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Posted by Vishal Parmar
January 24, 2022
In simple words, digital marketing is using the internet to reach customers. It’s similar to traditional marketing but at the same time, it’s not.
“ Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.”
Marketing has always been about connecting with your customers at the right time, in the right place. Remember how salesmen went door to door, or templates for various services would arrive with newspapers? Marketing has evolved ten folds since then. Now, marketing is about meeting your potential customers where they already are and will be by default; the internet.
Digital marketing metrics are important for digital marketers to use to measure and track the performance of a marketing campaign. It is essential you keep track of your performance and how effective your campaigns are in order to continuously keep improving.
For any digital marketing campaign, website planning, and monitoring it is very crucial because only the results will attest to the success of a particular campaign. Through digital marketing metrics, you can understand how well your strategy works and what’s lacking. There are numerous metrics that can be put to use for tracking your performance. Every metric has its own set of functions and an aspect that it’s targeted towards. You can use these marketing metrics to gain optimum results through KPIs. A key performance indicator is a metric used to measure how effectively you are reaching your business goals.
In this article, we will explore different digital marketing metrics and how to put them to use in order to gain useful information and results.
Different digital marketing metrics have different uses and areas to track. Let’s find out what metrics can prove to be useful in what capacities.
We all know how important SEO is when it comes to digital marketing. Search engine optimization is maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website and making sure that the website ranks high when information is returned from search engines. SEO metrics can help track your performance and inform you about what changes must you make in your SEO strategies to bring about a positive change. Here are 5 main SEO metrics:
1. Organic Search Traffic
When you’re running a website, your first priority is traffic. You want to know how your content is reaching its target audience. Every time you publish a new article, you probably want to check how many people visited and interacted with your website. You need traffic in order to scale the flow of website visitors.
Organic search traffic is one of the most important SEO metrics because by keeping track of your organic search traffic, you can figure out how well your SEO strategy is panning out. Organic search traffic is basically when a search bot picks up your content and displays your website in a SERP. Most researchers never go past the first two pages. Search ranking is a competitive space, it’s not easy to claim a spot in the top results. So if your organic search traffic is increasing, it only means that your pages are showing up in the top few search results and your SEO strategy is working efficiently.
2. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings refer to your page’s specific spot on the search results page when a user types in a search query. When someone enters words to search in Google that relate to your website’s content, the spot your URL is shown in is your keyword ranking. For any particular keyword, pages will have a ranking that they would appear at in SERPs. Search engines use algorithms to detect and crawl the website in terms of content, metadata, navigation, link structure, etc.
Keeping all of the above in mind, being able to set up and design a website in order to rise in rankings in search engines is what keyword rankings mean in SEO.
3. Number of Backlinks
Backlinks are treated just like ‘votes’ by search engines. Backlinks help bring traffic from a different website to your website. It is also a great sign for search engines as it establishes a sense of trust in terms of content relevance and quality. Search engines will rank you higher if you have a good amount of backlinks involved. Backlinks are also known as ‘inbound links’ and they bring in traffic to your page. Google still ranks backlinks in one of its top 3 search ranking factors.
4. Domain & Page Authority (DA/PA)
Domain Authority (DA) is a way of predicting your site’s search engine ranking. The algorithm was invented by Moz. The calculation of domain authority depends from tool to tool, but they all measure a website domain’s SEO power. You can calculate this by including multiple factors such as linking root domains, the number of links, and the strength of those links into the score.
Page Authority (PA) is similar but instead of domains, it’s used for individual pages. Page authority of your site’s webpage has a direct impact on your domain authority too. The higher your domain authority score, the more you are likely to rank in search engines.
5. Average Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is an SEO metric used to figure out how many viewers, after finding you with the help of search engines, clicked on your website and engaged with your content. If your page’s ranking is low but it’s receiving a good click-through rate then it’s an indicator for Google that your page has relevant information that users would want to discover.
