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Part of the beauty of digital advertising is that it’s so incredibly trackable... almost to a fault. The amount of sheer data you can glean from your digital marketing campaigns can be frankly overwhelming!
So, when it comes to selecting which data and metrics are most important, how do you know which ones you should actually be tracking? We suggest first to try tying them back to your goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) making sure they relate.
For example, your KPIs may provide you with information like whether your efforts increased brand awareness for your company, if you saw an increase in sales, or if your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is working. We've included some suggestions below for the kind of digital marketing data you might want to consider tracking:
Digital Marketing Metrics That Matter
1. Source of Web Traffic
This will tell you which web sources are responsible for driving visitors to your website. It could be from:
- Direct Traffic: Visitors come to your site by typing in the website URL.
- Referral Traffic: Visitors end up on your site by clicking on the URL from another website.
- Organic Search Traffic: Visitors find your website by looking up a keyword in a search engine and seeing your site link come up.
- Campaign Traffic: Visitors come to your site because of a campaign or clicking a tracked website link.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your CTR measures the number of clicks an ad receives based on the number of people viewing your ad. It can tell you whether your ads are doing enough to attract the attention of your target audience.
3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
This will tell you whether your advertising efforts generate the kind of leads that turn into conversions. It’s the difference between someone visiting your site, then leaving versus someone who follows through with making a purchase.
4. Lead Conversion Rate
Your lead conversion rate tells you how many of the leads generated by your advertising efforts end up getting converted to actual sales.
5. Page Conversion Rate
A landing page conversion rate tells you the percentage of people who ended up completing a call to action when they ended up on one of your website landing pages. Factors that can influence this metric include your specific industry, how far a visitor is down the customer funnel, and whether the visitor finds the call-to-action relevant to their interests.
6. Engagement Rate
Your engagement rate tells you how many people actively engage with your content. Examples of engagement rates include the number of likes received on a Facebook post or comments left in response to a company blog post.
7. Returning Visitors
Tracking your returning visitors will help you keep up with what happens when a person returns to your website. It gives you an idea of how successful you’ve been at building and maintaining an online audience.
8. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Your CAC measures the amount of money you spent to acquire new customers. That number should include anything spent on sales and marking, along with any associated variable and fixed costs.
9. Customer Lifetime Value
This gives you an indication of the total worth of a customer during your relationship with them. It’s important to your business as you typically don’t have to spend as much to keep current customers as you do try to acquire new ones.
We understand that it can be easy to get bogged down by the number of various metrics that you could potentially be tracking to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. We hope that the list of suggestions above has narrowed that amount down a little bit to help you focus on which metrics could be critical to the success of your digital marketing efforts in advertising your business.
Our team of marketing gurus would love to help you establish a marketing plan, and have created the guide below on how to monitor your advertising ROI. Reach out today to start a conversation!
Originally published 9/21/21 - Updated 1/30/23
