Whether you are looking to track digital marketing performance, SEO progress, or your social media growth, having set up measurable marketing metrics and KPIs can help your business reach targets month-over-month. Digital marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are some of the most important elements of any campaign, and without them, marketing teams wouldn’t have a clear picture of whether their marketing strategy is a success.
So, keep it simple. Carefully select a handful of core performance metrics and stick to them. Don’t be tempted to stuff every statistic into your reports — instead, include only those that speak to your campaign’s objectives.
Why the Right Metrics Make a Difference?
Simply knowing your page views and click-throughs is not enough, isolated data points might go down well in status meetings, but they can’t tell you if you’re getting a good ROI from your marketing spend. You need metrics that tell a story and show you a more detailed picture of your marketing efforts. Digital marketing metrics are critically important because they help brands determine whether campaigns are successful, and provide insights to adjust future campaigns accordingly. They help marketers understand how their campaigns are driving towards their business goals, and inform decisions for optimizing their campaigns and marketing channels.
Types of Marketing Metrics
Marketing departments operate across multiple channels. From social media to email marketing, to lead generation, your digital marketing strategy will include a variety of activities. With such a wide range of channels being used, it’s important for marketing teams to actively track progress and performance in real-time with the right marketing metrics. When choosing the right marketing metrics, you should keep in mind which channel you are using and who will be using the data to make business decisions. Business owners will want to see an overview for every marketing channel, while managers will want to dive into the metrics for a deeper understanding of day-to-day performance.
In this article, we’ll focus on two types of digital marketing metrics:
- Digital marketing metrics for engagement.
- Digital marketing metrics for revenue.
Digital Marketing Metrics for Engagement
Engagement rate. It is a difficult metric to measure because it varies depending on the platform. For example, social media platforms will define engagement rates based on likes, comments, and shares. A high bounce rate could be an indication that your web pages don’t meet the needs of visitors or it loads incredibly slowly, but looking at a low bounce rate in conjunction with a good average page depth means that people are likely to be reading your content.
Average session duration (or time on page). Someone who has been nurtured to a point of purchase and knows exactly what they want to do on your website may skim a product or service page and convert quickly into a paying customer. So when you look at average session duration, look at it in conjunction with your other engagement and lead generation metrics.
Average page depth. This digital marketing metric looks at pages per session (or the average number of pages visited by a user within a session). This metric is a standard option in Google Analytics, in terms of relevance to your overall website traffic (and how you use page depth to analyze web pages), for example, you can use page depth to determine how much interest users have in the sub-pages of your website.
Bounce rate. It is essentially the percentage of visitors that leave a web page without taking an action, such as clicking on a call-to-action, filling out a form, or making a purchase. You can track your overall bounce rate using website analytics tools, or for single pages or segments of your site.
Digital Marketing Metrics for Revenue
Conversion rate. The conversion rate of your digital marketing tells you how many people follow through on your call to action (CTA) as opposed to how many do not. Your CTA could encourage people to buy something from you, contact you via phone, or sign up for an email newsletter, to name a few.
Click-through rate. Put simply, click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. CTR is the first step in the process of improving your ad’s relevancy and generating desired actions such as making a purchase, fill out a lead or a contact form, etc. CTR is not just an indication of how relevant your ads are to searchers. CTR also contributes to your Ad Rank in the search engines.
Cost per lead. Cost per lead tells you how much you spend to get someone to convert on your site. A lead is not necessarily someone who has made a purchase (or will make a purchase), but they’re a prospect who you can eventually turn into a customer.
Cost per click. Depending on your bid settings, cost-per-click (CPC) may serve as a critical digital marketing metric in your ad campaigns. This metric measures what your company pays, on average, for every click on your ad.
Cost per acquisition. Cost per acquisition (CPA) is an overall online marketing metric for advertising. As your CPA also depends on your bidding method, like CPC, optimizing your bids can improve your cost per acquisition. If you can lower your CPC by a few cents, for example, that will also lower your company’s CPA.
How to Successfully Track Your Online Marketing Metrics?
You can measure dozens of digital marketing metrics. While that data may provide you with plenty of graphics, it may leave you without the insight that you need to analyze your campaign and discover ways to improve it. If you want to choose and measure your digital marketing metrics, you should follow these three steps:
- Create your goals;
- Choose your tools;
- Pick your reporting method.
Marketing KPIs
A KPI in marketing is a measurable value tied to specific objectives of a marketing campaign. It indicates progress during the campaign and helps measure marketing effectiveness at the end of a campaign. Marketing metrics are numbers that should be consistently tracked to understand the status of marketing campaigns and whether they are helping to meet KPIs and business goals. Key performance indicators show how well campaigns are tracking against each campaign goal. KPIs change over time and there is not a set of KPIs that work for every campaign. What’s more, measurement looks different at each stage of the marketing funnel. That said, here are three KPIs and metrics that can be helpful for digital marketers to measure.
Here are a few digital marketing KPI’S that can be included in your marketing campaigns:
Sales revenue. You need to ensure that you can report that your sales revenue exceeds the expenses of your marketing campaigns. Remember, reporting for the sake of reporting is pointless. Reports should lead to increased profits. This is the main difference between a proactive, results-oriented team and a backward-oriented team.
Customer lifetime value. A customer’s value to your organization is only as good as the time they spend as your customer. To prevent churn, you need a 360-degree view of your customers, and to constantly be monitoring customer satisfaction and usage of your product.
Online marketing ROI. Reporting and analytics are huge here. Having the ability to report on and analyze website activity, as well as where the traffic is coming from, is vital to your online success. Once you have tools in place to analyze this data, you can optimize traffic sources that result in more lead traffic, ultimately increasing conversions on your site.
Marketing qualified leads. Once a lead has met all of your marketing team’s criteria and is considered a marketing qualified lead, your sales team needs to accept the lead as a sales qualified lead. If the lead is not accepted by sales, the lead is put back on marketing’s radar. It is important to know the ratio of leads that get thrown back into marketing’s funnel, as well as leads that are accepted by sales. Once you know this, you can address any disconnects.
Social media reach. If you want to be more aware of how effective are your online marketing activities and if they are performing as planned, the social media reach metric will deliver you many insights and will help you draw conclusions considering your marketing strategy.
Final Thoughts
Reporting on marketing performance can be difficult, especially when it comes to measuring success on a multi-channel marketing strategy. But with an optimized tech stack and the right measurement infrastructure in place, you can effectively identify the channels and activities tied to marketing success and make data-driven decisions to improve your performance. Armed with these metrics and KPI’s performance, you’ll be able to prove that marketing is delivering qualified leads to sales. Optimize your spending next time and ensure that your marketing team gets the biggest bang for their buck.
Contact us to see how we can help you build measurable marketing strategies that accelerate the bottom line with special marketing metrics and KPIs, and the growth of your business.