Three CTA Metrics You Need to Track

What does your annual performance review have in common with marketing metrics? Both are designed to find areas of strength and build on them, and identify areas in need of improvement for further growth.

And while neither is exactly exciting, they both serve an important purpose.

Let’s skip your performance review for the moment, however, and focus on three marketing metrics you should be tracking to find the strengths and opportunities in the performance of your calls-to-action.

Need a quick refresher course on CTAs? Review these posts on the characteristics that impact how well your calls-to-action perform.

• Top 10 Ten Ways to Write a Compelling CTA

• 7 Criteria for Evaluating Calls-to-Action

• 5 Steps to Picking Blog CTAs that Generate Leads

So what metrics should you use to track and improve your CTA performance? The top three:

1. Click-through rate

The most important metric to track in monitoring your CTAs’ performance is the click-through rate.

What percentage of people who have seen the CTA actually clicked on it?

This basic metric should be tracked for all CTAs, whether in emails, social media updates, blog posts or paid media.

2. Clicks to submissions

This metric provides some insight into how the CTA and the linked landing page work together. In other words, how many of the visitors who clicked on the CTA filled out the connected landing page form to access the offer.

Tracking clicks to submissions is a great way to compare how two different landing pages perform when using the same call-to-action. A lower click-to-submission rate may be a sign that what the CTA offers and what the landing page offers don’t match up well.

3. Views to submissions

Finally, views to submissions tracks how many of the people who see the call-to-action click on it AND complete the landing page form.

Track of all of these metrics for a period of time to determine your current averages, then set benchmarks for future performance for each type of call-to-action: email, blog, social media, etc.

Compare individual CTAs to look for commonalities amongst the high performers—and under-performers—and use those insights to further optimize future calls-to-action.

There’s more to CTAs, of course, than measurement. Find it all in our Comprehensive Guide to Designing and Executive Calls-to-Action.