Businesses that don’t track their digital marketing efforts could be compared to going on a hunt without arrows and with closed eyes.
In today’s environment with more than 170 million people using social media daily, every marketer is expected to understand digital marketing fundamentals. Digital marketing is the process when marketers use various digital channels to promote their products or services online targeting consumers and businesses that are most likely to buy.
While it is believed that traditional marketing platforms will slowly lose interest, digital marketing techniques will take over. Next to many other digital marketing benefits, first, digital marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing. Second, it allows you to target your desired audience more precisely, and lastly, it does not have boundaries. Meaning you can launch international campaigns, without being there physically.
However, there is one but. How to monitor the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns to determine whether they were successful or another flop? That is where digital marketing metrics are helpful and in today’s article, we will try to cover our top 10 digital marketing metrics every small business should track to measure their success online.
What Are Digital Marketing Metrics?
To begin with, digital marketing metrics allow you to track the success of your marketing campaigns and how customers interact with your business online, including marketing channels such as your website or social media accounts.
Next, digital marketing metrics help businesses analyze and create strategies for existing customers and reach new ones. Analyzing metrics helps marketers customize their marketing campaigns and optimize them to reach the maximum potential, increase brand awareness, and reach other important business goals.
Difference Between Metrics And Indicators
Do not get confused between DMM (digital marketing metrics) and KPI (key performance indicator). Even though both are measuring tools they are used in different fields but cannot work properly without each other. While DMM assists businesses in analyzing and developing strategies for existing customers and attracting new ones. And metrics analysis assists marketers in customizing their ads for a more effective approach to increasing product awareness and customer growth. On the other hand, KPIs work extremely well within a business, allowing you to assess how effective your team, individual, or organization is at meeting business objectives. KPIs also let your business understand whether it is spending time and budget on effective techniques and tools to achieve business goals. Please understand, that both measurements are important since they show the business how well it is doing.
10 Digital Marketing Metrics Your Business Should Track
1. SEO Keywords
Marketers use SEO optimization techniques to optimize their websites to increase organic traffic. While doing SEO keyword optimization you look for relevant keywords that help it easier to find your business organically in search engine results and increase your traffic to the website. Using SEO tools, you can analyze the keywords that are significant to your website and see how these keyword strategies have increased traffic to your site.
2. First-time Visitors
Marketers can measure the effectiveness of digital campaigns such as banner ads or search campaigns by tracking the number of first-time visitors to a website. Analyzing new visitors at weekly or monthly intervals can be used to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Tools for website analysis frequently display the percentage of unique visitors compared to the overall traffic.
3. Traffic From Different Channels
By examining how visitors arrive at your website, you can determine which tactics are most effective for driving traffic. Marketers utilize the power of Google Analytics 4 to measure website traffic and determine which marketing channel generates the highest return.
These are the main traffic channels:
Direct traffic: Users who type your website’s URL directly into the web browser. This bypasses search engines and other channels and directs customers to your website. Direct traffic implies that visitors with purpose have a high level of brand awareness.
Organic search results: When users use search engines to look for specific terms and come to your website organically by clicking the link in the search results. To appear on the top pages of search results businesses invest massive amounts of cash into various SEO optimization techniques.
Social media: Links on social media are another option for customers to access your website from different sources. Making posts on your main social media account and users clicking on social media posts are several examples of this.
Referrals: A sharable link that allows visitors to navigate to your website. You can get referral links through collaborations with influencers or other guest blogging techniques.
4. Conversions
Each business tracks different conversions. For some it‘s a form submission, for others, it‘s a purchase. Users who download files from your website could be also defined as the conversion. For each business, the goal of website traffic is to convert customers, which results in more leads or direct sales. Higher conversion rates indicate higher success and more profitable business.
5. Search Trends
Another important digital marketing metric is to study search trends. This will help you understand how people find your website online and which search terms lead them to visit it. Updates to blog posts and landing pages may be required based on keyword trends. Depending on your industry, trends could change in predictable ways, such as seasonal increases or organic traffic for particular goods and services. Additionally, you can examine yearly variations in search results using search trends from certain data periods, which will allow you to identify high and low traffic periods.
6. Brand Awareness
Marketers can track digital marketing efforts online by tracking the amount of brand mentions online, brand reviews, and other social media activity. Even though brand awareness metrics can be a difficult statistic to obtain.
Brand awareness can be measured using the following methods:
Brand searches: Branded search terms occur when users look up your company name on search engines.
Social media post likes: You may estimate the volume of interactions or engagement taking place on your social media by monitoring the likes received on your social media posts.
Content shares: Examining the number of individuals who share your social media posts is another technique to measure brand awareness online. Reposting content from the page for your company is one of many options here.
Social media comments: Additionally, comments reveal consumers’ engagement with your brand and provide information about its popularity online.
Followers: Brand recognition may be directly measured by the number of followers on your social media accounts. Gaining more followers can boost website traffic and show that your marketing efforts were successful.
Brand mentions: Online discussions or mentions of your brand represent another way you can measure your brand awareness online. Marketers monitor positive and negative mentions to find strategies to reshape the brand’s reputation online.
7. Click-through Rate
Click-through rates is another essential digital marketing metric that shows the percentage of people who clicked on a link or ad online which led them to your website. Marketers are aware that even though many consumers might see your ads, only some of them will click them. To increase the likelihood of clicking, try to target more relevant people and provide more value. Increasing click-through rates is a key goal for marketers because it can lead to more conversions.
8. Retention Rate
Have you ever heard a business owner say, “I’m fine with losing a few customers”?
Personally, I’m not, and thus it’s important to track our customer’s retention. Unfortunately, marketers do not always place a high priority on creating an effective strategy for customer retention. Aside from financial concerns, customer retention is one of the best ways to determine how consistently your company delivers.
Simply put, companies with high customer retention rates are more likely to succeed. Strong customer retention rates are also an excellent motivator for attracting new customers. Where you could leverage clients’ success case studies to attract new potential customers.
On the other hand, revenue heavily depends on customer retention. Additionally, it is important for long-term growth and financial forecasts. Also, maintaining existing customers is easier than acquiring new ones.
9. Cost Per Click/Impression
As part of their digital marketing strategies, companies pay huge amounts of their marketing budgets on ads appearing on other websites. The cost per click or impression can be used to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Because impressions do not always lead to action, they are frequently priced in larger numbers, like 1,000 impressions for a given price. And they are cheaper than clicks. Businesses pay a higher cost per click because these clicks are more likely to result in leads or sales later on in the marketing funnel.
10. Cost Per Conversion
To calculate how much business will spend on a conversion, divide the amount spent on ads by clicks that lead to a purchase. This digital marketing metric shows your business’s total costs to gain a new or returning customer. Knowing the cost per conversion allows marketers to estimate the potential return on investment from their advertising campaigns. Also, marketers can determine the optimal conversion volume for their business by analyzing the cost per lead.
Conclusion
Each year customers’ journey online becomes more and more complicated. The more new marketing channels appear, the more complicated it becomes for marketers to track each of them and decide which channels are the most profitable.
As a result, it couldn’t be more important to track digital marketing metrics to evaluate your marketing efforts online.
And no, it’s not needed to track all these 10 metrics described earlier, because each business is unique, and for some of you, it is important to track one metric, while the other ones simply do not need it.
I hope that you found this article helpful and that it will help your business maximize digital marketing efforts online.
