Tracking and defining your conversion metrics opens a path to measuring your digital marketing strategy’s success. Just like choosing the right goals for your company, picking which metrics you focus on will deeply impact your decisions.
Digital marketing is not only about trying to inspire customer loyalty through clever marketing tactics, catchy advertising campaigns, and viral social media posts. It is also about providing the best experience to customers and potential buyers at every touch point of their journey with your company. This includes everything, from how your email marketing campaign is written to how your customers can find information about your business on search engines.
To have a truly successful marketing campaign, you must have a strong foundation for the buyers’ journey. And that foundation is…intelligent data.
A buyer’s journey can be sinuous or straightforward, providing a clear path from awareness to purchase — depending on their profile, prior experience with your product, goals, and more. The key here is that you must be there to greet them at every stop, helping them decide wisely.
Online marketing has the challenging yet exciting mission of shedding light on what this journey looks like for the buyer and how the process can be as smooth as possible. Thankfully, conversion metrics in digital marketing have been developed specifically to give clear information to help marketers develop new strategies and achieve more conversions.
However, not all conversion metrics are created alike.
Knowing which to measure can make or break the game for your business. Following the wrong ones won’t necessarily harm you, but it may turn into a wild goose chase that goes around your actual goal. This is why it’s better to first determine specific objectives, so you can then identify what you need to pay a closer look at.
Having said this, even though life sciences companies have different missions, values, and goals, there are a few key metrics that all of them need to check off their list.
What Is The Role Of Conversions In Digital Marketing?
Conversions are an essential part of every successful digital marketing strategy. They are the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign and the thing that really matters. They make your business money, so you need to focus on them.
A conversion can be anything from a click on your blog post to a purchase on your e-commerce site. You can track them using different tools and software, such as Google Analytics. However, the main goal of every conversion should be the same: bring in revenue.
What Conversion Metrics Should All Life Science Companies Measure?
There’s a wide range of conversion metrics you can track depending on your business model. Here are the ones we deem essential across the board:
1. Lead Inquiries
Lead inquiries are the first step potential customers take when they are interested in your product or service. This can happen through a form submission on your website, an email, social media, or in person. What you need to remember is that lead inquiries are not sales. They are people who want to learn more about your product or service.
Measuring lead inquiries can give useful insight into incoming traffic, enabling your company to identify potential business opportunities. They are, perhaps, the most basic of all the conversion metrics out there, but they open the gate to a world of relevant information.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
While lead inquiries show that customers are interested in your product or service, CTR or click-through rate is a tool that shows how well your ads perform. The way you calculate CTR is by dividing the number of times your ad has been clicked on by the number of times it has been shown. In other words, if you divide clicks by impressions, you get CTR.
CTR is easy to measure and can provide useful information regarding how well a headline, ad copy, meta description, or title tag is performing. Of course, CTR can also be measured when it comes to a hyperlink or a landing page, a call-to-action link in an email, or a PPC ad on a Google search results page. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing paid advertising or prefer the organic route. What matters is that CTR delivers either way.
When it comes to conversion metrics, CTR is one of the most accessible and tracked metrics out there, as it reveals significant information that can help shape future marketing strategies.
3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Even though you might receive more clicks from a certain campaign, it doesn’t mean that clicks will be a valuable addition to your audience. In fact, you might receive a lot of clicks from an ad that doesn’t actually convert customers.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) allows you to track how much you spent to generate each new customer. This metric gives you a better idea of how helpful your marketing efforts actually are.
To find out what the CPA is, you must divide the total marketing costs by the number of customers acquired.
Once you know the CPA, you can also use it to compare the actual revenue these new customers bring in. If your CPA is higher than this amount, you may reconsider your strategies, since the business may end up suffering. However, it’s all worth it if the new customers bring in considerably higher revenues than the costs incurred when acquiring them, to begin with.
As you can see, in the range of conversion metrics and if used wisely, CPA can offer tremendous insight into your company’s budget, as well as its future trajectory.
4. Session Time
If your business relies on website traffic, you’ll want to make sure that it stays as high as possible. One way to do this is by keeping track of the average session length. This will let you know for how long visitors stay on your website, so you can then adjust your strategy accordingly.
You can get a rough estimate of the average session time by looking at the average time it takes for a visitor to complete a purchase. If your average conversion rate is 10%, then the average session time will be 10 minutes.
Most website visitors don’t make a purchase right away. They spend some time exploring your site before making a decision. A 10-minute average might seem too long, but it’s a good starting point.
A small amount of time spent on site may indicate a confusing layout that prompts the customer to prematurely abandon the page, as well as a lack of relevant content. For example, if you notice that most people are only spending about 2 minutes on your website, you might decide to create blog posts that are between 500 and 1000 words long. This will likely encourage visitors to spend more time on your website, resulting in higher conversion rates.
5. Conversion Rate
Conversion rates represent the percentage of site visitors who take a desired action. For example, if you have a lead form on your site and want 5% of visitors to fill it out, that’s the conversion rate you want to track.
Your conversion rate is important because it lets you know how effectively your site generates leads. The higher, the better. But at the same time, there’s no point in having a high conversion rate if the leads aren’t quality.
If your site attracts a lot of low-quality leads, increasing the conversion rate might not be the best thing to focus on. In fact, it can be a bad thing. Low-quality leads are bad for business, and you want to avoid them.
Combining conversion metrics like these can only result in retrieving essential information for your company’s healthy and profitable development.
6. Interactions Per Visit
Interactions are a great way to track how engaged your customers are with your site. You can use them to discover if people are finding the information they need or if something on your site is driving customers away.
Interactions can be either a click or an impression. You can use them to track everything from form submissions to newsletter sign-ups. They help measure engagement but also determine what content your customers like…and what they don’t.
7. Bounce Rate
There are many conversion metrics to consider, but only a few will actually deliver significant results. Your website’s bounce rate is one of the key metrics to track, as it tells you how many people visit your site and then decide not to stay.
Unfortunately, this metric is also one of the most misinterpreted. The bounce rate only shows how many visitors left the website without clicking on any other page, which does not provide any value for the business. To deliver actual results and make the most out of your website, you have to consider the value of each goal driven by the website. If your website’s main goal is to get people to sign up and fill out a form, then the conversion rate matters more than the bounce rate.
Coming July 2023, the Bounce Rate metric will be replaced by Engagement as Google Analytics Universal turns into Google Analytics 4.
8. Customer Lifetime Value
Profitability is, at the end of the day, what matters most. If you can’t prove that your business is viable and earns more than it spends, you’re unlikely to stay in it for long. Unfortunately, many companies fail because they don’t have a substantial way to track their financial results.
As long as you have a way to measure your company’s results, you have a much better chance of success. Customer lifetime value is one of the best ways to track financial performance. When you know how much each of your customers is worth to your company, you can make smarter business decisions. At the very least, you can avoid spending money on customers who aren’t viable.
Conclusion
Conversions are what make your life science company successful. Without a thorough understanding of them, you’ll likely have a hard time achieving your business goals.
It’s important to note that different businesses will require different types of conversions depending on their niche and specific marketing goals. For example, a budget-conscious startup might need to pay more attention to lead-based conversions, while a startup building its brand might need more focus on brand exposure and engagement.
Ultimately, conversion metrics should be used to guide and improve your marketing initiatives and customers’ experiences. While these eight we’ve discussed are some of the most important, they are not the only ones that will help track your campaigns.
Want to track a different type of conversion metric and don’t know how to do it? Consider working with an agency specialized in digital marketing for life sciences, such as Sciencia Consulting. Our team of experts will help you create the perfect marketing strategy for your business and show you how to track the most important metrics.
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