Many online businesses measure their digital marketing success with the two most common marketing metrics and conversions: leads and sales.
In reality, there are other indicators of the success of your marketing campaigns aside from these types of conversions. Such internet marketing metrics are crucial for tracking your marketing efforts and for knowing if they are working or not.
What Are Digital Marketing KPIs?
Digital key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measurable values that show aspects of your business’ performance. They can be related to some aspects of your business like sales, employee performance, website traffic, web traffic sources, and many more. These KPIs are important because they tell you what specific part of your marketing strategy is working and what’s not.
You may be generating income from your business, but if you don’t know where the income is coming from or what type of strategy is working for you, you won’t know where to focus your attention and where to invest your time and money.
With platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads, it is easy to track where your customers are coming from, the cost of acquiring a customer, and which digital marketing is most effective. Armed with this knowledge, you can focus on the strategy that brings the best rewards and can drop the strategies that are not working.
What Are the Best KPIs to Track?
The best KPIs to track will be different from business to business. What may be the best KPIs for your business to track may be completely different from the KPIs of my business. It all depends on your goal. It may be brand awareness or higher organic traffic on your website; the key is that your goals and the KPIs you need to track should meet the SMART criteria.
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Relevant
T – Timely
Having SMART KPIs means that they need to provide specific results that marketers can measure. They must be realistic, achievable, highly relevant to your goal and have a measurable time frame.
What Not to Track
The fact that KPIs are now very easy to track makes their use a double-edged sword for those who don’t know the internet marketing metrics that really matter. It may be easy to measure the important KPIs valuable to your business, but it is likewise easy to get confused and track those marketing metrics that have no value. By doing so, you will just focus on the wrong KPIs and waste a lot of valuable time.
To know which KPI to track, you need to understand the value that the marketing metric gives to your business. For instance, if you want to track the number of followers you have on Facebook and Twitter, but you currently don’t have any social media campaign geared toward increasing your likes or followers, it is useless to track that.
The information that you should be tracking must give you insights on how to improve the business and earn more profits. If not, then it is not worth tracking and is not an effective KPI.
15 Digital Marketing Metrics and KPIs Essential to Your Online Business Success
While we mentioned earlier that the KPIs depend on the type of business and the goals you have, here’s a compilation of the most important ones that you might want to consider:
1. Brand Awareness
This marketing metric tracks how your brand performs on social media and branded search platforms. This will track the changes to your online brand awareness over a specific period of time. This includes the number of Facebook and Twitter followers your brand has, posts and comments mentioning your brand, brand mentions, and brand searches on search engines.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost
This KPI will tell you how much you need to spend before you get a customer. The cost may include advertising, sales visits, and anything spent on prospecting and converting a client.
3. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate metric will tell you what percentage of site visitors will turn into leads and which leads turn into customers. You can apply these marketing metrics on each channel like social media, SEO, search engine marketing and website content.
4. Search Traffic
This KPI is related to traffic coming to your site from Google and other search engines. Metrics such as total visits, organic visits, website visitors, page views per session, top pages and traffic sources can be analyzed to know where your customers are coming from.
5. Keyword Rankings
The keyword rankings metric will show you where your site ranks in your most valuable keywords and phrases. This is related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and will indicate if the SEO efforts you are implementing are working or if they are ineffective.
6. Bounce Rate
This internet marketing metric shows the percentage of visitors who land on your site and click away. By improving your site’s landing pages and making them more engaging, you can get your visitors to stay on your site longer.
7. Cost-per-Click
For those who use paid advertising, this is a critical marketing metric that shows the amount you spend for every individual click a user performs. This will show how long your marketing budget will last. The lower your cost-per-click (CPC), the longer your budget can stretch.
8. Cost-per-Conversion
This KPI is considered a must-track metric if you’re running an eCommerce website. This metric will show you how much it costs to convert a site visitor into a paying customer.
9. Customer Lifetime Value
The lifetime value of a customer is the amount of income a customer generates for your business for a specified time. It can be weeks, days or years depending on the service offering and back-end product.
10. Social Engagement
If social media is one of the channels you wish to target, this metric will show you all the interactions you made on each of your social media posts. This will include likes, clicks, shares, retweets and comments. Your social media success will be measured through engagement, since this can be earned only when a user chooses to interact with your content.
11. Signup Rate
This marketing metric will tell you what percentage of your site visitors signed up for your email list. This micro-conversion will help you determine if your email marketing campaign is effective or if you need to focus on other internet marketing strategies.
12. Average Time on Page
This metric will give you better insight into the amount of time users actually spend viewing your website’s content. This KPI will tell you if you need to improve your site’s content or landing pages.
13. New Leads Generated
This metric will assist you in determining the value of your marketing campaigns. This KPI tracks the number of leads generated by marketing efforts through a certain period of time.
14. Average Lead Score
This KPI measures the quality of leads based on criteria like buyer behavior, user activity and many other metrics. This is important for businesses that spend most of their marketing budgets following up on leads. This will determine which leads are likely to convert into customers so that marketers can focus their efforts on these types of leads.
15. Overall Return on Investment
Obviously, the ROI metric is the true baseline for your business’ success. Simply put, it shows how much you spent (investment) versus how much you earned (return).
Key Takeaway
By implementing and using these internet marketing metrics, you will be well equipped to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Remember that these metrics will help you use your marketing budgets wisely, improve your sales activity and choose the channels that best reach your target audience.
Bringing on an outsourced CMO can help you both better track each of these metrics and use this data to create actionable digital marketing strategies. Interested in learning more? Schedule your free consultation today to get started.
Emma Collins is a freelance content writer and copywriter at Hawke Media. She’s been writing articles on digital marketing, finance, lifestyle, entertainment, social media, technology, and more for over eight years. Emma loves gaming and watching anime during her spare time.
Sources:
Klipfolio – Digital Marketing Metrics and KPI Examples
Freshsparks – 19 Important Marketing Metrics for Measuring Success in 2020