Commonly associated with first-tier search engines, a pay-per-click campaign is essentially driving traffic to your website. PPC is when advertisers pay a certain amount for each user clicking their ads. Lots of businesses opt for PPC since it’s promising. Yes, it does require some investment, but it has proven to yield great results. You can make use of PPC metrics to make sure you’re on the right path. Here are 5 main PPC metrics used:
1. Cost Per Click (CPC)
The amount you pay every time a user clicks on your paid ad is known as your CPC and it’s a useful metric for making your PPC campaign a success. Your CPCs are often based on the keywords that you’re using so it’s better to use long tail keywords to attract more traffic for your important keywords. CPCs can also change with different industries but they’re always evolving so you must keep an eye on CPC trends. CPC is one of the most important metrics for PPC campaigns.
2. Total Conversions
When someone on your website not only scrolls through your page but also makes a purchase, that act is referred to as a conversion. The term ‘conversion’ might sound dramatic but that’s exactly what it means, a potential customer converting to a real-time customer. You can find out your conversion rate by calculating the percentage of visitors that converted. Total conversion value is another PPC metric to compare between ads, campaigns, pages, or keywords.
3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition is also known as cost per conversion. Cost per acquisition is a PPC metric used to measure the average cost of a user taking an action that leads to a conversion. It tells you how much you end up spending trying to get a new customer or a new lead. It is very easy to calculate: How much did you spend? How many prospects do you have? So if I’m spending 8500$ and I have 85 leads, then my cost per acquisition is 100$. Your cost per acquisition should start decreasing as your campaign progresses.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV is a PPC metric used to measure how much money is every customer expected to spend on your business in their lifetime, more like totaling the net profit of an average customer for your company. Keeping the cost-per-acquisition metric in mind, the more a customer is valued in terms of CLV, the more you can spend on their CPA. If each customer costs more than they’re worth, then it’s a sign to stop your PPC campaign and work on other important things that need to be fixed.
5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend can be explained as the amount of money your business earns for each rupee or dollar you spend on advertising. It’s very similar to ROI (return on investment), the money you’re spending on digital ads is the investment on which you’re tracking returns. It is however something that you cannot measure until your campaign is underway or even after it is over, so it’s crucial that you pay heed to other PPC metrics to obtain a good ROAS.
We all know different social media platforms that help us with marketing. Here we talk about the top 5 social media metrics:
1. Reach
Reach is one of the most important social media metrics that’s used to measure how many people are seeing your content. Reach is often confused with engagement but, engagement is how many times your content is viewed and Reach is how many people viewed your content. The more your reach counts, the more people can view your content.
2. Impressions
If your goal for your social media account is brand awareness, measuring impressions can help you a great deal. An impression is the number of times your content was displayed to the audience. One user could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content. Impressions simply mean that your content was displayed on someone’s timeline. A viewer does not have to engage with your content for it to count as an impression.
3. Engagement
Engagement is simply how many people or accounts on social media are resonating with your content. Engagement sprouts as soon as somebody starts interacting with your content in the form of likes, comments, or shares. You can easily track and calculate your engagement rate. The average engagement rate is the number of engagement actions a post receives compared to your total number of followers. If your engagement rate is high, your content is well-received by the audience. If not, it’s time to think of innovative ideas to create content and work on your engagement rates!
4. Share of voice
Share of voice is a very interesting social media metric to use. This metric is used mostly as a public relations tool, or for a paid advertising campaign. It helps you find out how many people are talking about your brand online as compared to your competitors. Of course, your share of voice can have a goal of increasing over time since campaigns come and go but your brand remains constant.
5. Conversions
Conversions are simply how many people viewing and engaging with your content actually bought things from your brand. When a consumer purchases something from you, they turn into a customer from a potential customer. Conversions are simply tracking your sales. It also includes checking how many people signed up for your newsletters, downloaded your app, or even scanned a QR code.
