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024 has come and gone, and you’re sitting on a treasure trove of data that can help you as you begin to make your 2025 plans. For many marketers, though, being creative in the brainstorming phase and understanding spreadsheets full of numbers are two very different things. How can you make the most out of your data if you aren’t sure what it’s telling you?
To help you analyze your year-end metrics, we put together a list of tips and tricks that will simplify all those numbers. We’re breaking down what to look out for, what data matters, and how to apply it to your 2025 planning.
Identify Your Most Important Metrics
The list of “important” metrics will vary by your company’s industry, your overall business objectives, and upcoming plans for the year. However, marketing metrics typically fall into three categories: business outcomes, audience engagement, and operational efficiency. Here’s a closer look at each:
Business Outcomes
These metrics directly measure your financial results, customer value, and overall growth. They include:
- Revenue, like return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend, revenue growth, and revenue per customer.
- Sales and lead generation metrics, like cost per acquisition, sales conversion rate, number of leads, lead conversion rate, and cost per lead.
- Customer metrics, like customer lifetime value, customer retention rate, and net promoter score.
- Industry and benchmark metrics, like market share growth and benchmark performance.
Audience Engagement
These numbers reveal how users interact with your content, channels, and campaigns. They include:
- Website and digital engagement, like click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, session duration, and page performance.
- Content performance, like top-performing content, time spent on content, and content ROI.
- Social media engagement, like engagement rate, follower growth, and social ROI.
- Email engagement, like open rate, click-to-open rate, and unsubscribe rate.
- SEO metrics, like organic traffic to your site, keyword rankings, and search impressions.
Operational Efficiency
Finally, these data points assess the overall cost-effectiveness and productivity of your marketing efforts. They include:
- Advertising performance, like cost-per-click (CPC), and impressions vs. conversions.
- Campaign efficiency, like cost-per-acquisition (CPA), lead conversion rate, and ad spend ROI.
Many of these facts and figures are accessed using an analytics dashboard — the most common of which is Google Analytics 4 — but even with innovative visualization software that presents your data in graphs and charts, deciphering them can still be overwhelming. As you sift through your 2024 numbers, here are some techniques you can use to uncover the gold:
5 Ways to Apply Your Year-End Metrics to Future Planning
1. Conduct a comprehensive performance review
First, look for the highs and lows of your campaigns — those will help you identify patterns and trends. (If you have 2023 data as well, you can also look for year-over-year changes.) Focus on metrics like conversion rates, engagement, and ROI across all channels. Plus, keep in mind any seasonal patterns or anomalies in customer behavior. This can help you predict next year’s periods of high (or low) interest.
2. Revisit your customer segments
Compare your year-end data to your current buyer personas — do they match up? If you see discrepancies, such as demographics, preferences, spending patterns, or actual vs. anticipated online engagement, that’s a sign to do a little fine-tuning or create some new segments. Other watch-outs include shifts in demographics, preferences, or spending patterns. The more you know your customer base, the more personalized and effective your marketing strategies will be.
3. Identify your top (and bottom) sellers
As you look through sales data, identify the products or services that performed the best and the worst. Ask yourself questions like: Why were they successful? Why were they not? How did they perform compared to the same time last year? What did the average shopping cart look like? With an overall performance picture, you can create strategies that replicate your successes, improve your weaknesses, and take advantage of trends like product bundlings.
4. Evaluate your marketing budget
If there’s one thing about marketing, it’s that things are always shifting — it’s rare that your marketing mix will be exactly the same from year to year. To see where you need to make adjustments, compare performance across all channels to determine which produced the highest ROI. This information is invaluable in helping you trim the fat, which is especially helpful if you’re working with a smaller budget.
5. Make improvements to customer retention
In addition to engagement data, it’s also important to assess customer churn to look for patterns or common factors, including bounce rate, loyalty program data, or re-engagement campaigns. This valuable information, along with customer feedback collected throughout the year, can guide you in adjusting your retention strategies to address recurring issues or level up successful areas.
Leverage Predictive Analytics to Set New KPIs
Many analytics dashboards now include predictive analytics, which is a machine-learning enhancement that uses historical data to make future predictions about customer behavior and sales trends. These predictive insights empower you to be proactive across the board when planning, including the allocation of resources toward areas more likely to yield results, and the ability to make smart KPI decisions, set baseline metrics, and track progress.
Hawthorn Creative’s full-service team of marketing professionals is experienced at both analyzing data and using it to help build future marketing campaigns. If you’re ready to improve your performance in the coming year, let’s talk.