Track Marketing Outcomes with Digital Metrics
What are macro and micro outcomes?
Which micro and macro outcome metrics should I track on my website?
Which ones should I track on social media?
Imagine your business has 2 door-to-door salesmen: Macro and Micro. Along with having really weird names, they have 2 very different selling styles.
Macro is all about the immediate sale. From the moment he shows up at a customer’s door, he’s persuading that person to buy, buy, buy products.
Micro visits potential customers often, never being too pushy. He may not make a sale right away, but people are comfortable enough to invite him in whenever he shows up. Eventually they start buying products from him.
You know that both Macro and Micro are valuable to your business, but you decide to figure out which one will be more profitable for you in the long run.
Macro outcomes are about short-term success and reaching your main business goal (like making more sales).Macro and micro are actually different types of digital marketing outcomes.
Micro outcomes are about longer-term business value (like brand awareness and recall). They contribute to your main business goal in the future and engage people who aren’t ready to buy right now, but are still interested in your business.
It’s tempting to focus on macro outcomes only, but keep in mind that micro can end up being 3 to 4 times more economically valuable. And measuring both can tell you if your digital marketing is successful with a wide range of customers.
LISTEN UP
To measure both outcomes, you need to know which metrics you should track for all your marketing channels. Let’s start with your owned channels, AKA the ones you completely control, like your desktop and mobile websites.
For your mobile website, you can skip macro metrics and only look at micro.
That’s because currently mobile is less about conversions or sales and more about creating an easy, fluid experience. A clunky or flat-out unusable mobile site might make people leave immediately and never return.
To measure your mobile site’s micro outcomes, track:
BOUNCE RATE
% of people who land on your website and leave right away.
RETURN USERS
% of people who come back to your site after their first visit.
For your desktop website, you should look at different metrics for both your immediate and long-term business goals.
The metric for your main business goal or macro outcome is conversions. That normally means sales, but you may have other goals.
For example, you might want to focus on lead generation instead of sales so it would make sense to track how many newsletter signups you’re getting from your website.
Whatever your goal is, track it over a set period of time and see if your website is making it happen. If not, it’s time to make some site improvements.
TIP
Sometimes you can use your micro outcomes to reach your macro outcome.The metrics for your micro outcomes can be percentage of times more than one page is viewed and the number of accounts created.
These can tell you whether or not your website has made people comfortable and interested enough to keep interacting with your company – which means they could become lifelong customers and fans.
Let’s check out how Ghost, a company that offers a customizable blog platform, used their owned channels to do this.
Ghost gave new customers a free 14-day trial of their service. Their main business goal (AKA macro outcome) was getting more people to upgrade to their paid GhostPro platform post-trial.
They found out more people upgraded after they created their first post, used a custom blog theme, or added a custom domain name to their blog. So they made these 3 actions micro goals.
To reach these micro goals (and by association their macro goal of subscriptions), they created a “Blog Setup” progress meter. The visual encouraged people to take all 3 actions.
If someone left Ghost’s site without doing the micro goals, they’d get an email with a 90-second video showing them how to complete the actions.
The progress meter and how-to videos helped raise micro goal completion from 7% to 26% – a success that would “trickle up” to Ghost’s macro subscription goal.
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You can also track outcomes on rented channels like YouTube and social media.
Macro and micro outcomes are a bit different in this scenario since you’ll mainly be judging your content’s quality. You’ll also use different metrics depending on what channel you’re on.
For YouTube, you can track amplification as a macro outcome and subscribers as a micro outcome.
Tracking amplification, or how much your content is spreading to a larger audience, shows you how many people link to, embed, or share your YouTube video. It’s a good indication of how popular or effective it is.
Tracking subscribers shows you how well you’re appealing to your fans. They’re the ones who want to see your content as soon as you post it, and they’ll be the ones who will first spread it – which, of course, helps your macro goal of amplification.
For stream-based social media sites, where posts like a status update or Tweet move through a feed quickly, you can track conversation rate and brand awareness.
Conversation rate is your macro outcome metric. It’s the number of comments on your individual posts, and can tell you if you’re finding your audience, sharing good content, using the right tone of voice, and creating an online community.
Micro outcomes on social media will tell you how much your posts are raising your brand awareness in the long run.
These outcomes can include almost all the positive interactions between your channel and your audience – like the click-through rate on links you post, new followers you get, or the number of people who are driven back to your site.
DO THIS NOW
Make sure you’re ready to do outcome metrics on at least one channel. Let’s start with your desktop website.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Macro outcomes are business goals usually focused on immediate conversations.
Micro outcomes are goals that help brand awareness and recall long-term.
You can track both across your owned and rented channels.