The 3 Marketing Metric Buckets

Measuring your marketing programs is really important – to show the value of the work you’re doing – but sometimes it’s difficult because there are so many different metrics to choose from. One thing I found to be helpful is to categorize metrics into three buckets to help choose the metric that matches the level of activity that you’re working on measuring.

The first bucket of marketing metrics is Action metrics. These are the most basic – did I do that thing or not? Examples of Action metrics are maybe you have a content calendar, and you want to measure that you’ve actually published a blog post, either every day or every week – whatever your cadence is. Another Action metric category would be readiness metrics. Let’s say you have a campaign launch and there are things you have to do at certain times in order to make that launch. Successful tracking of those would be Action metrics.

The next level up in metrics is Delivery metrics. Delivery metrics are measurements of a collection of activities done in such a way that they deliver an experience in the market. An example of a delivery metric would be an event that you’re going to and actually orchestrating that event and doing all the things and creating all of the experiences that you decided were needed for that event to be successful. That’s a delivery metric.

Delivery metrics are about what you are doing, and that differentiates them from the next and highest level of marketing metrics, which are Effect metrics. These also can be called Impact metrics. These are now measuring what happens in response to the things that you do. These are by far the most important measurement and the most valuable type of program measurement because that’s the whole reason you’re doing all of this marketing – to get the effect from your customers or your prospects or whatever audience you’re working towards. Common Effect measurement examples are different flavors of leads, or other behaviors – activities that your prospects or customers are doing to show that they are progressing in the customer journey towards buying or even after they’re your customers. You still want to measure the response of your customers to the work that you’re doing for them.

I hope these three categories or buckets of metrics are helpful for you as you figure out how to measure the impact of the marketing that you’re doing.