Cannabis Marketing Metrics (KPIs)

Cannabis Marketing Metrics or KPIs

Launching a cannabis business is exciting, for sure, but after the big day comes and goes, what remains is often more than a little daunting. For example, let’s take successful cannabis marketing.

Successful marketing can make the difference between a brilliant new business that grows wings and flies and that same business that closes its doors a year or two after launch day. Many entrepreneurs get so panicked by this thought they simply start throwing themselves at any and every marketing idea in hopes of getting the word out about their business.

These entrepreneurs definitely get an “A” for effort. But chances are high they aren’t getting the marketing results their business needs and deserves to survive and thrive.

Yet the question these new entrepreneurs often have is valid – how will you know what works if you don’t just try everything and see what takes?

And this approach can work if you have unlimited time and cash to pursue every road, no matter how off the beaten path it may be. But most new entrepreneurs don’t have that kind of time or cash to give their new business that critical mass toehold in the cannabis industry.

Here, what is needed is to streamline and focus efforts – not putting all eggs in a single basket, per se, but putting eggs strategically into only those baskets that are most likely to deliver the desired business growth results.

The Role of Marketing Metrics

But how do you know which baskets to put your eggs into? To answer this question, what you need is something called marketing metrics.

Marketing metrics is data, pure and simple. Where do you get marketing metrics for your cannabis business? You need to collect them!

The simplest and most common way to collect marketing metrics is by setting your website up to automatically capture data about web visitors and customers. Many entrepreneurs like to use Google Analytics to do this because the service is free and there are lots of online tutorials to help analyze the data.

But there are other services as well – the important thing is to choose a service to collect data that will become your cannabis business’s marketing metrics.

Once you have Google Analytics (or your selected service) installed and working with your website, you will need to wait at least a month (and ideally six months) to give the service time to collect raw data and organize it into metrics for you to review.

Essential Marketing Metrics for New Cannabis Entrepreneurs

Once your cannabis business website is capturing data and beginning to generate useful marketing metrics, your next challenge is to make sense out of the data and what it can teach you.

What you need to avoid here is getting bogged down in the statistics (metrics) themselves. You could easily spend all day, week, month, year just analyzing metrics. So your goal is to hone in on the most important metrics – the ones that tell you what is working and what is not working with your cannabis marketing efforts.

Here are seven of the most important marketing metrics your website can generate for you and how to use them to grow your cannabis business.

Metric #1: “Unique Web Visitors.”

The word “unique” is the most important word here. A unique visitor is a single real person who has visited your cannabis business website. The more unique visitors who visit your website each day, the more opportunities you have to capture sales.

NOTE: There is another similar metric called “Total Web Visitors.” This is not the same metric! The one you want is called “Unique Web Visitors.”

Unique Web Visitors can tell you loads of useful information, including how many people visit every day, hour, or minute, where those visitors are coming from (around the world and online), when they are most likely to visit (days, times) and where they go when they arrive at your website.

Metric #2: “Bounce Rate.”

In website lingo, the word “bounce” means “leave.” So your “Bounce Rate” tells you how many visitors arrive at your cannabis website and then quickly leave again. Bounce Rate is calculated by clicks. You need to have at least two or more pages on your website in order for the Bounce Rate metric to be meaningful for your cannabis marketing efforts.

A visitor who bounces is one who arrives at your site and then departs before clicking on anything – a link, a menu button, an email signup box, et al. If that visitor arrives at your site and clicks on anything at all, they will not be counted in your bounce rate even if they leave after clicking.

Your website’s Bounce Rate can tell you whether the content on your web pages is engaging visitors and potentially converting them into customers. A high Bounce Rate generally means your website content needs improvement because visitors are not finding the information they are seeking.

Metric #3: “Referral Sources.”

This metric tells you where many of your website visitors are coming from. In other words, where did they go online before they visited your site? Where are they hearing about your cannabis business online?

Here is an example: let’s say you have a Twitter presence for your cannabis business. You look at your Referral Sources metric and see a high rate of referrals from Twitter. This tells you that Twitter is a potentially good place to continue your marketing efforts.

Metric #4: “Alexa.com Ranking.”

Alexa.com is a marketing service that focuses on website ranking based on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) parameters.

So where using a tool like Google Analytics will help you benchmark your website’s performance today against your website’s performance yesterday and make adjustments, Alexa.com’s data can then help you benchmark your website’s performance against that of competing cannabis websites.

Metric #5: “ROI (Return on Investment) for Marketing”

So now you are reviewing your cannabis marketing metrics and making adjustments to the content on your web pages. You are also evaluating how your cannabis website is performing versus your closest competitors and adjusting your advertising to capitalize on what seems to be working well.

This gives you a new data set – ROI, or Return On Investment. Your ROI tells you how well a given advertising or marketing campaign is performing. In other words, did that campaign generate enough website sales to justify your expense?

Keeping a close eye on cost versus profit for each marketing campaign will help you make better use of every marketing dollar in your budget.

Metric #6: “CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).”

The CAC of each marketing campaign can be calculated as follows: total marketing profit minus total marketing expense divided by the number of new customers the campaign generated.

In other words, how much did it cost you to win each new customer’s business? The more you study your marketing metrics, the better you will get at generating new business without overspending on marketing to do so.

Metric #7: “Lifetime Value.”

As you no doubt know by now, there are so many different types of customers! Some will buy from you once and never be heard from again. Others will keep coming back day after day and year after year.

The “Lifetime Value” metric is vital to ensure you aren’t spending more to attract new cannabis customers than their estimated business is worth.