For growth-minded companies, metrics are critical in defining progress against goals and objectives. Every area of business aligns with specific metrics, and that includes digital marketing. There are a host of digital marketing metrics to consider. Some are more meaningful than others. In this post, we’ll highlight the ones you should be watching closely.
Why and How to Measure
You can only improve on things if you measure them. Nor will you understand ROI (return on investment) or ROAS (return on ad spend) without analyzing data. Metrics allow you to track a campaign and specifically contribute sales or conversions to it.
However, it can be tricky to manage these metrics. Often, the data exists in multiple places, and you want to have a holistic view. If possible, it’s great to have a centralized dashboard and reporting capabilities.
Digital Marketing Metrics: Keep Your Eyes Fixed on These
Website Traffic Metrics
Website traffic is a key metric. You can learn a lot from this data, including:
- Understanding if traffic is increasing or declining
- What pages have the most traffic (page views)
- How long people spend on your website
- The strongest referrer to your website (Google, direct, social media, third-party websites, etc.)
- New vs. returning visitors
All this information is available in Google Analytics. Finding trends in traffic data will allow you to find opportunities to improve and leverage. In addition, the analysis of traffic patterns delivers tremendous insights.
Conversions and Lead Generation Metrics
First, you have to define what a conversion is. It could be an actual purchase, completing a form, downloading content from a landing page, or another action. Once you decide what constitutes a conversion, you’ll want to track it — one way to do this by setting up goals in Google Analytics.
You’ll also have data around any form-related conversions so that you can attribute the acquisition of a lead or customer to a specific campaign. Lead generation campaigns can include paid search ads, social media marketing (paid and organic), email marketing, and other content amplification channels. You’ll determine their effectiveness by the leads generated compared to ad spend or efforts (if organic).
Search Engine Ranking
How you rank for keywords is vital to your visibility. Most buyers begin their journey with a Google search. Thus, it’s imperative to work on SEO so that your content is the best answer to the user’s query.
You should check your ranking for keywords every 30 days and calculate month-over-month changes. If content is falling in ranking, redistribute it to give it a bump. You may also want to update it to be more relevant. SEO is a long game in digital marketing and something you can never take your eye off.
Engagement Metrics
This category of metrics falls in several channels. You can measure engagement on your website with time on page and bounces. Measuring social media engagement is essential as well, and includes likes, comments, and shares. Email marketing is also a channel that measures engagement, which you’ll understand by reviewing open rates and clicks.
What you learn from these metrics helps you with digital marketing tactics, informing you which channels have the most engagement and why.
Digital Marketing Metrics: Measure, Improve, Measure Again
Digital marketing metrics are essential to determining the success of campaigns and efforts. They will inform what you do next with insights learned. However, it can be challenging to measure, improve, and measure again. Small businesses don’t often have the bandwidth or expertise. We can help. We are experts at digital marketing. Our team can launch, measure, and optimize your campaigns to deliver traffic, leads, and sales. Connect with us today to chat.
