Digital marketing metrics are the values used to track the performance of all marketing campaigns, strategies, and efforts. These are tracked with the use of different tools that each specialize in their own metrics.
Digital marketing is an important strategy to have in 2023. It is imperative to know how to effectively market your business online if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
It is also important to practice digital marketing if you want to expand your online presence. This has numerous benefits like brand awareness and directing your target audience’s journey through your sales funnel.
To make sure that your digital marketing efforts are doing well, we will need the help of digital marketing metrics.
In this article
- Why Track Digital Marketing Metrics?
- 15 Digital Marketing Metrics You Need to Track
- Making it Easy to Track Your Digital Marketing Metrics
- Related Reads
Why Track Digital Marketing Metrics?
Tracking our metrics helps us understand how well we’re doing with our digital marketing efforts. It gives us an idea of how our target market responds to what we’re doing.
Upon tracking our progress, we can therefore make better and more informed decisions. We can identify which strategies are bringing in more traffic and which ones need more attention.
Tracking metrics also allows for troubleshooting. For example, a particular page isn’t doing well because it receives low traffic. You then visit that page and see that it shows a page error, so users can’t access it, hence its low performance. You can now act accordingly to solve the problem.
15 Digital Marketing Metrics You Need to Track
Return on Investment
Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important metrics to track for digital marketing.
ROI is determined by computing how much you earned divided by how much you invested. It shows you how much money you get back from all of your digital marketing efforts.
If your ROI is negative, then it means you lost more money than you earned. A positive ROI is always a good sign. It serves as the true measurement of the success of all of your efforts.
Website Traffic
Your website is the very foundation of your digital marketing. It is essential to establish an online presence. It also becomes the very face of your brand in the online setting.
Keep track of all the traffic that flows in and out of your website. It helps you understand if your campaigns are working and how well they’re working. You’ll also get to observe the specific time when these campaigns are at their best.
The goal is to increase total site visits from week to week. This shows stable growth, and if you do notice a drop in that growth, it’s time to check if your website has problems, like broken links, Google Algorithm penalties, or other issues.
Traffic by Channels
If it’s important to identify the overall traffic that goes in and out of your website, it’s also important to identify where they come from.
All your digital marketing efforts aim to bring traffic to your website. In identifying where this traffic comes from, you’ll know which strategies are effective and which ones are not. You’ll also be able to identify which traffic sources are worth investing in more than others.
Here are some of the main traffic sources for your site:
- Direct visitors
- Organic search
- Referrals
- Social media visitors
- Paid visitors
New and Returning Visitors
New visitors show you how well your strategies target organic traffic and how those targets are doing. Returning visitors also helps you understand how many people come back to browse and consume your content.
Sessions
Sessions in Google Analytics refer to the number of visits that your website receives. In Google Analytics, this is measured in 30-minute increments.
You can think of this as a more detailed report of how many people are visiting your website. It also gives you an idea of how well your digital marketing strategies, campaigns, and efforts are working.
Time on Page
This describes the average amount of time that users spend on your page. It’s hard to determine what is the ideal time spent on a page because it depends on a lot of factors. These include things like the length of the page, the content, and the users themselves; their demographics and web time, for example. But to give you an idea of the average session duration by industry, here is a study by Brafton.
What this metric tells you is if users are spending too little time on your pages. It is an indication that you will need to improve your website to get your users to spend more time.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who immediately leave your page upon arriving. Basically, if your website is junk, any user hitting on it will leave immediately, hence the name “bounce.”
Bounce rate problems may include:
- Page loading too slowly
- Consumers didn’t find what they were looking for
- Found content was not relevant to what customers sought
- There is an error on the page
- Crappy writing on your web page
Ideally, you want to aim for a 0% bounce rate, but that’s technically impossible, and I won’t explain why that is.
Instead, to help you better understand the average bounce rate (which is the rate at which anyone visiting your page “bounces” from that page, leaving it because your page is boring) per certain pages and environments, here’s a chart by Kissmetrics.
It is important that you track this metric so you can quickly identify if there are problems with any of your pages.
Exit Rate
Exit rate tells you where or on which page the user lost interest after spending some time exploring. Bounce rate focuses on users who instantly leave after visiting one page. Exit rate, on the other hand, focuses on where and when users leave after visiting more than one page.
This gives you insight into your users’ journey. You’ll get an idea if your user interface and user experience are good.
Device Used to Access Your Website
This metric focuses on identifying what devices your visitors use when they go to your website. This helps you design and tweak your website to fit whatever device your visitors use to access your website.
It also gives you insight into which pages are not yet optimized to be viewed on different devices.
With the rise of mobile users who are accessing the internet, this is one metric that cannot be ignored. In 2021, there were 4.32 billion mobile internet users. That’s over 90 of the global internet population.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate spans multiple channels, but it’s usually observed in social media marketing and advertising efforts. What you’re tracking here is how much users interact with your content or your posts. This includes the following interactions:
- Clicks
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Retweets
- Reposts
These metrics show which content is performing well in your social media marketing and advertising efforts.
Click-Through Rate
The Click-through Rate or CTR shows how many people click on something on your website. It means they were interested and clicked through to another part of your website. This metric can also be used as an email marketing tool but also used as a paid advertising metric. CTR is the click-through rate, a ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view it. This allows you to see how many interactions you have on any given website.
A good rule of thumb to remember is that the higher the CTR, the lower the cost per click. This is for when you’re considering the cost per click and maximizing customer engagement.
Conversion Rate
This gives you insight into how many people follow through with your call to action (CTA). This includes actions like buying from you, contacting you, signing up for an email newsletter, and many more.
Your conversion rate helps you understand how effective your digital marketing efforts are. You’ll be able to see how many people are converted to customers or clients.
Cost Per Click
This measures what your company pays, on average, for every click on your ad. It applies to pay-per-click marketing and pay-per-click ads on numerous social media platforms. This is an important metric to track because it directly relates to your overall marketing budget.
Cost Per Visitor and Revenue Per Visitor
Cost per visitor (CPV) calculates the total investment made to acquire a visitor. Also, revenue per visitor (RPV) calculates how much your brand earns with each visit. These 2 metrics usually come together to determine if the costs are worth the revenue.
A good rule of thumb to remember is that if the RPV is higher than the CPV, then your investment is worthwhile.
Cost Per Acquisition
This metric gives you insight into how much you need to invest, on average, to convert a user to a customer. It’s mostly focused on digital advertising efforts.
Making it Easy to Track Your Digital Marketing Metrics
Tracking your digital marketing metrics can be daunting at the start. There is so much to track and so much to consider. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s best to start with ones that resonate with the goal of your campaign the best. You can then work your way up from there and track more metrics as you get better at tracking the previous ones.
There are so many benefits to tracking your digital marketing metrics. It helps you understand how your target audience is responding to your marketing efforts. This information can help you make better decisions and campaigns moving forward because you understand what works and what doesn’t.
These metrics are your keys to more effective and successful digital marketing. You’ll be able to do amazing things once you’ve identified your strengths and weaknesses.
The best of luck with your digital marketing journey!
