Digital Marketing, Social Media, Specific Business

The goal of every digital marketing campaign is a positive return on investment. You can't manage what you can't measure, you can't market what you can't manage! Digital media has been called the 'most measurable marketing method ever'. Some campaigns increase awareness of your brand, while others can bring visitors to your blog – both of which will help increase your profits in the long term, but short-term results cannot be measured in monetary values.

There are important metrics for both brand awareness and sales conversion to track and guide your digital marketing campaigns. Depending on your specific business plan and marketing efforts, some metrics may be more important than others. Narrowing down your reports to include the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) will reflect what digital marketing success looks like for you. Before you can determine whether your digital marketing campaign is successful, you need to set objective and achievable goals. Much of your online strategy arises from your goals. Goal setting ensures that you have something to strive for. What's more, it provides a guide to the metrics you'll use to measure the success of one or more campaigns.

You can't measure success without goals!

Ways to Measure Digital Marketing Effectiveness

There are an endless number of metrics to measure digital marketing effectiveness . We have compiled for you the most important factors that you should consider the most. These may not all be relevant to your specific business goals, but they are the starting point on the path to finding ROI (return on investment)!

Important Website Metrics for Growth:

The top 10 items in this list summarize the website metrics that are most important for success in digital marketing. Let's say from the beginning that you will need Google Analytics to track this data.

General Website Traffic

Since your website serves as your home base, all of your marketing efforts will likely be focused on increasing traffic there. Individual campaigns may focus on list building or increasing social media reach, but the ultimate goal of this activity is to send more traffic to the website over time.

Therefore, regularly monitoring your website traffic provides you with a variety of information, such as which campaigns are running and when. If at any point you're seeing a steady decline in traffic while maintaining ongoing marketing efforts, your website may have broken links, a Google Algorithm bug, or other technical issues deterring visitors.

You can try:

Traffic by Source

This metric sheds light on exactly where visitors to your website are coming from. If you have numerous marketing platforms, use them to determine which sources are winning and which need more attention. Or use it to narrow down where you spend your valuable time creating content.

The four main traffic sources that Google Analytics tracks are:

Organic Search: These users clicked on a link in a search engine result that brought them to your website.

Direct Visitors: These users typed your URL directly into the search bar or bookmarked it and visited you again.

Recommendations: These users were sent to your website when they clicked a link from another website.

Social: These users came to your website after finding your social media profile and/or posts.

New Visitors and Returning Visitors

Multiple visits show that you offer valuable content that generates a second impression. When you regularly publish new content (blogs), you can review your New and Returning Visitors results to see how any paragraph of content is performing. Simply put, if you want to drive more organic traffic to your website, new visitors can be important to you. The returning visitors metric should also be noted if you want to measure how many people are coming back to re-browse and get information.

Tips to Increase New and Returning Visitors:

  • Create and publish valuable content that can be found organically through search engines.
  • Use your social media accounts to promote blog posts and add relevant tags.
  • Send your subscribers an email or desktop notification after new content is published.

sessions

Sessions show the number of visits your websites receive. Google specifically counts this in 30-minute increments, meaning it only calculates this metric for each user every half hour. Consider Amazon: Users can create a session to shop in the morning and then revisit later in the day to add something new to their shopping cart. Each of these are considered separate sessions.

Digital Marketing, Social Media, Specific Business


Average Session Duration

Depending on your website's function (information, e-commerce, etc.) or industry, the duration of site measurement may vary depending on its relevance to your campaigns. Average session duration is a general indicator of how much time visitors spend on your site. This helps you understand how your site is performing from a user experience (UX) perspective. Before calculating your average session duration, examine the following from a user's perspective:

  • Is your website easy to navigate?
  • Do users find what they are looking for quickly?
  • Is the content valuable and worth reviewing over a long period of time?

Tips to Increase Average Session Duration:

  • Add a video to your content.
  • Increase the readability of your content (larger fonts, more white space, etc.).

Page Views

This is the total number of pages viewed. A user visiting the same page repeatedly triggers this metric, so it's the largest of all page-related metrics for digital marketing effectiveness. It is important to know how many pages are visited on your website in a certain period of time. This helps you understand whether your entire site is valuable or only certain pages are attracting attention.

