A sound Digital marketing strategy with well-defined marketing metrics is critical for determining the success of your online activity and efforts for impactful sales.
As a marketer when you carve out a digital marketing strategy, or a marketing campaign, there are certain tough questions you inevitably face.
Am I reaching out to my target audience effectively? Are they responding to my CTAs? Should I focus on a different set of demographics? Am I getting the conversions and the ROI that I want?
The answers to these questions are crucial to measure the success of your marketing campaign for the desired results. But, it is usually this measuring part which is tricky because numbers unfortunately don’t tell you everything. And neither do they necessarily help you demonstrate real value for your organisation every time in terms of sales and returns. If this weren’t true, then the bounce rate and number of sessions fleshed out by Google Analytics would be magical! However, there is good news!
Over the last few years, the practice of measurement has evolved tremendously. Not only are there some incredibly knowledgeable Digital Marketing and Website Analytics master minds out there, but also a vast array of tools that aid you in monitoring and measuring your Digital Marketing activity.
Although the metrics you want to measure will depend on your most important business goals, we have pulled out 5 mainstream marketing metrics for you.
These can serve as a foundation on which you can measure the success of your marketing campaigns and they in return provide you with the proof that you are doing your job well.
Total number of conversions.
The conversions are the visitors that convert into records for your marketing database and let you focus on what truly matters. But most of the organizations that rely on Google Analytics as one of the most important measurement tool make a couple of mistakes. First, they look at overall site averages and second, they fail to set up goals.
Without goals, you can’t see whether your visitors are responding to the desired CTAs like buying something, subscribing to a service, filling out a form, downloading a brochure or signing-up for a newsletter.
You can either refer to the total amount of conversions or segment them according to the audience type to identify the nuances of your customer behavior.
Reach & Engagement levels
Consider reach and the level of engagement as the two major elements of the measuring process.
For e.g. let’s investigate the social media marketing metrics. Each social platform has its own specific Digital Marketing metrics like Facebook Insights, YouTube or Twitter analytics. But regardless of the way it is represented, the most important aspects to look at are the levels of reach and engagement. You can consider these two elements as a measure of the health of your social media marketing profiles.
In terms of, are you being visible? And are your online communities interacting with your content?
However, be mindful that although these social media marketing metrics are easily accessible, trying to establish a correlation between the reach, engagement and action levels is vague and nonexistent. But since social media activity effectively provides a sturdy platform for business impact, monitoring it should be considered as an important rung in the ladder and not as a complete evidence of success.
Conversion rate by channel
As a marketer it is imperative for you to identify which activity has the greatest impact on your ROI and sales. Measuring conversion rate by channel helps you calculate this.
To get accurate data on the best performing channels, you need campaign tracking and Google’s campaign tracking tool simplifies the tracking of your online activity back to your site provided you use it well and consistently.
Cost per sale/acquisition
If you start using campaign tracking, it gets easy for you to work out the cost per sale or acquisition (CPA). However, there may be times when it is confused with cost per conversion but there is a difference. Conversion is non-revenue based like filling out a form etc. while an acquisition is about a customer spending money on your product or service.
A simple way to calculate CPA is to work out the average revenue per customer and from that pulling out how much you’re spending on an average to capture a customer.
Return on investment
The next step after CPA is determining your ROI.
It means how much you had to invest to get a customer and how much did they subsequently spend?
ROI = Net Revenue/Cost.
ROI is usually expressed as a percentage. While a high ROI is always welcome, it should always be used along with other metrics like as cost per sale and overall conversions.
Our recommendation- Stay ahead of the Website analytics game and identify the marketing metrics that matter to you the most within your digital marketing strategy & marketing campaigns. And answer all those questions that are most important for your business.