Digital marketing is a fast-paced industry with new trends and insights constantly emerging. The volume of information can be overwhelming for marketers trying to keep up. As a result, it’s tempting to focus on the latest trends or new tools rather than spend time measuring performance and ensuring that KPIs are met.
With so many different digital marketing metrics available, it’s easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Before tracking a million different digital marketing metrics, it’s worth taking a step back and asking what a business wants to achieve with its digital marketing efforts. Once the answer is available, it becomes much easier to identify the digital marketing metrics that will help the business measure success in achieving those goals.
What Are Digital Marketing Goals?
The first thing a business needs to do is to identify its goals for digital marketing efforts. While this may seem an obvious starting point, it’s surprising how many marketers don’t take the time to do this. If they don’t know what they want to achieve, it’s incredibly difficult to measure success in digital marketing.
For example, ‘bakemeawish’ is a bakery that wants to grow its online sales. To do this, their marketing goals might be to increase the number of new customers purchasing from the website, increase the average order value, and reduce the percentage of customers who abandon their cart.
That’s a lot of different marketing goals, but if they dig a little deeper, they’ll notice that they are all just variations on the same theme. Every marketing goal is related to growing business, either by bringing in more customers or increasing the amount they spend.
Which Marketing Metrics Will Help Businesses Measure Success?
Now that the business knows what they want to achieve, the next step is to identify the digital marketing metrics that will help measure success in reaching those marketing goals. There are hundreds of digital marketing metrics out there, so how do you know which ones the business should be tracking? The best way to identify the right digital marketing metrics is to look at the KPIs the business currently measures and then tie these back to digital marketing efforts.
Let’s go back to our bakery example. Suppose the ‘bakemeawish’ bakery currently measures the metrics for the number of customers visiting the store. In that case, they consider the average order value, the percentage of shoppers who make a purchase, the number of sales staff working each shift, the amount of profit earned on each shift, the total profit made each month, etc. Their digital marketing efforts should be tied back to these KPIs.
Measuring Brand Awareness
One of the most common marketing goals for digital marketers is to increase brand awareness. While marketers have traditionally focused on growing brand awareness through advertisements, this approach has limitations when reaching customers who don’t watch TV anymore or don’t listen to the radio.
Digital marketing channels, on the other hand, have the potential to reach a huge audience regardless of age, location, or interests. There are several digital marketing metrics that you can use to track brand awareness, including the following:
- Unique Visitors: This is the total number of unique visitors to a website each month. If the business has multiple websites, it can track unique visitors for each website.
- Website Traffic: This is the total number of visitors to a website each month and is often expressed as an average over the month.
- Conversions: This is the total number of customers who complete the desired action on a website, such as making a purchase, creating an account, etc.
- Click-through Rate: The number of people who click on the brand’s ads is divided by the total number of impressions those ads receive.
A business can use a reliable and effective tool like Rankwatch to measure all the above digital marketing metrics and update its current business growth. Their ‘Site Auditor’ feature helps you detect all the hindrances that stop your website from ranking higher by performing a detailed microanalysis.
Measuring Customer Acquisition
Another common marketing goal for digital marketers is to acquire new customers. While “customer acquisition” can be used interchangeably with “marketing lead generation,” the latter typically applies to a narrower subset of potential customers.
For example, Amazon is selling a subscription-based service, and they may generate marketing leads by putting a signup form on their website.
Acquiring new customers can be tracked using the following digital marketing metrics:
- Metric #1 – new Visits: This is the total number of new visitors to a website each month. The business can track new visitors to each site if it has multiple websites.
- Metric #2 – new Signups: The total number of new customers who sign up for the service each month.
- Metric #3 – new Signups from Organic Search: This is the total number of new customers who sign up for the service each month after finding the website through a search engine.
- Metric #4 – new Signups from Referrals: This is the total number of new customers who sign up for the service each month after being referred by another customer.
- Metric #5 – new Signups from Social Media: The total number of new customers who sign up for the service each month after finding the business’s social media pages.
Measuring Lead Generation
When a business tracks marketing lead generation, they track the number of people who provide their contact information.
For example, if Amazon put a signup form on the website and track that information metric, they generate a marketing lead.
Lead generation can be tracked by measuring the same metrics as customer acquisition.
Measuring Lead Quality
The quality of marketing leads is determined by their level of interest in the product and their likelihood to purchase. There are several digital marketing metrics a business can use to track marketing lead quality that, includes the following:
- Quality from Organic Search: These are the marketing leads who sign up for the product or service after finding the website through a search engine.
- Quality from Referrals: These are the marketing leads that sign up for the product or service after being referred by another lead.
- Quality from Social Media: These are the marketing leads who sign up for the product or service after finding it on social media pages.
Measuring Lead Direction
The direction of the marketing leads represents their path to conversion.
For example, let’s say ‘bakemeawish’ generate marketing leads by putting a signup form on their website.
A new lead might visit their website and may sign up for their email list. That customer would have a marketing lead direction of “Website > Email”.
The “marketing lead direction” metric measures how many customers progress toward conversion along each path. For example, if 20% of visitors progress from the website to the email list, it means that 80% of the visitors don’t sign up for the email list.
Measuring Lead Value
The value of each marketing lead is determined by the likelihood of them becoming customers and the amount they are likely to spend. While there are no hard-and-fast rules for determining marketing lead value, a few best practices include:
- The group leads by their source: This metric helps keep track of how customers find the business. For example, a business might receive group marketing leads from social media and organic search in two different groups, making it easier to determine which channels are driving the most valuable marketing leads.
- Calculate the average value of each lead source: This metric will help to keep track of which channels are driving the most valuable marketing leads and which channels need further improvement.
Conclusion about Digital Marketing Metrics
While there are hundreds of different digital marketing metrics out there, it’s worth keeping in mind that the best marketing metrics to track are those that drive business growth. The more specific a business’s marketing goals are, the easier it is to measure success.
For example, if a business wants to increase brand awareness, it should track the metrics that involve increasing brand visibility on search engine results pages, social media, and other digital marketing channels. Suppose a business wants to acquire new customers. In that case, the best digital marketing metrics involve generating new marketing leads through online advertising, referral programs, social media marketing, and other channels.
Like weight loss, a business can’t succeed at digital marketing if they don’t take the time to ensure it’s on the right track. It’s important to have a plan that encompasses all the marketing activities and tracking progress toward the business’s marketing goals.
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