A key marketing difficulty, according to 40% of marketers, is showing the ROI of their marketing operations. This is most likely related to metric measurement.
There’s a lot you can focus on in digital marketing, but there’s also a lot you don’t need to focus on, which can be daunting. Furthermore, understanding how those who receive promotional materials feel provides insight into what people want – and what they don’t want.
That’s why we’ve compiled this comprehensive collection – everything necessary for digital marketing metrics. We cover everything from email marketing to SEO, mobile commerce to social media marketing.
Digital Marketing Metrics: The Lowdown
Most marketing departments have a plethora of tools for measuring performance across channels. These include landing pages, email, content, and paid ads.
But most marketers still find it challenging to use these solutions in a way that allows for accurate ROI tracking.
The problem lies not in the fact that marketers don’t have the tools but rather that there are no clear guidelines as to what metrics directly affect your small business and ultimately, your bottom line.
You need a deeper understanding of what these metrics mean and how you can use them. This will ultimately steer your marketing decisions in the right direction.
1. Website Traffic
Because your website is what represents you and your company in the professional world, the amount of traffic it receives is a function of the entire performance of your digital strategy.
Make sure to update your website design, take care of the coding, and troubleshoot any technological issues on a regular basis if you want your brand to leave a successful digital footprint.
The last thing you want is for your potential clients to put off by poor loading, mobile incompatibility, or broken links, which are all crucial to SEO.
Measuring your website traffic should include the following:
- The amount of direct visitors
- The number of referral visitors
- Organic visitors that came from search engines
- Traffic generated from social media
- Traffic that comes from paid search campaigns
- Website visitors that come from your email marketing campaigns
Where your website visitors come from gives incredible insight into your target audience. What platforms they are coming from, how they’re finding your business and brand, these are metrics that you can use to make strategic decisions.
2. Page Views and Session Durations
These two metrics are directly related to your website.
Page views are a high-level measure that give you a complete picture of your website’s performance, page by page. This number displays how many times users have visited your page and highlights the most popular ones.
Create your content strategy and SEO strategy using this metric. Determine which pages receive the most traffic. You can use this to increase the odds of conversions and purchases, by placing your links and CTAs (calls-to-action) in these places.
The amount of time visitors spend on your website or on a certain page measures in seconds, otherwise known as page session duration.
This information not only tells you how well your content is received by your target audience, but it also shows how user-friendly your website is. Some flaws prevent visitors from investigating or returning to your site, such as ambiguous navigation, slow page loading times, and broken internal links.
The breakdown of this metric can assist you in examining how visitors interact with various items on a page. Use these insights to optimize your pages and increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
3. Conversion Rates
This is the percentage of website visitors who take some sort of positive action and meet one or more of your conversion goals. Making a purchase that helps you achieve your company goal of growing revenue is one example of a beneficial action.
Subscribing to your newsletter is another example of a positive action that helps you achieve your conversion objective of reaching as many people as possible with your top-of-funnel products.
Knowing your website’s conversion rate also allows you to assess the efficacy of your marketing initiatives. You can pinpoint those that are leaking leads and failing to close sales.
4. Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics is a large umbrella of platforms, places, strategies, and content for any digital marketer to measure effectively.
There are three main categories that require measuring when it comes to your social media efforts:
- The engagement rate
- Brand awareness
- Return on investment
Each of these categories comes with its own set of checklist items in order to gain the overall picture of how your social media is performing.
The Engagement Rate
The engagement rate is a measure that is frequently used to determine how engaged your audience is with your content and how effective your brand efforts are. Consumers engage and interact with brands through “likes,” “comments,” and “sharing”.
The amount and frequency with which audience members connect with your account is referred to as engagement. Every social media platform will have an engagement measure.
This will be the aggregate of smaller interaction possibilities like likes, comments, and shares.
Many platforms have multiple types of metrics or various naming conventions, such as Retweets vs. Shares, for example. High engagement rates imply audience health like how responsive your audience is, and how many of your followers are “genuine”.
This metric is a true measure of the effectiveness of your content, your engagement rate, and your brand awareness.
Brand Awareness And Reach
Impressions and reach are both critical metrics to evaluate, especially if your social goals are focused on brand awareness and perception. It’s critical to grasp the distinction between reach and impressions because you should be using these metrics as brand standards.
- The number of times a post appears in someone’s timeline is referred to as impressions.
