10 Key Metrics That All Business Owners Should Monitor All The Time To Evaluate and Effectively Tweak Their Digital Marketing Campaigns Market dynamism and unpredictability conundrum In the digital marketing age, not only are measurable metrics and other analytical data are possible and available in real-time, the need to measure these data is paramount as evidence to success. In a constantly and rapidly changing business landscape, the need to measure digital marketing success as efficiently as possible has increased in importance more than ever before. Every digital marketing tool available has some means of measuring success made available through the various metrics business owners can obtain. The digital marketing age has rendered a great amount of unpredictability in the market conditions. New technologies are creeping in, trends are changing often than ever, which makes it more difficult and as important to know if your digital marketing efforts are yielding results. Measuring results If you wish to measure the digital marketing campaign`s success (which is a must), it is essential to keep a continuous tab on the most important metrics. The data from the analytics tools when properly tracked and gathered and dissected, churns out the useful statistics, facts and trends. When illuminated through the light of the human intelligence, can generate valuable insights and help determine marketing campaigns effectiveness. Abstract vs Concrete If you’re not a digital marketer, you will perhaps look at several vanity metrics and lose time on efforts that do not contribute to the growth of your business. Thus, as a business owner you must either be sufficiently aware of the core metrics that matter to measure the success of your digital marketing campaign, or alternatively hire a professional digital marketing agency to help you with analytics and conversion optimization. The success of any digital marketing campaign is evaluated by inspecting 3 core factors – traffic, conversion and revenue. While simple outcome of an active SEO and PPC campaign is traffic generation, but the end purpose of running digital marketing campaign gets clearer once you have the right mechanism and right data set to conduct the further analysis of the traffic, conversion, and the revenue metrics. And that’s where cognizance of the factors related to the campaign`s profitability will happen to you. I have carefully selected the most important metrics recommended by the leading digital marketing experts for each stage of any of the digital marketing campaign(s). Monitoring these metrics could
bring significant insights, which could prove helpful in tweaking your digital marketing campaigns and improving its profitability. Traffic related metrics #1- Overall relevant site traffic Monitoring the number of unique visitors in the light of business relevancy, that you get on your website in a week or a month are critical for you to see if your SEO and PPC efforts are in the right direction. *Don’t forget to analyze your mobile traffic separately as nowadays an increased number of people access your website from mobile devices. #2- Click Through Rate (CTR) Click Through Rate measures the number of people who clicked on your ads or results. A higher CTR rate is one key factor in achieving the better quality scores, and reducing the PPC costs per unit of traffic. Another plus side is that you can also receive discounts from platforms such as Google AdWords for maintaining a superior quality score. #3. Cost Per Click (CPC) The CPC is metric which tells you the per unit traffic cost, and it is important to be watchful of the CPC values, a lower CPC could make a world of difference to the outcome of any campaign, you could earn more business while spending less with an optimum CPC. The value of CPC is determined by a combination of factors. Google has coined an umbrella term called quality score for determine the CPC value associated with a target keyword. It is determined by the popularity of your keywords, the landing page experience you have to offer your visitors, the expected CTR, the adverts relevancy, and market worth of the keyword which is the traffic potential it has and how much your competition is willing to pay for that keyword against your bid. So, it is vital to keep CPC in check. #4. Traffic Sources This simple metrics can make or mar the fate of any digital marketing campaign. It is essentially measuring the breakup of the various sources which are sending the visits to your website. Understanding about the sources from where your traffic originates, can be useful in fine tuning of the campaign`s targeting. It will also help you understand if you’re getting the traffic from the desired sources, and if you need to re-strategize your digital marketing efforts to focus on the high yield sources only.
Conversion related metrics Measuring conversion is about measuring the visitors performing the desired actions on your website. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the various visitor’s interaction can help you tweak your website, the landing page, ad copy, and call to actions to result in the better overall conversions.
Following metrics can be tracked to evaluate various aspects of user interactions #5- Average page views per visit This metrics reveals relative engagement factor of the content and pages and the other elements on a website. The reason that this metric is important for conversion rate is since higher page views from a visit indicate a high level of engagement. A higher average page views per visit value could well be an indication in the increase in the chances of a visit transforming into a paying customer. #6- Bounce rate It is, in fact, in most of the cases the simplest of the metrics that can instantly reveal the degree of thoroughness in your campaign`s planning and in preparation of the content and other copies.
A high bounce rate is clear indication of: A)- Campaign targeting gone wrong, and you are attracting mostly non-relevant traffic B)- Your content strategy is off the track and your visitors are not finding your content a match to their taste And hence they tend to leave your website frequently. # A few times some technical configurations can misstate this metrics, (Single page website, etc.). Hence, Bounce rate should be evaluated in the light of the overall analytics setup and the other metrics. #7- Cost per lead The success of a digital marketing campaign depends on how well your website and content convert website traffic into leads or paying customers at minimal possible costs. Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a metric that defines the lead conversion ratio of a particular campaign and corresponding cost, giving insights to the business owner or marketer on how profitable their campaign is or not.
#8- Rate of return visitors Returning visitors is about the impact your first impression or interaction was able to create in the mind of visitors.
It is one of the metrics that determines if your website is attracting the relevant traffic or not, and if the experience your website was able to provide to your first-time visitors was a memorable one. Moderate to high count of returning visitors indicates a better brand recall factor, and is good for business. You need to understand the point they are exiting your website (without converting) and optimize to further improve the experience of visitors.
#9- Conversion rate Conversion rate is a percentage of visitors who are taking the desired action (filling contact form, calling you, signing up for subscription, chatting with you, etc.) on your website or landing pages. Conversion rate is that final minute metric to look for when you want to determine if your money is being spent well. This is in fact the business owner’s favorite metrics, by only looking at this one metric you could get a fair idea of the overall state of your digital marketing efforts. Conversion rate, since directly relates to the ROI, a healthy conversion rate implies, a healthy value of the all the other underlying metrics, i.e., something must be working well to contribute to this healthy conversion rate! Nonetheless, as a business owner, if my conversion values are consistently meeting or exceeding the expectation, It makes less sense to be much bothered about the rest of the above, isn`t it? And thus, would rather continue to trust my marketing agency or professional, and focus one my business offering more. Revenue metrics #10- Cost to acquire a customer/ Cost Per Acquisition CPA When you divide your marketing costs for a specific digital marketing campaign or a fixed period with the number of new and paying customers generated during that campaign or period, you get the cost to acquire a customer. A lower acquisition cost indicates healthy campaign and better profits. A higher acquisition cost is sometime inevitable especially in the competitive niche. If the lifetime value of the customer is good, it is still wise to continue acquisition at a slightly higher than normal cost!