Essential Digital Marketing Metrics for Marketers.

Every marketing campaign is targeted toward achieving a certain goal, so it is easy to measure the success of a particular campaign based on the marketing goal. However, digital marketing is an ongoing thing for brands in this day because everything you do to put your company out there digitally is a form of digital marketing. For instance, you likely have a social media account and a blog that you post on regularly and you probably send newsletters to your subscribers; these are all forms of digital marketing. And for all of these efforts, how do you measure your success? What digital marketing metrics do you use to ascertain the success of your marketing efforts? 

The reason this is important is obvious; you can only improve on what you know. If you are able to measure the success of your marketing efforts, you will be able to know what’s working and what needs to be improved to achieve better results. If you are just starting as a digital marketer especially, you need to learn the essential digital marketing metrics to track your performance. That said, let’s look at these essential digital marketing metrics;

 

Website Traffic 

Your website can be likened to your office, just online. So, it is expected that you want to make sure you have growing traffic. And the first step to determining that is by measuring your website traffic over time. The insight you get from monitoring your website traffic will help you stay ahead of the game by fixing things that need to be fixed and improving things that need to be improved. 

 Now, there are different metrics that you should note under the website traffic, I will discuss them below.

• Traffic Sources: Traffic sources show you where your traffic is coming from. Usually, traffic can be organic (found you through search engine results), direct (typed in your URL), referrals (found your link in another website) or social (found you on social media). The point of this is to know the channel to invest more in and the channel to discard or put more effort in. For instance, if you get most of your traffic from Facebook, maybe you need to concentrate more on Facebook to further increase the result. 

 

• Returning/New Visitors: Both of these visitors are important to your website’s growth. This is because returning visitors indicate that you have valuable content on your website that keeps people coming back. And new visitors mean that your website content is drawing people in. Now, you need to be certain that your SEO and content are directing traffic to your website and also that people find your content valuable enough or your website friendly enough to keep coming.

 

• Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the rate at which people leave your website immediately after visiting your website. While you want the previous two metrics mentioned to be high, you need the bounce rate to be low. There are so many reasons why this could happen; including slow page load, broken links, weak landing pages and irrelevant information. Read more on how to reduce your website bounce rate.

 

• Most Visited Pages: This metric will show you the pages most of your traffic finds interesting or valuable. The idea is to see what these pages have in common, so you can replicate the same on other pages that you can. 

 

• Exit Rate: Bounce rate might tell you the rate at which people leave your site immediately after visiting but it won’t help you with further information to explain why. The exit rate, however, will indicate where your traffic left after interacting with your site. So you know the exact point or page that they lost interest.

 

Conversion Rate

This is basically when a visitor completes a desired action on your website. If you sell something, then you would have recorded conversion if the user buys your product. So conversion is based on the set-up of your business. As expected, you should monitor your conversion rate to determine if you are getting your desired result or not.

 

 

Click-Through Rate

You can use click-through rate (CTR) for paid advertising and email marketing. For email marketing, it indicates the number of people that click on your link through your emails. And for paid advertising, it also indicates the number of clicks you get on your ads. The higher your CTR, the lower the cost-per-click (that is, the amount you pay for every click on your ad). 

 

Social Engagement 

Social engagement comprises all the interactions made on your social media post, including comments, clicks, shares, likes, retweets and so on. Luckily, the major social media networks provide insight into all these metrics, so you can monitor them adequately. 

 

Brand Perception

Brand perception is one of the essential digital marketing metrics for marketers that is often overlooked. But you need to know what is being said about your brand and how people generally feel about your brand. You can do this by searching for your brand occasionally to see what’s being said or set up Google Alerts to alert you anytime your brand or any related terms to your brand are being mentioned. This way, you will be able to stay up to date with what’s going on and address what needs to be addressed.

 

Let me conclude by saying that you should install and integrate Google Analytics into your website if you haven’t. Google Analytics is a very comprehensive platform that will give you insight into the website analytics mentioned in this article.

So, did you enjoy reading this article? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.