- The number of possible unique viewers for a post (typically your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts) is referred to as reach.
While impressions can tell you a lot about your content’s potential for social visibility on their own, it’s still vital to look at other metrics for a complete picture of performance.
If you want to raise awareness while also teaching your audience, you’ll probably want to seek a combination of both impressions and engagement.
If a post has a large number of impressions but a low number of engagements (and hence a low engagement rate), it’s likely that your post wasn’t intriguing enough for people to act after seeing it in their feed.
Return On Investment
Social referral traffic and conversions are connected to both sales and marketing goals, and ultimately key company goals, and are most applicable to organizations with websites or e-commerce platforms.
To track these, you’ll need a publishing strategy that includes UTM tracking and a website traffic analytics software like Google Analytics (or a built-in one if you’re using Shopify), as well as a website traffic analytics program like Google Analytics.
The way a user finds your website is through referrals. They’ll be divided down into sources in web analytics. The source/medium you’ll be watching is usually “social,” and then it’s broken down by network. When someone buys something from your website, this is referred to as a conversion.
A social conversion occurs when someone comes to your website through a social media channel and then buys anything during that same visit.
Ultimately, this metric should tell you how many leads are turning into actual sales, so you can work out if what you have spent is making you more money.
5. Paid Advertising ROI
Okay, you’ve determined your objectives and studied all of the variables. Now is the time to consider how you create your advertising approach. What about the costs, though? What is the impact of your digital marketing campaign on your budget?
Observing the profitability of your campaign is important. Probably, one of the most important aspect of measuring digital marketing performance.
At the end of the day, if you’re spending money on paid digital advertising, then you really need to know what’s coming back to you, so return on investment is key.
Cost Per Click
Cost Per Click (CPC) is a measure that shows how much money you spend as an advertiser based on how many times your ad is clicked.
A click should cost you about $2 on average. When you reach your daily budget, your ad will be instantly removed.
This can also be referred to as Pay-Per-Click.
Cost Per Conversion
Cost Per Conversion/Cost Per Acquisition: CPC refers to the expenditures you must pay to actually sell your product or service to a client, whereas CPA refers to the expenses you must pay to really sell your product or service to a customer.
6. Traffic To Lead Conversion Rate
The conversion rate of website visitors to actual customers/leads is measured by the traffic-to-lead ratio.
Lead generation is directly tied to the success of your business, therefore it’s critical to understand what’s working and what’s not in the traffic-to-leads pipeline.
The following are some things to think about when it comes to website traffic and leads:
- People are drawn to your website as a result of your traffic-generating efforts.
- When a visitor arrives on your website—specifically, the page they were directed to or the page that contains the material they are looking for—they have the option of continuing to interact with you or not.
- If a visitor decides not to interact further, you’ll need to figure out why there’s a discrepancy between their wants and the material on your site.
- If there is a disconnect—meaning the user did not complete a lead—your traffic-to-lead ratio will show where in the marketing flow the exit occurred.
Tracking the traffic-to-lead ratio will help you figure out when and where you need to make improvements to your website. Perhaps the content should be altered to better answer the questions that your potential leads may have.
Perhaps a single page has a formatting issue. Whatever the issue, analyzing your traffic-to-lead ratio will demonstrate how effective your digital marketing and digital presence are at generating leads.
7. Landing Page Performance
A website’s landing page is typically designed to accomplish certain advertising or marketing objectives, such as promoting a product, informing users of special offers, or launching a service.
Visitors arrive on the landing page after clicking on a hyperlink, which could be an ad or a link on your site or on another website. Landing pages are created with the goal of eliciting a positive response and generating certain marketing results.
Here, you will want to take note of the following:
- Total landing page views for understanding peak traffic times
- Landing page conversions
- Where is your landing page traffic coming from
This will give you an accurate picture of what’s happening with your landing pages. Are they working? Perhaps the problem is not getting people to get to your landing page but rather getting them to take action.
Making Magic With Digital Marketing Metrics
No marketer or company or brand wants to waste time or money on marketing strategies that are useless.
It’s critical to identify the campaigns that are delivering the required business outcomes as soon as possible, so you can keep them going and replicate the patterns across other marketing channels.
Only tracking these digital marketing metrics will allow you to keep track of your marketing efforts without wasting time, money, or effort.
The best part about reaching the end of this article is knowing that you’ve found an agency that can do all this for you and more, contact us now.