Online or Digital Marketing Metrics are values used by marketing teams to measure and track the performance of their marketing campaigns. Digital marketing teams use a number of tools to promote their services and products, and tracking the results can often be time consuming and difficult. By creating specific digital marketing KPIs, it’s easy to determine targets and goals and measure performance based on those values.
There are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations we could track to give an insight into the company’s marketing efforts and customer behaviour. Not every metric is relevant to the marketing plan. There are a few key metrics in three broad categories - traffic, conversions, and revenue that are universally applicable to judging a company’s digital marketing’s success. The top KPIs for modern digital marketers that are data-driven are explained below:
Overall Traffic
“All Traffic” in google Analytics will show how many people visited or engaged with the site in total. It can be broken up into source/medium, which describes where the traffic comes from.
Overall traffic will give a bird’s eye view of where the company stands. It’s a good idea to benchmark or keep an eye on the total traffic over time. We may begin to see similar patterns emerge—like seasonality—that can put the company ahead of the game later. The rule of thumb here is that if the company is doing a good job, the overall traffic from all sources should steadily increase over time.
Channel-Specific Traffic
These metrics depend on where people were immediately before arriving at our site. The channel is the type of door they used to enter the site.
Looking at our top mediums is important to measure for full-scale digital marketing campaigns. It allows a company to see what’s causing a drop in the visits and where the campaign excels.
Channels to watch:
Direct: This is when people directly type in your URL to visit your site or who began to search in the omnibox but visited your site before.
Referral: These are people who came to your site from another website. It’s external traffic. People followed a link on a different domain to get to you.
Organic: These are people who performed a search on a search engine such as Google or Bing, and clicked on your website’s listing in the organic search results.
Social: People who came to your site from a social media platform. It’s also a great indicator to gauge the general effectiveness of your SEO, social engagement, content, and integrated campaigns.
Total Conversions
Traditionally, a “conversion” is when someone evolves from a simple user visiting your site to a paying customer. However, in today’s digital world we want to track engagement and what our customers are doing on our website to get them deeper into our funnels.
Low conversions can speak to bad design, unappealing offerings, or a disinterested audience. Tracking conversions helps you point out exactly which components people are interacting with on your site, and which components they just aren’t.
It’s also hugely informative on the quality of the UX and other less-tangible creative areas. Low conversion rates can spark a push toward updating the sales funnel, or indicate that it’s time to invest in modernising the website.
Bounce Rate
A site’s bounce rate is the average number of visitors who left the website after only visiting one page—the page they came in on. I.e. the “entrance page”.
Each page can have its own bounce rate. We’ll find different pages tend to have different bounce rates, and not all bounce rates are equal.
Bounce rate can tell us whether the site content is relevant or if we are using the right landing page for a paid campaign. The number is very relative, however.
On one hand, a bounce rate for a specific page may be high because users leave the site after viewing the single page after finding the precise info they needed, and had no interest in going further. Perhaps they even called in and became a paying customer after bouncing off a contact page.
Search Trends
Looking at search trends can explain a lot that we don’t have control over. For example, an apartment rental company search trends for “apartments in Mysore city” might dip in winter and spike again in spring.
This can be a great way to tell whether we are targeting the right keywords for our campaign. If we’re targeting a word that was quite popular five years ago but has since fallen in interest, we may be spending our efforts chasing a highly competitive phrase that really shouldn’t be so competitive anymore.
New Vs. Returning Visitors
This metric tells us whether the site is sticky enough to encourage repeat customers, and tells how effective the outreach efforts are. For example, if we launch a new email marketing campaign to our database, we might see an increase in returning visitors to our website. That reveals the email campaign was well received.
Top 10 Organic Landing Pages
Also known as “entrance pages,” these are the individual pages where visitors enter our site after performing a search on a search engine. This metric tells us which pages on our website are the most visible in search engines.
If the #1 page visited from organic results is a really specific article, we can glean what people were popularly searching. This also highlights the importance of specificity in our content strategy. Our top organic pages can also tell us how well they’re optimised, and whether we need to refocus our SEO strategy.
User Demographics
Google Analytics will give us a little demographic information, with easy views to age, gender, location, and even some interest information. The important thing here is the location information.
Brand Sentiment
Not all publicity is good publicity. We should be gauging sentiment of online conversations regarding the company.
It’s also important to have a response plan in place. This ensures timely, well-planned handling of unsavoury voices while staying in line with the brand tone and voice. We will also be able to track the positive side of our mentions.