Internet marketing is mainly about understanding customer preferences, building brand awareness, distribution and making your business stand out to ultimately reap higher sales. In order to establish a strong marketing strategy, you must enumerate digital marketing metrics that can help you make better decisions.
With such digital marketing metrics, it is possible to make effective and well-informed decisions, which is the main objective to measure them right in the first place.
So, what are important metrics for digital marketing?
In this post, I share with you the vital digital marketing metrics, which you need to measure even for the smallest project. But before that, let me brief you why these metrics are so important.
Why Digital Marketing Metrics are So Important?
Whether you are a big company or a small one, you constantly have to justify the marketing budget. Hence, you have to quantify the same. Every step you take must add value to your business.
Earlier, marketing was related only to creativity. There were not much related to measuring metrics. But presently, things are completely different. A digital marketer must focus on setting up relevant KPIs supported with techniques for measuring marketing metrics.
Hence, it is vital to focus on important marketing metrics to scale the business.
Important Digital Marketing Metrics:
The success of your digital marketing project can be measured in different ways. One major method is by assessing the SEO metrics. There are innumerable tools available that offer easy-to-read reports so that the metrics can be assessed without any trouble.
1. Keyword Ranking:
Check for keywords that you wish to rank. Once you know about such keywords, you can use this data to enhance the SEO strategy. It is best to capitalize on current success.
If your site ranks among the top 10 for high-conversion keywords, use them in your campaigns, blogs and make sure that your position stays at the top. Only top-ranking keywords can bring the most traffic.
2. Measure SEO Traffic:
Organic SEO traffic is one that is earned from appearing high on search engine result pages. Make sure your website ranks for keywords relevant to your industry. It is vital to track organic traffic so that you are able to see the volume of visitors on your website.
- Measure the Landing Page
Organic traffic is obtained from the entire website. But landing pages give a good idea of tracking traffic. It lets you determine where to improve.
If a few pages of your site rank on page 1 while others rank on page 4, you know that certain improvement is needed.
- Measure Geographical Location
Further, it is vital to track from where the organic traffic is coming. This is possible when the SEO efforts target a specific geographical location. It is also of great help when you wish to expand your business into novel markets.
If people in a particular country like your products better and heavy traffic is coming from there, you must divert marketing resources into such countries to boost sales.
3. Mobile Traffic:
A large number of users these days use mobile to search for websites and avail the services. It is therefore vital for your website to be mobile-friendly. Google too likes mobile-friendly websites.
If your website is receiving high yet constant traffic from mobile, you must immediately optimize the website. Moreover, if you experience high traffic coming from mobile, it might be because of the shifting of the usage patterns from the target audience.
Mobile searches are different from desktop searches. Also, mobile users use fewer keywords as compared to desktop users. Hence, track mobile traffic to measure whether you rank for mobile-only searches or not.
4. Link Building:
Link building is related to bringing other websites to link back to your website. It drives referral traffic and enhances domain authority.
The algorithms of Google are evolving and complex. But backlink is still a vital factor for search engines to identify websites that rank for specific keywords. Websites with more number of backlinks tend to gain higher SERP rankings.
5. Traffic from Other Sources and Channels:
The vital rule to consider here is to never analyze, access, or view the website by considering the total number of visits, page views or unique sessions. You will never gain anything good from it. Break down your SEO efforts into segments to avail correct data for enhancing SEO efforts accordingly.
You must compile a diverse range of total visitors. They must tell what they know about the brand and how it is discovered. Your customers may have found you through offline or online marketing efforts or through word of mouth referrals. So, classify the traffic on the basis of its sources to understand and take necessary actions accordingly.
In addition to SEO marketing metrics, you must take into account the content marketing metrics. Such metrics help marketers to determine the effectiveness of their strategy.
6. Compare Old Retention Rate to New One:
It is of utmost significance to measure customer retention. Along with profitability, businesses must focus on customer retention to measure the reliability of their business.
Businesses with a high retention rate are more successful. Powerful customer retention drives successful customer acquisition. Also, it is vital for consistent financial planning and growth. Also, retained clients usually need lesser maintenance in comparison to already acquired customers.
7. Bounce Rate:
This is the rate of the number of visitors who stop engaging with your site after an interaction. This interaction can be a social media share or page view. It can be quite tricky to measure the bounce rate for your website. But there are a few online tools available, which can be used to accurately measure the bounce rate.
Effectively use the bounce rate metric to identify flaws in the website. Discover ways to enhance engagement in weaker sections. The vital thing to remember is that a person spending longer time on your website is more likely to convert.
8. Average Duration of a Session:
Basically, it is related to the time visitors are spending on the website. It is helpful to analyze varying trends and patterns. For blogs, measure the session by seeing the duration people are spending on it. For case studies, check the ones, which people have found more interesting. Similarly, you can carry forward for other elements.
