Those of us that call ourselves digital marketers love a good set of acronyms, abbreviations and jargon, especially when it comes to measuring performance and assessing value. If you’re responsible for budget management or even requesting budget sign off, here’s some of the more common reporting buzz words you’ll need a good handle on if you want to prove value in your marketing.
AOV – Average Order Value
The Average Order Value is taken from all your eCommerce data and calculates what each customer spent on average. This is typically broken down by channel or date to give greater insight.
To calculate AOV, just divide the total revenue generated by the total volume of customers.
Average Order Value is important because it helps you measure performance per marketing channel, influences wider business discussions, it’s often used in forecasting and gives guidance on where marketing budget should be allocated.
The single best way to increase AOV is to convince your customers to spend more money. So, make sure any USPs are clearly highlighted. Most eCom sites will offer free delivery with orders over a certain value which is a great way to test AOV against conversion rate (CR)
Attribution
In the world of marketing, Attribution is attributing various touch points to a conversion. For example, if someone clicked on a PPC ad and spent money with you but they only clicked your PPC ad because they’d noticed one of your social media posts, the social channel should have a percentage of that revenue spend attributed to it.
Attribution is often overlooked because it can be hard to get right. Tracking various sources online is easy enough but when you start factoring in offline marketing, it becomes harder. If you’re spending money on postal campaigns or even TV ads, it’s important you can attribute revenue across all channels involved. If you’ve got physical stores as well as a website you’re now tracking conversion across multiple sources.
Pets Corner were especially sceptical about the value of digital marketing because it’s hard to quantify when combined with physical stores. Read our case study to learn how isolating the true impact of marketing campaigns from the constant fluctuation of retail sales grew their revenue.
BR – Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of traffic that leaves your website after just viewing one page. You want as low a possible bounce rate as it means more traffic is visiting more than one page and statistically speaking, the more time a visitor spends on your website, the higher the chance they’ll convert (or return and convert)
Typically, there are two reasons your bounce rate might be too high:
- You offer a sub optimal User Experience. Your page might keep jumping about as it’s loading making elements hard to click on (this is called Cumulative Layout Shift and is part of Google’s organic algorithm), you might keep showing popups (which can also have a negative impact on SEO performance) or maybe the content is just too hard to read.
- It’s not sticky enough. Just because you’re not doing anything wrong, doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. Your SEO might have convinced you to publish huge blocks of content but if they’re not easy to read, using bullets, imagery and easy to digest paragraphs, you’ll put users off. Maybe your navigation is hard to use or just difficult to navigate.
Vuzo recently worked with Currys, the UK’s largest electronics retailer. Read our case study to learn how our data scientists were able to offer instant evidence on what was causing their high bounce rate, and how their in house SEO team fixed it with our recommendations.
CPC
Cost Per Click (interchangeable with PPC, Pay Per Click) is a term used in paid marketing to give a currency price of an individual click. This is especially important when you’re planning a new campaign because it helps you plan your budget. The more competitive or more demand there is for a keyword, the more expensive it’s likely to be.
CPM
Cost Per Impression (technically, cost per mille which is Latin for thousands) is the cost per every 1,000 times your ad will be shown.
CPA / CPL
Cost per Acquisition and Cost Per Lead is how much money has been invested into getting a conversion. If you’re running an eCommerce website and a customer spends £100 on a product, you’ll know the money it cost getting them to make that conversion in the first place. Maybe they arrived via a PPC ad in which case you’ll need to factor in the cost of that click. Maybe they came to you via an organic result which, whilst technically free, will still need you to factor in how much money is invested in SEO to contribute towards that listing in the first place.
CTR
Click Through Rate is applicable to paid and organic traffic, and is measuring the percentage of traffic that clicked through to the website after seeing it.
