4 Types of Metrics to Evaluate Our Communications Post-Launch

When we run our marketing and PR campaigns, we can measure many elements. But, what are the most important metrics to track in our communications campaigns to know if we are successful?

We want to use data to help learn what worked well and what missed the mark. This helps us understand how it performed against our goals to help course correct it as a campaign continues and to learn from it so we can make our next communication plan or message better. 

Here are more than 20 possible metrics broken down into four areas to try tracking our business communications:

1. Measure Exposure and Potential Reach

How many people were exposed to our content? This could be page views or visits on our website, the number of people in the room when we spoke, the number of people who stopped by our table at an event, and more. If people don’t have a chance to interact with us or our content, then we have no opportunity to share our messages and make connections.

However, reaching one million people is meaningless if they are not the people we want to reach. So, in addition to measuring the number of people we reach, it is also helpful to understand who they are.

Metrics to consider tracking include:

• Impressions
• Page views
• Page visits
• Video views
• Number of attendees at event
• Number of people in a room when we spoke
• Number of people who signed up for webinar
• Number of times content was shared
• Number of earned media mentions
• Demographics of our audiences (such as age, location, or occupation) and how they align to our target audiences
  

2. Measure Feedback and Engagement

How many comments or questions did the content get? This helps us measure how engaging our message is and how we delivered it when people take the extra step to interact with it. 

These comments and questions can also deliver incredible insights into how our target audience thinks to inform future content development. Is there a question that keeps coming up that tells us part of our message is confusing? Is there content we’re missing that people have asked about? Do people want to know more about a specific topic? 

For metrics, we can of course track the number of comments and questions that come into a social post, video, website article, speech, and more. Additionally, we can look at feedback as a percentage of reach to see how changes we make to the campaign influences our ability to connect with our audiences.

Metrics to consider tracking include:

• Number of comments
• Number of questions
• Sentiment, which means measuring the “tone” of a comment or question as positive, negative, or neutral
• Key themes or hot topics that are mentioned repeatedly
  

3. Measure Impact Against Business Goals

Did our communication do what we needed it to do? This will be a metric tied to the specific business objective for the single communication or campaign. For example:

• If we want to drive product sales, can we tie numbers to the piece through a coupon code or tracking link? 
• If we want to drive traffic to our website, did we see a bump in traffic that we can attribute to the campaign?
• If our business goal is to be a thought leader in our industry, how many speaking events have we had at trade shows? How many articles have we written on LinkedIn? How many awards have we applied for and won?

While these metrics will be very specific and unique to our goals, some common ones could include:

• Newsletter sign ups
• Webinar sign ups
• Product sales
• Services purchased
• Potential new clients who requested additional information
• Website traffic
• New social media followers
• Click throughs to our content

4. Measure Trends Over Time

While it’s important to evaluate each comm/campaign on its own, it’s also helpful to review them in the context of other things we’ve worked on to see if we can gather any insights. 

Questions to consider include:

• What trends are we seeing? 
• Are we improving in any of the areas identified above? 
• Which areas offer the best opportunity to improve? 
• Did this campaign reach a segment of our target audience better than others? If so, why?
• Are there any unusual data points in our current communications that we can learn from for future campaigns and plans?

To get a clear picture of performance over time, we need to set some common metrics to track our work in addition to metrics specific to the campaign, message, or event. 

[Create a pin that lists all the metrics together.]

Take Action

Put what you just read into action:

1. Decide on three to five metrics that make sense to track for an upcoming report, presentation, event, or something else. 
2. Determine when you will track them (e.g., launch day, one week later, two weeks later, one month later) and schedule time in your calendar to do it. 
3. Collect your metrics together for easy reference later or to share with others in your team. Need help? Check out our downloadable template below.

[Create an opt in form/image in ConvertKit to download a template.]

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