Digital marketing KPIs: Is your business tracking them right?
KPIs have always played a crucial role in any business. And in this current pandemic-led situation, when most companies are shifting from offline to online, focusing on online marketing strategies and measuring the correct set of digital marketing KPIs has become vital.
Wondering how to know whether your efforts are on the right track?
Start measuring your digital marketing KPIs.
What are digital marketing KPIs?
Digital marketing KPIs are quantifiable and measurable metrics directly related to your business’s digital marketing strategies. It can be brand awareness, web traffic, page conversion, lead generation, sales growth, CPA (cost-per-acquisition), or the lifetime value of a customer (LTV).
How does tracking the correct digital marketing KPIs help?
Data-driven decisions are always more reliable and tracking your KPIs precisely helps you make informed decisions. Thus, helping you achieve the Return on Investment (ROI) effectually. KPI dashboards give your marketing team a real-time view of a campaign’s performance.
Monitor current strategies
Are your digital marketing strategies on track? Are you targeting the right set of people? How is your website performing? To get answers to all these queries, you need to start tracking the right KPIs.
Progress over time
Once you have decided on your target, setting weekly KPIs makes it easier to track. Breaking down bigger objectives into smaller milestones and milestones into tasks is the most basic way to track overall progress. This also ensures that the entire team stays on track and works towards the bigger objective.
Take action on time
By highlighting the problem areas, KPI dashboards help you make prompt and real-time decisions.
Related marketing blog: 5 reasons marketing agencies should automate client reporting
Let us see some of the most important digital marketing KPIs that companies must track:
8 most important digital marketing KPIs
1. Website traffic KPIs
Businesses always aim to enhance user experience. And to do this, you need to understand your prospects. Analyzing the website visitors, understanding their demographics, interests, and keeping track of their activities gets you to know your visitors and helps you improve your ROI. One of the best tools to track your web traffic is Google Analytics.
Website traffic consists of highly measurable factors like:
- Sessions
- Users
- Pageviews
- Pages per Session
- Session Duration
- Bounce Rate
- Traffic channels
- User retention
- Goal completions
2. Content performance KPIs
Does your landing page have strong content to hold visitors’ attention? Does it have enough call-for-action? Are your social media campaigns engaging enough?
All these answers surround good content!
Good content is not just words; it’s about building trust and customers’ expectations from you. Neglecting it can be scary for your business. Despite being less costly, content marketing can produce thrice as many leads as outbound marketing. It drives about six-time higher conversion rates and can boost website traffic by 7-fold.
To express the power of content, Chris Brogan has said, “Content Marketing is weaponized storytelling.”
To track content’s performance, keep a watch on the following KPIs:
- Unique page visits
- Time spent on page
- Inbound links from other sites
- Shares, likes, and comments.
- Leads generated.
- Subscribers and followers
- Top Exit pages
3. Social media engagement KPIs
Whether you have a local shop or a global company, social media presence is vital for your marketing strategy. It is the best way to connect with the world.
The two essential things to keep in mind while tracking the social media digital marketing KPIs are engagement through followers, likes, comments, and social media traffic conversion into customers.
4. New vs. Returning visitors
While new users and returning users’ behavior may be similar, it’s essential to track them separately.
A new user speaks a lot about your marketing efforts. The time they spend and their conversion rate is a metric to see if your marketing message is robust.
Once you get a new lead, the next vital thing is retention. Here comes the importance of tracking returning users. A study says the engagement of returning users is more than the new ones. Furthermore, more returning visitors mean better ROI.
On the contrary, an increased bounce rate is a red signal, and you must try to find out what’s causing it.
5. Cost Per Acquisition or CPA
Measuring CPA is critical because it’s the perfect KPI to determine the ROI.
CPA helps you gauge cost-per-conversion, that is, the cost of acquiring a new customer. In turn, you can decide if you need to modify your marketing and advertising strategy.
6. Online conversion rates
Online conversion rates are the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions. It can be anything from spending time reading your articles, subscribing to your channel, or hiring your service.
If you want to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase ROI by getting more value from existing visitors, you should focus on CRO (conversion rate optimization).
7. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Though all customers matter, finding out the CLV helps in optimizing ROI and strategizing your business goals. CLV aims to calculate the total amount of sales that a customer expects to initiate throughout your relationship. It also helps you to find out the most profitable products and decide on your target audience.
8. SEO
According to studies, the website ranking on the first position in Google search gets 42.25% of all organic traffic. The second search result gets 11.94%. If you want to be the first one, you need to focus on Search Engine Optimization.
Leads from SEO have a 14.6% close rate which is 1.7% more compared to outbound leads. By connecting your Google Analytics account with your Google Search Console, you can track the search queries that get substantial traffic to your website.
The precise data of total clicks, impressions, CTR (average click-through rate), etc., helps you design your content, select ads, and decide on their targeting and placements.
KPIs that help you track your SEO performance:
- Overall organic traffic
- Avg. time spent on page
- Number of indexed pages in search engines
- Organic click-through rate
- Bounce rate
- Exit % of webpages
- Number of new leads
- Conversion rates
ROI (Return on Investment)
Hard ROI
Marketing activities that generate sales and revenue are known as hard ROIs. Examples include purchase, customer acquisition, coupon redemption, lead generation, website traffic, etc.
Soft ROI
Unlike hard ROIs, soft ROIs do not have immediate financial benefits. But, its impact is felt in the long run. Examples include more brand awareness, new social followers, customer retention, more word-of-mouth advertising, etc.
Conclusion
Whatever your ROI objective is, marketing analytics and the correct set of digital marketing KPIs will aid to achieve your business goals. With many tools available, you can now measure your marketing efforts and find out the hidden opportunities more seamlessly.
Now that you know why and which marketing KPIs you should track consistently, how about we understand how to visualize these on dashboards or reports? Let us know if that’s what you would also like to do by completing the short form below.
