If you are investing a lot of your time and money to boost your brand awareness, you will probably want to know how your marketing campaign is performing. However, digital marketing can quickly become confusing and overwhelming for beginners, business owners, and anyone who isn’t a marketing expert. Even if you know how to obtain data on your marketing, you might not know which metrics are relevant. To help you get a good ROI on your marketing, we will explain which of the important digital marketing metrics to follow.
Traffic Sources
Arguably, the most crucial measure of the effectiveness of your marketing is knowing if it’s bringing people to your website. Marketing campaigns can have different goals, and not all of them need to lead to product purchases directly. Some campaigns can build brand awareness or generate interest for a new product launch. However, for businesses with an online presence, when a purchase does happen, it’s likely going to be through your website. Therefore, we suggest working with professionals to improve your website design. Good websites can improve the user experience and attract more organic traffic.
You should monitor individual sources of traffic to your site. They can represent the efficiency of your marketing and your SEO performance. The most important digital marketing metrics to follow for site traffic are:
- Referral traffic. The number of visitors who arrived at your website through a URL on another site. This can be important if you invest in influencers or other forms of word-of-mouth marketing.
- Campaign traffic: These are visits from your digital campaigns and ad clicks.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate indicates the ratio of users who click on one of your links. Although this metric sounds rather vague, when we apply it to various forms of online advertising, we can get valuable insight. Your click-through rate (CTR) can be particularly important for measuring the effectiveness of your pay-per-click advertising. PPC advertising is great for improving online visibility and lead generation. You can calculate your CTR for the PPC ads you run with this simple formula:
CTR = Ad Clicks / Number of Impressions
Here, the impressions represent all of the people who viewed your ads. The CTR represents the percentage of that audience who clicked on the ad and arrived at your landing page. If your CTR is low, that could indicate that your ads aren’t performing well and that you should probably run a different copy. Fortunately, it is pretty easy to experiment with PPC advertising. You can run simple A/B tests to see which version gets a better audience response.
Cost per lead
There is no doubt that running a digital marketing campaign can be expensive. Even if you decide to do most of the work yourself, you are still devoting time and other resources which could have been spent elsewhere. However, if your marketing is effective, it will be well worth the expense. The cost-effectiveness of your campaigns is one of the most important digital marketing metrics to follow. One of the best ways to calculate this is to look at the cost per lead:
Cost per lead = Cost of generating leads / Number of leads acquired
By doing this calculation, we can see how effective your marketing is in generating new leads. Any individual who has expressed an active interest in your products or services is considered a lead. Obviously, not all leads will be equal, and you can separate them into segments. However, attaching a dollar amount to your lead generation can be a good measure of your marketing effectiveness.
Conversion rate
Conversions represent site visitors who perform an action you desire after they arrive on one of your pages. The desired action can be signing up for a service, filling out a form, purchasing a product, or other specific actions. Therefore, you can view your rate of conversions as the number of visitors you’ve managed to turn into leads. Your conversion rate is essential for any campaign, and you should look for ways to improve it with your marketing and effective website design. If you want users to do something when they arrive at your site, then be direct about it. Make sure the action you want your users to perform is clearly communicated and that there are no misunderstandings. While you should be blunt, you shouldn’t use forceful language or intrusive pop-ups since that approach may frustrate users.
Rate of engagement
Since users have started spending most of their time on social networks, it was logical to expect that marketing would follow. Over time, we have seen many marketing strategies specifically developed with social networks in mind. The most effective one is content marketing, where you either promote your content on social networks or specifically create content for those platforms. Quality content will often be shared by users, further increasing your visibility on social media.
Content marketing aims to get users to engage with your brand and grow your audience. By measuring your engagement rate, you will see how many users interact with the content you post. These interactions usually take the form of likes, comments, and shares, but they can also depend on the platform in question. You can also measure engagement on several platforms and compare which type of content gets the most attention from your audience.
In summary
Now that we have explained what the important digital marketing metrics to follow are, you should have no problem measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. Make sure that your campaigns have a good return on investment and generate leads for your sales team. You can perform adjustments when you notice that your goals aren’t being met. However, you will first need to follow the right metrics.
