Did you know that according to a recent study, 76% of marketers believe that marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the previous fifty? This rapid transformation has made it more crucial than ever to keep a close eye on the metrics that matter.
Understanding and leveraging key performance indicators (KPIs) is not just beneficial; it's essential for steering your business towards success.
What is a Digital Marketing KPI?
KPI stands for key performance indicator. KPIs and metrics are crucial to digital marketing campaigns to let you know whether your efforts are resulting in a positive uplift in business.
There are two types of KPIs, high level or low level. High level KPIs are related to over all business performance. On the other hand low level KPIs are linked directly to the marketing campaigns themselves.
All KPIs and digital marketing metrics needs to be SMART:
- S: Specific
- M: Measurable
- A: Attainable
- R: Realistic
- T: Time-bound
Choosing which KPIs to track will depend on the type of digital marketing campaigns you do and also the type of business you are running. As long as they are all SMART, you will be setting yourself up for success.
Why Should I Track Metrics and KPIs?
Every marketing team will have a variety of platforms that they use to track their campaign results, from campaign level up to high level results. Tracking your key performance indicators are vital so you can ensure that your digital marketing efforts aren't going to waste.
By tracking your KPIs you can see whether a campaign is working or not, meaning you can make educated decisions on where to go next. For example, for a Google Ads campaign if your ROAS (return on ad spend) is barely breaking even, you would know you need to further optimise the campaign.
Tracking your digital marketing metrics is also important so you can share your results with other teams within your business. Most shareholders will only want top level information about your marketing efforts, not specifics about each campaign. Tracking your KPIs makes it easy for you to share with others in the business any successes or learning curves without having to worry about digital marketing jargon.
Top Digital Marketing Metrics and KPIs
Website Traffic
Traffic is the amount of users visiting your website. High traffic is a good thing, low traffic is usually not so great. High website traffic is the first step in any digital marketing campaign. The goal is often to lead potential customers to your website first, then converting them with your on-site marketing.
You should also be traffic where most of your traffic is coming from. There are a few main website traffic sources:
- Organic: Through search engines
- Direct: Straight to your website
- Referral: Through a backlink on another site that isn't a search engine
- Paid search: From PPC campaigns
- Email: Through an email marketing campaign
- Social media: From any social media, paid or organic
Conversion Rate
Next up is conversion rate, which is your website traffic compared to how many actually convert. This is usually an indicator of how well your website converts users. If you are getting lots of website traffic, but a very low conversion rate you know you need to better optimise your website experience.
To work out your conversion rate simple divide the amount of conversions by your website visitors then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Average conversion rate fluctuates based on industry, but a good benchmark is often between 2-5%.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition is a good one to key your eye on for paid digital marketing campaigns. This metric is used to find out how much it costs to acquire each new customer from a certain campaign. You can work this out by dividing the amount you've spent on a campaign by the amount of new customers.
For example, if you spend $100 on an ad campaign and acquired 4 new customers, then the cost per acquisition is $25.
The amount you are willing to spend per acquisition will depend on the lifetime value of your average customer. We will cover LTV later in this article but for the moment, consider how much your service or product is. If you are selling phone cases with $40 profit per unit sold then a CPA of $25 is still profitable.
Return On Investment (ROI)
Return on investment is a great top level digital marketing metric to share with stakeholders across the business. It's a quick snapshot of how successful your marketing efforts have been. It's also a pretty easy one to figure out. Depending on whether you want to see the ROI at a campaign level or an overall figure for all marketing efforts, simply look at how much revenue has been brought in via your marketing minus how much the marketing costs are for that period.
A return on investment isn't the goal of every marketing campaign. For example, some campaigns may be completely brand awareness based, hence ROI wouldn't be the correct metric to quote. On the other hand, most business owners want to know whether their investment has been worth it. So it's always worth keeping a close eye on ROI.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click through rate as a KPI can be used across a huge amount of campaigns. From social media and email marketing to PPC and SEO. Click through rate measures the amount of people who have seen you vs how many actually clicked.
This means if your PPC Google Ad had 3000 impressions and 60 clicks then you'd have a 2% CTR.
As with conversion rate, average CTR ranges between industries and campaign types. A good click through rate is often between 2-5%.
Mobile Traffic
This metric shows you how many of your website visitors, social media followers or email subscribers are browsing on their mobile. This can help you better optimise your campaigns for your target audience.
If you notice that a vast majority of your users are interacting with your brand on mobile then you'll want to start optimising your campaigns for a smaller screen.
Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement covers a lot of smaller KPIs, including:
- Followers
- Click through rate
- Likes/ Shares/ Comments
- Audience growth
- Engagement rate
Basically any metric from your social media account is covered by the term social media engagement. If social media is one of your digital marketing strategies then it's important to keep an eye on your audience and how they interact with you.
Engagement rate is a good metric to get an understanding on your social media success. If your Instagram has 1500 followers for instance, but your posts only average 15 likes then perhaps you need to better tailor your content towards your audience.
