Navigating the numbers: essential marketing metrics for wellness businesses
Time to jump into metrics.
Do you want to have a better sense of whether or not your marketing investments are working for you? It’s time to get comfortable with essential marketing metrics. This has been one of my favorite blogs to write so far. In it, I’ve collected a few examples of essential metrics across a few key scenarios. I’ve also created a fictitious case study for each section, so you can start to see how the metrics coalesce as patterns and tell a story that points you toward better marketing decisions.
My goal is for you to come away with a clearer understanding of the essential metrics that matter most for your healing arts business, how to measure them effectively, and why they are crucial for your growth and client satisfaction.
There’s an old saying among marketing quants, or marketing professionals who deal most closely with the numbers, that if you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen. While I don’t think that saying is completely fair – after all, there are plenty of marketing programs that take time to pay off or only do so indirectly – providing concrete data on what’s working and what’s not, absolutely will help you to fine-tune your strategies and maximize your impact.
Whether it's through email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, or pay-per-click advertising, each metric offers a unique insight into your business's health and potential.
Let’s get into it.
Section 1: Finding the metrics
Leveraging tools for metrics assessment: key technologies for healing arts professionals
Wondering how do you’ll access all these essential marketing metrics?
The good news is there are numerous tools at your disposal. Many are free or “free adjacent,” meaning you get the analytics for free when you advertise on a certain platform. I certainly recommend you start with free options, rather than investing big in any fancy analytics platforms that offer bells and whistles you might not need out of the gates.
At a high level, you can think about the universe of analytics broken into a couple categories: 1) comprehensive analytics platforms that take time to set up but will give you a pretty good view of what’s working on your website like Google Analytics, and 2) more specialized software for various marketing modalities.
Many specialized tools offer detailed reports on open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, for email (such as Mailchimp), enabling you to refine your messaging and content.
Similarly, social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer help you track engagement, follower growth, and content performance, providing a window into your audience's preferences and behaviors.
Most social media platforms themselves like Facebook or X have a lot of this built in, sometimes more comprehensively, but they of course don’t give you view across other social media platforms. After all, why would they help their competitors out?
When it comes to search engine optimization, tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs offer a deep dive into keyword performance, website traffic, and SEO rankings. These insights are very important for optimizing your website and content to attract more organic traffic.
Lastly, for pay-per-click advertising, platforms like Google Ads for paid search or and Facebook Ads Manager for paid social advertising, provide comprehensive data on ad performance, audience reach, and return on investment. These tools are essential for maximizing the effectiveness of your paid campaigns but again won’t show you the picture across platforms.
In the next section, we’ll learn about five essential metrics in each of these areas, how to calculate them, how they contribute to the overall success of your healing arts business. And, I’ll give an example or two about how you’d use one of them to make a real-world business decision.
Section 2: Getting into the metrics and how you can use them to make better decisions about your business
Email marketing metrics: crafting connections that count
Mastering email metrics: essential for engaging and retaining your audience
Email marketing metrics case study
Problem
Let’s suppose you have a strong open rate, low unsubscribe rate and high CTR and share rate, but low conversion rate (let’s say the conversion you’re measuring is appointment bookings). What might that mean?
Analysis
The high open rate and low unsubscribe rate tells you that you’re probably emailing people who are at least interested in what you have to say. They want to read your emails. Further, if they’re clicking and forwarding the emails, it validates they want to be engaged.
However, if the conversion rate is low, a couple things might be happening a little later in along the customer journey.
The first thing to rule out is whether something is wrong with your analytics.
This happens sometimes. One fairly common culprit I’ve seen a number of times originates from the email analytics coming from a different system than website analytics. What could be happening is the email system has over-reported their metrics, making them look “better” than they are and therefore the whole picture is off.
Or, more likely, the conversion tracking on your website is misfiring (probably wasn’t set up correctly, I’ve done this myself and it happens to the best of us). In that case, it’ll look like a bunch of people have dropped off and not taken an action they actually took.
The other possibility is that the analytics are all trustworthy, and that means you have an actual business problem. For some reason, people are interested in what you have to say via email, but not in booking the services you offer.
Why could that be?
A bunch of things could cause people to drop off and not book: 1) if we’re being honest, your website design might be the culprit. If you for example have a totally different email design compared to their website, they could think “oh I’m in the wrong place” and exit the browser before giving you a chance. 2) there could be something wrong with the bookings experience - it’s hard to use, buggy, etc. 3) you might need to reevaluate your pricing.
To diagnose, it would certainly be worth pretending to book yourself across the whole experience to see if you catch any issues. Whether you can or can’t, also a good practice to ask a few trusted current clients about their booking experience to see if you can diagnose that way. We wrote a blog about email strategies, “Effective email strategies for alternative health practitioners” too if you’d like to take a look.
Solution summary
Make sure your email and web analytics are all firing correctly.
Check your website to ensure the booking experience and offer packages are easy to purchase and compelling.
Social media (organic) metrics: engaging your online community
Revitalize your social media strategy with these vital metrics.
Case study
Problem
You find yourself with high post frequency, audience sentiment and content reach, but low engagement rates and follower growth.
Analysis
First of all, it’s great that sentient and reach are high and that you’re posting frequently. It means that you’re definitely trying hard and doing something right.
However, something is off – we also want and need engagement and followers on social.
Presumably, most of these metrics came from the same place so they should be telling a cohesive story, so we can probably rule out the engagement/follower growth rate problem being ruled out by an analytics issue.
My first thought would be: what exactly are you posting? If the reach and sentiment is high but people aren’t taking further action, it may be that your content is pleasant but not engaging enough. Or that perhaps you’ve got a targeting problem wherein you’re posting ot the wrong people or on the wrong platform that just doesn’t drive the engagement you’d want. Finally, you math also want to check your CTAs to make sure you’re asking people to take the action you find most favorable. We wrote a blog about this if you want to check it out, “What are CTAs? The Do's and Don'ts of CTA Design.”
Solution summary
Conduct a small focus group of current clients to see what kind of content they wish to engage with.
Ensure you’re following best practices on your calls-to-action.
Search (organic) metrics: ensuring you're easily found
Elevate your online presence with these core SEO metrics.
Case study
Problem
Let’s say you have strong website traffic and page views and a low bounce rate, but low SEO rankings and keyword performance.
Analysis
The first thing this tells us is your website appears to be performing well by some fairly important standards. Now, we don’t have a full picture because we didn’t include conversions as a part of this case study, but at least we know that your website traffic and low bounce rate tell a story of interested website visitors who are not churning off the page too fast.
However, your SEO rankings and keyword performance tell us that we might have an organic search problem. For some organic search best practices, check out our blog article, “Unlock the secret to top Google rankings for your holistic site!”
The first thing I’d probably check in this case would be your website traffic sources. This should be available in the analytics section of your website platform or in Google Analytics, if you have that set up. I’m going to venture a guess that your website traffic is largely not coming from “organic search” sources like Google or Bing, but rather being generated by other means such as direct, social or paid media.
The thing is, this particular “problem” may not be negatively impacting your business at this time. Most businesses focus a lot of effort on organic search results, but if your strategy of getting traffic elsewhere is garnering you as many clients as you can handle, I’d say this isn’t something you need to “fix” right away.
However, it might be nice to implement organic search practices at some point anyway to hedge your bets should some social algorithm change and you suddenly need to rely more heavily on search.
Solution summary
Develop and execute an SEO strategy.
PPC across social & search metrics: optimizing your ad spend
Maximize your ad impact with these essential PPC metrics.
Case study
Problem
Let’s say you have a high quality score, top ad position on Google, and conversion rate (based on appointment bookings), but low ROI and high CPC.
Analysis
The high quality score basically tells us that Google believes that the ad is relevant to the audience. This is a big deal. Many people mistakenly think that even if their websites are poorly designed and connected to their ads, if they pay enough money for to Google, they will be rewarded by getting a top spot. That’s just not the case.
If Google sees that your ad doesn’t match up with your website content and therefore people’s experience goes something like, “click the ad, be disappointed, churn off immediately,” they may not run your ad even if you’re willing to fork over a million dollars a click. So, it’s good to know you’ve got a good ad quality score out of the gates.
Also good is the high ad position and conversion rate. This completes the picture that you’ve got relevant ads with regards to your website, and that your customer journey is one that delivers appointment bookings for you.
So, what’s the problem? The problem is you’ve got a cost issue. If you have a low ROI on the program, it means that you’re spending too much, and even with the extra bookings, your marketing may not be worth it. The high CPC tells us that maybe you’re bidding for keywords that are particularly expensive. Or, that you fell for the “#1 or nothing” belief some advertisers have, which is that if you absolutely must get very top position on Google.
Often, it’s OK to have the second or third spot on Sponsored Google results.
Why? People still see it, they still click, but you pay slightly less a premium than you would for that coveted #1 spot. Most of the time, my ad strategy doesn’t require the #1 spot. You also might consider what keywords you’re investing in. Some of them just aren’t “worth” it because they’re too broad or competitive. Maybe localizing your ads, finding longer-tail keywords or overall investing in a slightly less competitive ad strategy could lower your CPC and therefore raise your ROI.
Solution summary
Re-evaluate your PPC strategy including (we wrote a blog on this one, too, “Cutting-edge PPC strategies for holistic health businesses in 2024”).
Focus not only on your conversions and ad placement, but also cost management.
Overall marketing metrics: a holistic view of your business
See the big picture with these key marketing metrics that can help drive drive growth and satisfaction.
Case study
Problem
Let’s say you find yourself in a situation where you have great customer retention, LTV and NPS, however you also find yourself with a high CAC and low revenue growth.
Analysis
This looks like a classic case of doing a great job with your book of current clients, but not finding new ones in an efficient way.
The question I’d start with here is this: is this a problem for you? We are obsessed with growth in our capitalistic economy, but I think it’s important to state that growth is still a personal/strategic choice for each business owner to make.
I also know plenty of practitioners who have the awesome problem of “enough” business that they really don’t need to go out and find new clients on a regular basis. If this sounds like you, bravo. Maybe it’s still worth a little marketing here and there to new clients to keep your brand top of mind and hedge your bets should a few of your top clients move away all at once, but you’re not in a bad position.
On the other hand, you may want to grow (chances are you do if you’re reading this). If that’s true, it’s time to do a little marketing! Now, because we also know you have a high CAC cost, we know that whatever marketing you are currently doing is costing you a lot, at least on a per-client basis. So, without knowing more, I’d probably advise you begin with some cheap/free marketing ideas. Content marketing (check out: “Seven content marketing ideas to educate and attract clients for healing arts practitioners,” and SEO both come to mind as viable options.
Solution summary
Create a lower-cost marketing strategy to find new clients.
Conclusion
I hope if you’ve gotten this far, you feel that embracing the world of marketing metrics is not just about tracking numbers. It's about connecting more deeply with your clients, understanding their needs, and crafting a marketing strategy that resonates, engages, and grows your healing arts business. Don’t let go of your best instincts about your business, but also allow these metrics to inform your marketing journey towards greater success and fulfillment.