Most Visited Pages

You need to examine this metric to determine which areas of your website are most valuable. You can find this in the “Behaviors” section of Google Analytics. The most visited pages metric reveals all kinds of information about exactly where your site's visitors are going and for how long.

Output Rate

If your campaign aims to attract new users to your website for further branding efforts, exit rate measurement will show you exactly where they stay after reviewing your content. Unlike bounce rate, which triggers when someone only views a page, exit rate tells you where the user loses interest after spending some time.

Why might your visitors leave your site immediately?

  • The site takes too long to load.
  • They couldn't find what they were looking for right away.
  • They found relevant content but didn't need to click further (it didn't interest them).
  • They encountered an error page loading.

Unless your website is set up to send users to a separate URL for conversion, you'll need to look at the bounce rate percentage to determine if your campaign is effective.

Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate:

  • Reduce your page load time.
  • Add internal links to your page.
  • Add images to your content.
  • Use a compelling “call to action.”

Conversion Rate

Google Analytics can help measure the number of conversions made on your site. However, conversions can also mean different things depending on the campaign. Often, number crunchers only look at this marketing metric to determine whether your campaign is effective. But the outcome is only one piece of the puzzle and should be one of your overall digital marketing effectiveness factors.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of overall views your content or ad receives. Your content may be shown to the same person multiple times, and each time will count as a personal impression. As a result, this number will always be unachievably high because the reach metric is triggered only once per user.

Social Access

Your publications on social media platforms are intended to reach a large number of users. The reach metric shows exactly how many people were reached (for example, X people saw your content). The number of people reached is always more than those who are interested, that is, your target audience, your goal is to ensure the participation of 2-5% of users.

Tips to Increase Your Social Reach:

  • Fully brand all your social media profiles.
  • Publish original content regularly.
  • Connect with your community.

Social Participation

Social engagement reflects the total number of interactions made on any given social media post. This includes clicks, likes, reshares, comments and more. So all social media is a metric used to measure your success.

Earned only when a user chooses to engage with your content! Therefore, you can easily rank your content types based on how much engagement they receive. This helps guide your future content creation.

Digital Marketing, Social Media, Specific Business

Email Open Rate

Your email open rate measures the number of people who opened your email campaign compared to those opened overall. High open rates indicate a properly segmented list, an attractive subject line, and strong send time. Low open rates tell you that at least one of these factors is inadequate.

Click Rate

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) metric can be applied to email marketing as well as paid advertising. Clicks on email blasts often get the highest conversions across the board. As it relates to pay-per-click, your CTR helps determine your relevance score and affects your cost per click.

This digital marketing efficiency metric reflects the amount you pay for each click. This is true as it directly relates to your overall marketing budget in this area. The lower your CPC, the longer your budget will last.

Cost Per Conversion

Cost per conversion is all about your individual business model and often your individual campaign. As I mentioned before, not every metric is important for every campaign. If you don't sell directly online, you can cancel this metric.

However, if you are using an e-commerce website where users can add something to a cart and convert it into a purchase, CPC is a must-have metric. Simply put, this metric tells you how much you'll pay to convert a site visitor into a sale.

Cost Per Acquisition

Your cost per acquisition (CPA) only applies when you subscribe customers. It helps you determine the optimal budget to spend to make a customer your regular visitor and acquire new ones. Cost per click applies to both pay-per-click marketing and a number of social media platforms that offer the click-to-site type of advertising.

This digital marketing efficiency metric reflects the amount you pay for each click. This is true as it directly relates to your overall marketing budget in this area. The lower your CPC, the longer your budget will last.

Overall ROI (Return on Investment)

This metric is a true foundation for success. In summary, return on investment equals how much you spend (your investment) and how much you earn (return). You may not be able to control the money you spend on marketing because you cannot count the man hours most of the time. Accurately calculating your campaign's ROI will be key to determining whether you're experiencing overall success.

When you're ready to create a campaign, implement and measure the next online strategy, remember these important factors: