, I hope you have a great December and I'll see you back here in January. Bye for now, and I'll see you back here live in a couple of weeks. Well not live, but you know what I mean. I'll be back here with a new episode in January.