Having such information in hand can help shape the content strategy effectively. For marketing channels, you can assess where users providing valuable engagement are coming from. This helps to determine potential opportunities and issues.
Just remember, there are many limitations to this metric.
9. Lead Generation:
When you need to measure the ROI of your content, you basically have to measure the level of revenue you earn from the content in oppose to what you are spending and distributing. To measure the ROI of content marketing, use the simple formula of return minus investments.
The important part here is that if you are spending less money to create content and earning higher sales, it is worth it.
10. Organic Backlinks:
This metric compares a total number of referring domains to the external links on your website. The finest way to measure the metric is by considering the ratios. A favorable ratio is one that has 500 incoming links from a lesser number of referring domains. Moreover, you must focus on not just the number of referring domains but also on the kinds of domains. If the content from a particular domain is not related to your site, the rankings may suffer.
Moreover, measure the total number of backlinks. If there is a drop in the number of backlinks, this implies that your website is not getting crawled and hence needs improvement.
Google likes backlinks, which are natural and organic. Therefore, you must carefully monitor the backlinks.
Along with content marketing and SEO marketing metrics, equally vital are social media marketing metrics.
11. Engagement Rate:
This metric is related to the level of interaction any content receives. It is the percentage of the audience who responds to the content.
Some ways people react to your content are views, shares, reactions, likes, or comments.
With the help of engagement rate you can determine the kind of content you must work on the basis of how it performs across distinct social media platforms. It is a clear indicator of how responsive the audience is to your content.
12. Mentions of Social Media Brand:
Customer feedback, your reviews and another kind of post that refers you on social media are considered as a social media brand mention. Build a list of anyone who writes about you as well as the publication or platform it appears in.
When you write interesting content pieces, it lends you an opportunity to let others know about you. While writing content, do consider the post of your competitors. Focus on where they are being mentioned.
13. Growth of Followers:
It is vital to track the number of followers you have. You can fetch the numbers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Create a spreadsheet and update it regularly. See the numbers growing. You can use distinct tools, which keep a track of the followers for you.
By estimating the number of followers, you can scale your business and know the kind of content that engages them the most.
14. Reach of the Post:
It is the total number of people who saw your post. It includes friends, Facebook, family, and others. If one person sees your post multiple times, it will be considered as one.
To identify Facebook users, analyze recent views to your post for engagement and reach. Moreover, track the post that people mark as spam.
To track Twitter users, you can expand tweet details. Track the monthly impressions to identify the monthly reach. Assess top tweets and compare the same with other tweets to see who engages and replies.
15. Unlikes and Likes:
The ‘like’ tab on Facebook lets you measure detailed metrics of the net. It combines the following metrics:
- Organic Likes – These are likes received from people who are not part of the Facebook Ad campaign.
- Unlikes- These are people who unliked or dislike your page.
- Net Likes – These are the total number of likes after deducting the number of unlikes from your page.
- Paid Likes – These are people who liked your post through the way of a Facebook Ad campaign.
When it comes to email marketing, there are numerous metrics to measure.
16. Email Click-Through Rate:
A click is when anybody clicks on links in your email. A good click-through rate is one that brings you more loyal customers. To increase the CTR, define a strong subject line for the email and create a responsive email message.
17. Unsubscribe Rate:
It measures the number of people that unsubscribed from the email subscriptions. This number must never be negative as it clearly indicates that your readers do not like your posts or email content.
18. Open Rate:
It means the number of people who actually open the email and read it. If the open rate of an email campaign is high, it means you have a strong email subject.
19. Email Bounce:
It measures the non-delivery of email to the recipient. When such action occurs, the e-mailer gets an automatic notification of failure of delivery that originated from the email server of recipient.
The email bounce can be soft meaning the email ID was valid but it did not reach the recipient. The email bounce rate is hard when the email ID is incorrect or permanently rejected.
20. Spam Rate:
To maintain the best rate of deliverability, make sure that your email account holds a low compliant or spam rate. If the rate is high your account may shut down in to prevent unwanted emails from being sent.
To measure the results of online paid campaigns, you must take into consideration some important paid marketing metrics.
21. Conversion Rate:
It is defined as the number of conversions received by your ads to the total number of clicks on your ad. This rate lets you know your offer’s relevancy.
22. Cost Per Click:
It measures the price an advertiser has paid. A positive cost per click makes sure that your campaign is successful.
23. Paid Click-Through Rate:
It is the total number of clicks received by your ad divided by the number of impressions. It tells the relevancy of ad in terms of what viewer’s desire. A higher CTR indicates higher relevancy of the ad.
On a Concluding Note:
In addition to these metrics, you must also take into account the important CRO metrics that include value per visit, interactions per visit, exit rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate.
By measuring these metrics you can have a clear idea of where your marketing efforts are lacking growth. So, overcome such hurdles to achieve profitable results. If you want to gain more knowledge regarding the same, let us know through your comments.