CTR is calculated by dividing the total volume of clicks by the volume of impressions and turning this number into a percentage. Whilst there are various reports on ‘average’ click through rates, it will vary depending on device, website industry, local and personalisation, SERP features (like video, People Also Ask results, images, local listings and maps etc)
Luckily CTR is a wonderfully easy metric to measure and with the right analysis, there are plenty of relatively resource light tests that can be run to improve it.
Get in touch to hear some of our case studies on how we use Customer Review Analysis to improve PPC ad copy and SEO meta descriptions to increase CTR by 2.6%, CR by more than 17% and improved ROAs by more than 35%.
CR
Conversion Rate is another important multi-channel reporting metric as it’s the percentage of traffic that results in a conversion. Whilst it’s a great top level metric for reporting ROI, it’s important to start segmenting the data before you try to derive any actionable insight from it.
First party data
First party data is data that a buyer has shared directly with you (the brand or the merchant) for specific purposes (i.e. a transaction, or marketing permission).
KPI
Key Performance Indicator is another important but broad marketing performance term. A KPI is any piece of information you deem important to measure the success of a campaign. If you’re running an email campaign you’ll want to track open rates which will be a KPI. In SEO, you’ll want to see visibility increase or rankings grow.
The most important thing to remember when setting KPIs is to make sure you’re comfortable with them. Don’t let an external agency bully you into them, yes Quality Score is important in the world of PPC, but if you’re more concerned with the return on spend or a strong conversion rate, those should be your primary KPIs.
LTV / CLV
Lifetime Value or Customer Lifetime Value helps measure the value of brand, customer service and the true cost that first conversion could produce. This is an especially important metric for subscription or renewal type businesses like insurance but it’s still a very important metric for any website that values customer loyalty.
Read our case study on Sophie Conran. After believing their PPC had hit a ceiling, we analysed their customer data to produce more accurate targeting to deliver a 50% reduction in CPC. By understanding their LTV segments, they were able to reinvest this saved cash back into more profitable marketing.
NPS
Your Net Promoter Score is a number between 1 – 10 that says how likely a customer would be to recommend your business.
NPS is calculated by taking away the percentage of people who wouldn’t recommend you from the percentage of people who would. The more people who would recommend your business, the higher your NPS will be.
Whilst not technically a digital marketing metric, happy customers are more likely to spend money with you again (with a low CPA), and Trust is a SEO ranking factor. Whilst NPS itself shouldn’t impact rankings, too many vocal, unhappy customers will get Google’s attention and you could see your Trust from Google decline.
PEBCAK
Ok… this isn’t a real reporting acronym, but who hasn’t worked in at least one job where, when asked to confirm the problem, they’ve wanted to point to a colleague and explain that the Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard!
Vuzo can help with this too, we routinely run training sessions and workshops with our clients. From product design and buying teams, to customer relation staff, there’s always plenty everyone in the business can do to help all facets of digital marketing.
PPC
Pay Per Click is when you’re paying every time someone clicks on your ad that takes them through to your website (like CPC). If you’re using platforms like Google Ads, you’re bidding every time someone searches a keyword you’ve specified. If you’ve said you’re willing to pay more than anyone else bidding on that keyword, your ad will usually be displayed at the top of Google.
Of course, the second you stop paying, your ads disappear and if you don’t understand this method of marketing well, you could find you’re spending a lot of money very quickly without seeing tangible results.
ROAS
Return On Ad Spend is the amount of revenue generated from either a campaign or ad. This is an holistic enough metric to give a broad overview of paid performance, but can also be specific enough to spot opportunities for improvement.
SEO / Organic
Search Engine Optimisation is not something that can be measured with a single metric. You’ll have to set your own KPIs depending on what is important to you. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising (making improvements) to your website to stand the best chance of getting the most organic traffic from search engines.
Whilst Google doesn’t state categorically how its ranking algorithm works, it does publish information on what offers a good user experience and what offers a bad user experience. A competent SEO will know how to read between Google’s lines, interpret Google’s published Website Guidelines into clear actions and recommendations and explain how Google thinks in a succinct enough manner to keep your website future proof.