Metrics that Matter (MTM)

There is a lot of generic advice out there on how you should measure your brand’s performance, from measuring engagement with your marketing to interaction with the product itself. While initially these ideas may help you to kickstart your enterprise, over time, they may become less and less relevant as you try to keep on top of all the data you have access to. In reality, by trying to analyze lots of metrics, you will only be touching the surface of each, and only a handful will be of tangible value to your business’ operation. Here we look at how to identify the Metrics That Matter (MTM) to your brand for maximum results.

What are metrics?

Performance metrics are the measurements that your marketing and sales executives use to assess how successful their campaign or product has been and/or how customers are interacting with them. They need to be agreed upon by all key managers and stakeholders, so everyone is working toward the same KPIs. For example, here are some engagement metrics used by companies which sell software as a service (SaaS):

• Average number of times a user used a particular product feature.
• Percentage of users who used a particular feature.
• Average number of key actions per user session.

However, while these metrics would be appropriate for a SaaS company, they do not tell the whole story. These metrics don’t tell the company whether or not the software is simple to use or whether the user found that particular feature to be helpful. This kind of information would help the product design team to improve their product.

In addition, metrics are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different types of businesses will define success in different ways. Metrics that matter for content marketing will differ to those of a SaaS company or an eCommerce website. Very often, the metrics which worked for a company in the early will need to evolve alongside the company.

How to find out which metrics matter to your business

While working at Google back in 2015, Kerry Rodden came up with the HEART framework, which helps a business to assess the quality of the user experience.

• Happiness: Measuring the attitudes of users via interviews or surveys
• Engagement: Measuring user’s behavior such as how often and for how long they use your product or service
• Adoption: Measuring how many new users start using the product or service
• Retention: Tracking the number of returning users
• Task success: How quickly/efficiently do users complete tasks, or how many users encounter errors?

When these metrics are used alongside the Goals-Signals-Metrics process, you can take these potentially vague metrics and make them tangible.

For example, when measuring happiness, the question could be: How can we measure ‘happiness’ when users are completing a purchase on our website?

To do this, you break the metric into three key elements:

• Goal: The customer feels secure and satisfied when completing their transaction.
• Signals: Received positive customer feedback via a survey
• Metrics: Measuring the percentage of customers who report feeling satisfied and secure after completing their transaction.

Ask yourself who your ideal customer is and what their ideal behavior would be when using your website or product. When you know what the perfect scenario is, you will be able to identify the questions you need to ask to find out if this is the case and, if not, you can focus on how to make improvements.