Emails are just messages sent back and forth for communication. But, emails are also used for marketing where you can send emails to all customers who show interest in your products. Here are email marketing metrics that can help you:
1. Open Rate
Open rate is a universally used email marketing metric that has been in the game for a very long time and is also one of the simplest ways to keep track of email marketing campaigns. Open rate is the percentage of subscribers who open a specific email. The open rate helps in finding out how engaged our subscribers are with your brand and how effective your subject matter is.
2. Conversion Rate
Just like how you can figure out how many people clicked your link by knowing your click-through rate, similarly, your conversion rate will help you know how many people clicked your link and finished a certain action. If you are hosting a sale on your brand, the conversion rate will show you how many people clicked on your link and then actually made a purchase.
3. Click-Through Rate
CTR is another common email marketing metric through which you can determine how well your marketing campaign is performing. Email CTR measures how many people clicked a link that was included in your email. There are a few ways that can prove to be useful in terms of the CTR when you craft an email. You can include links throughout the email at appropriate places and have an eye-catching CTA button so that people can actually click these links to redeem offers.
4. Unsubscribe Rate
It is very easy to know your unsubscribe rate. Your email provider can provide you with that information. This email metric can be found in the main dashboard on your metrics dashboard. Unsubscribers can often sign towards fine-tuning your subscriber list. It also lets your subscribers know that they have a choice to unsubscribe, establishing a sort of trust factor. Yes, unsubscribers can be demotivating, and losing quite a bit of them together can be devastating but it’s not always a sign to be feared! It can simply mean that people who were never going to prove to be fruitful are unsubscribing from your email blasts.
5. Overall ROI
By now we all know that ROI stands for return on investment. It is crucial in any campaign to keep track of your ROI to know where you stand. It tells you the overall return on investment for your campaigns. Calculating ROI can be done by taking the money you made in sales for the campaign minus the money you spent to execute the campaign. Divide the result by the total amount of money invested in the campaign and multiply by 100. Email marketing tends to have the highest ROI out of any digital campaign.
Content is everywhere, you’re reading content right now. Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. You can use these 5 content marketing metrics to measure and review your performance:
1. Traffic Sources
Traffic on your page can be from numerous sources like organic traffic, paid traffic, campaigns, ads, emails, etc. When you know where most of your traffic is coming from, you can pay more heed to your lacking resources in order to gain more traffic through there. It helps you determine what changes you need to make in terms of content marketing. There are many tools that can help you track your traffic sources.
2. Average Time on Page
Knowing how long potential customers or viewers spend on your page can help you craft your content better since you will know what content attracts more attention. If an article that you’ve posted online is not getting the attention you had expected it to get, you should take a hint and start improving your content. If a piece is gaining too much traction, then you know what kind of content you need to create moving forward.
3. Post Engagement (Comments)
Comments can give you great feedback about your audience. If someone has left a comment on your post, chances are they have loved your content or related to it. The best part about comments is that as a content marketing metric, this is great to grow your audience too. People often tag other friends who might relate to the content too and that also is a plus point about comments. You can also come across constructive feedback and even ask for it and create content that caters to your audience!
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a content marketing metric used to figure out how many people steer away from your website right after visiting it. Sometimes when people land on your website, they leave right away because of a number of reasons. It could be because your website took too long to load, your content isn’t good enough, or because of poor user experience. It can be time-consuming trying to figure out what really went wrong but if the need arises, you can definitely dive deeper into the problem.
5. Conversion rate
Conversion is undoubtedly the main aim of a strategy. Conversion rate is the percentage of users who have accessed your content and performed a fruitful action. When it comes to content marketing, a conversion could be leaving a comment, sharing your post with someone, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading content. You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors.
We spoke about 5 channels of digital marketing and their metrics. A single brand can use all these marketing campaigns to help their cause and they can also use all the metrics to keep track of their performance and take action accordingly. If you’re reading this article, you’re here to either educate yourself or to help your own business. It’s time for you to take action and get started!
