The modern path to purchase is not always linear, and many shoppers bounce between online and in-person marketing touchpoints along the way. This omnichannel shopping environment can make tracking sales attribution tricky, but using the right marketing metrics can help you untangle and understand a retail marketing campaign’s performance easier.
Shopper marketing reaches customers at the point of purchase, so it’s vital to track on-the-ground, actionable metrics that connect to real dollar sales for every campaign.
Comparing Actionable Metrics vs Vanity Metrics
Vanity metrics, such as likes, views, followers, saves, shares and impressions might make you feel like your business is doing well, but they are often misleading. These metrics do not provide any real insight into your performance and are not the best at measuring ad effectiveness.
Retail marketing is about converting browsers into buyers, so you should constantly be tracking actionable metrics instead. You can’t take a “like” to the bank, but conversions like a form submission or a purchase bring consumers into your brand and off social media – a true measure of sales velocity.
Actionable retail marketing metrics monitor specific, measurable and repeatable actions that get you closer to your campaign goals. They track each step along your sales funnel to determine which channels are working and where customers are falling off. It’s important to set your marketing goals before choosing which metrics to measure to prevent distractions from irrelevant data.
3 Key Shopper Marketing Metrics Retail Brands Measure
For over 20 years, Cliffedge Marketing’s shopper marketing strategy for retail brands includes measuring how effectively each campaign drives sales to determine what works and doesn’t. Before activation, we establish a non-advertising set as a control group to measure your ad performance more accurately.
Here are three sales metrics we measure in a shopper marketing campaign and why:
- Units Sold
Sales volume metrics track how many units of a particular product you sold over a given period at a specific location. This metric is important because it paints a more detailed picture of your sales efforts than revenue metrics alone. Making a profit doesn’t always mean your campaign is doing well – you may be making money from a few expensive items while others aren’t selling.
Coupons and discount codes could also cause a sales lift during your campaign without driving massive revenue compared to regular periods. Tracking the units sold by location provides insight into shopper demographics and can help you plan more successful campaigns in the future.
- Unit Velocity
Velocity metrics track the percentage change or increase in units sold per location during a given period. This metric shows how quickly your products move through various channels and helps you predict future volume requirements. It also helps identify which retailers sell your products best and how to adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly.
You can calculate unit velocity using the following formula:
Velocity = (month 2 units – month 1 units) / by month 1 units
You can use the velocity value of each store to calculate the average velocity of all retail sales during a given period. Please note that velocity usually tapers over time and can help indicate when it’s time to increase ad spend, change creative or even take a break if that audience has been fully saturated.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
According to a Gartner CMO spend survey, one in four marketing dollars is spent on paid media, so tracking your marketing attribution accurately is important to identify which adverts work best. ROAS helps you measure the effect of paid ads according to their price versus how much revenue they helped you generate during a marketing campaign. Ideally, the profit you make during a promotion should cover the cost of advertising, so if you’re running expensive adverts without generating the same amount in new sales, you’re taking a loss.
You can calculate the return on ad spend using this formula:
ROAS = Total campaign revenue / total campaign cost
Get Started Measuring Your Shopper Marketing Campaigns
Using sales metrics to track campaign performance is more effective when you compare data from past promotions and alternative campaigns. Cliffedge Marketing can help you set up and decode shopper marketing metrics across your sales funnels.
We make it easy to work with us for more informed advertising that adapts to your audience.