Life Time Value (LTV)
Life time value is an estimate of how much a customer or client is worth during their customer life time. You can work this out by finding your customer value by the average customer lifespan (how long a customer remains a returning visitor to your brand).
This one is an important metric to keep sight of for any marketing investment. By understanding exactly how valuable a single customer is you can properly budget your campaigns accordingly.
Low Level Digital Marketing KPIs Examples
These types of KPIs are often looked at on a smaller level to see the overall success of a single digital marketing campaign or source.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is most commonly found in discussions around your website. Bounce rate is the rate at which users leave your site almost immediately.
A high bounce rate is a bad thing for a multitude of reasons. The first being that your visitors clearly aren't getting what they need from your website so they're much less likely to convert. A high bounce rate is also bad for your SEO. High bounce rates signal to Google and other search engines that your website isn't the best to serve to their users. This will affect your rankings and could go on to affect your businesses overall online visibility.
If users are leaving your website quickly you need to find out why and remedy the problems. It could be because your website doesn't load quick enough, or maybe your content is poorly written. Running regular website audits can help you to source the issues and solve a high bounce rate.
Micro-Conversions
Micro-conversions are smaller achievements made before a full conversion. This could be anything from a social media follow to a meeting request or email subscription. Keeping a close eye on the amount of micro-conversions on your site can signal whether your visitors are having a positive experience on your website.
Cost Per Click
For PPC campaigns you want to keep an eye on CPC (cost per click). This is how much you pay per click towards your website. Ideally you want to pay a little per click as possible, however this will vary depending upon the search terms you are targeting.
Google Ads often work on a bidding system, meaning whoever is willing to pay the most per click will get their ad served. Other ads, social media ads for example, are done on a budget basis and you pay for the impressions and the CPC is determined by how successful your campaign is.
Keyword Rankings
For SEO campaigns you want to keep a close eye on your keyword rankings. Whether you're currently attempting to climb the search engine results page or you're maintaining high search engine ranks you need to monitor these every week.
Using tools like SEMRush or Google Search Console you can see how your website ranks against your competitors. From this you can mould your content strategy to either climb or maintain your rankings.
Open Rate
Open rate is a common email marketing metric that shows how many of the users you have sent an email to have opened it. In an ideal world every subscriber would open every email however this is almost never the case for email marketers.
Your open rate can be affected by many things, the first one to focus on is your subject line. Is it compelling? If you received an email with that subject line, would you open it? The SL is one of the most important parts of your marketing emails to get your users to even open it.
Another factor that could be decreasing your open rate is spam filtering. If your domain appears slightly dodgy then many email inbox providers will deliver your marketing straight to the spam folder. Most people completely disregard their spam folder so it's key to make sure you're avoiding it.
To stay out of the spam folder make sure you're authenticating your domain with your email marketing platform and you're not sending emails to people who haven't authorised you to do so.
Followers
Social media followers are a good figure to see how your socials doing. By monitoring your follower growth you can see whether your social media efforts are paying off. Try to understand why you're gaining or losing followers and build your campaigns accordingly.
Lead Tracking
Now that we've been over all of these digital marketing metrics you want to be certain that you are tracking everything correctly. Automating this process will make everything a lot easier for you the next time a stakeholder asks you for top level metrics.
Call Tracking
Call tracking involves using a unique phone number to track where incoming calls are coming from. Whether it's digital or physical marketing, call tracking can help you to evaluate the effectiveness of any campaign.
A lot of call tracking software will also be able to track:
- The caller's phone number
- The date and time of the call
- The call length
- Whether they are a new or repeat caller
UTM Tracking
UTM tracking should be used in every digital campaign where you link to your website (which is basically every campaign!). This is a type of tracking that is added to the end of a URL that signals where the traffic has come from.
The tracking is used in tools like Google Analytics to show exactly which sources are pulling in the most traffic and more importantly, which don't pull in much traffic at all. Then you can focus your efforts to either improve the worse sources, or further optimise your best.
CRM Tools
Popular CRM systems include Hubspot and Salesforce. These are great systems that allow you to track leads through the sales funnel, from prospecting to closed lead. Having a CRM can help you in more ways that just organising your clients. Most CRMs will track all email conversions you have with your clients, their interactions with your website and current status in your sales funnel.
All this information can help you with targeted marketing materials. For example, email marketing that is targeted towards individuals who have purchased a specific product.
Final Thoughts
From the pivotal insights from website traffic and conversion rates to the details offered by CPA and ROI, each KPI is a piece in the complex puzzle of digital marketing success.
Remember, tracking mobile traffic and social media engagement isn't just about keeping up with trends; it's about understanding where your audience lives online and how they interact with your brand.
Mastering these digital marketing KPIs isn't just about boosting your current campaign; it's about setting up your business for long-term success. So, take these insights, apply them to your digital strategies, and watch as your marketing efforts transform into tangible results.
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