The digital marketing industry is worth billions worldwide. It has gained more importance after the Covid-19 pandemic, as doing business in person has become difficult.
There is a drastic shift in how consumers interact with businesses. So, if you plan to turn to digital marketing after gauging these shifts, you will require Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to guide your marketing team and business to success.
Whether organic or paid, digital marketing KPIs and metrics are essential because they provide an important measure for your marketing efforts. It presents you with an overview of how your specific campaigns are performing, which will help you decide whether you should continue campaigning or change your track.
More importantly, digital marketing KPIs and metrics provide performance insight into the most valuable resource of an organization: the people.
Your allocated digital marketing funds should be utilized explicitly for campaigns that will bring in leads or sales conversions. Here, KPIs will assist you in identifying the campaign you must focus on or that needs improvement.
Your digital marketing team may have to take tough calls of abandoning the marketing campaigns performing poorly. However, there is scope for improvement. Your digital marketing team can use KPIs to provide inputs for the areas that need specific tweaks and adjustments, allowing you to revive a poorly run campaign.
The digital marketing team can reap the benefits by utilizing KPIs in tracking multiple spheres of business dimensions rather than just tracking marketing campaigns. It has the potential to report to you your company’s performance benchmarks and whether you will achieve your business goals in a financial year.
Here are some of the digital marketing KPI parameters which can guide you:
- Your reach and engagement on the internet via social media channels.
- Cost of sale conversion per lead.
- Percent of leads that become customers.
What exactly is a Digital Marketing KPI?
The digital marketing key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable metric that allows a business’s marketing team to understand some aspects of its marketing efforts via numbers.
It provides vital information for you and your digital marketing team to make decisions that will help you pivot when things aren’t going as well and support you in celebrating all of the digital victories you’ll gain from your optimization efforts.
Kindly note that these metrics can be related to any aspect of your business, from employee performance and HR recruitment targets to purchase and store department metrics to the sales report.
Digital Marketing KPI Tracking Criteria
Your team can get a complete overview of your business and marketing performance with the assistance of the KPI dashboard and marketing tools, allowing you to make monthly improvements.
While the precise KPI combination you track will depend on your business and the precise channels your digital marketing initiatives target.
To elaborate further, it is important to evaluate your performance in terms of social media engagement, SEO strategy, advertising, lead generation, and conversation rate. And the preferred method to accomplish this is through tracking different digital marketing KPIs.
Most Important Digital Marketing KPIs and Metrics
What are the key metrics that all digital marketers should measure in their campaigns? How do you even measure digital marketing success? Here are the top digital marketing KPIs and metrics that all digital marketers should measure:
1. Keyword Ranking
It is an important KPI because it reflects how often your online web store was seen by the user’s search result for a keyword related to the services or products offered. Keywords help you represent your business in a digital context.
Keywords are relevant because search engines are designed to favor groups of similar and related content. You are more likely to rank organically and be in a good position if you replicate content around keywords and phrases.
Hence, that is why ranking in the search engine is so essential. Ideally, you should aim for high impressions and a high ranking by driving the maximum amount of traffic to your website.
2. Social Media Engagement
Like Keywords, social media is the most important Digital Marketing KPI, mainly because users engage with the content you post on your website.
It is simple to learn how to measure social media engagement. In order to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy on your social media platforms, follow these steps:
- Select the period you want to create a report from.
- Look for your platform’s likes, shares, and comments and study them together.
- Divide this figure by the total followers on your platform.
- x 100 times.
You can use these steps to determine the percentage of your followers interacting with your website. Your website’s performance improves as engagement rises.
3. Return on Ad Spend
Cost is important. Income is among the most significant marketing indicators. The path of KPIs leads to revenue, regardless of whether advertising expenditures or in-house revenue are tracked.
Return on advertising expenditure is a driving force behind revenue development. In order to compare your overall ad expenditure to the revenue from the campaign, it measures the revenue earned from every penny you spend on advertising.
4. Email Click Rate
Are your customers responding to the marketing and promotional emails you send? To understand, subtract the total number of emails sent by your team by the total number of clicks, then multiply the result by 100.
For instance, if you had sent 10,000 emails and received 1000 clicks, your email clickthrough percentage would be 10 percent.
Monitoring your email marketing data is essential to determining its value. The click-through rate in email marketing allows your digital marketing team to assess the performance of your campaign.
This data allows your team to assess the degree to which your email copy, design, and subject line successfully drew users to your website, allowing your team to craft new campaigns by gathering this data.
5. Web Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
The website traffic lead ratio will assist your digital marketing team in calculating the percentage of visitors who become your leads, aka paying customers.
Through this KPI indicator, your team will have reliable data because it helps determine the caliber of website traffic. Since many organizations utilize their websites as their primary business tools, such as SaaS or e-commerce, this metric is essential.
How much website traffic are you receiving? And how do you calculate the “Website Traffic Lead Ratio”? It is calculated by dividing the total website visits by the total number of leads generated. The result is then multiplied by 100.
For instance, if your website receives 1000 visitors per month and produces 100 new leads. Then your traffic-to-lead ratio will be 10:1 with a 10 percent conversion rate.
6. Website Traffic
One of the key performance indicators for any website is website traffic. It shows how many people find you through organic search and how many users visit your website.
This digital marketing KPI is crucial because it can be used to assess a website’s marketing campaigns’ efficacy. Furthermore, your digital marketing team can monitor the development of a website’s overall user growth.
The KPI tool for website traffic can demonstrate how effectively a website operates in terms of the volume of traffic it receives during the campaign run.
7. Building Inbound Links
You will receive more visitors to another website the more inbound links are connected to your website: the more inbound links, the better. It would help if your team actively worked to increase the number of inbound links to your website, which you may discover using a combination of SEO tools.
Writing excellent guest posts for other blogs that will link readers back to your website is one approach to achieving this. Whatever strategy you may use, it is important to try to increase your inbound links because Google will consider them while determining where to place your site in search results.
8. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate reveals whether the visitors completed the action or not. It is usually calculated in percentages, and a successful campaign will be indicated in more significant percentages. Any activity relevant to your business can be a conversion, including someone signing up for your email, adding a product to their shopping cart, or scheduling a demo.
Good website design and layout are crucial for conversion rates as they can impact both the quantity and quality of visitors’ experiences while on your website. With a clear message, your website’s offer and call to action will definitely affect the conversion rates.
9. Returns Vs. Time Invested
This is one of the essential digital marketing KPIs to monitor in order to determine whether your digital marketing team’s efforts are beneficial. Keep track of your time on marketing and compare it with any profits you may have gained or improved since the campaign started.
By using this data, you can also calculate the profit per hour of marketing labor. If you are not earning as much money as you should, you must re-evaluate your digital marketing tactics.
10. Traffic Via Video Content
Since digital marketing uses more video, your SEO strategy should also take video into account. According to studies, videos have a 50 times higher likelihood of showing up as part of the blended results on the first page of search engine results.
But how do you measure traffic coming from video sources? Try adding a “video” tag to all your visual links, and when creating a report, write “video” to filter report results instantly. You can also embed your website’s link on the video uploaded on your YouTube channel, creating a video sitemap.
Lastly, your video conversion rates will indicate how many new leads were generated, potential leads, and paying customers your campaign yielded. This will show you how well your video meets its objectives.
These video campaigns will also help you develop a good strategy for future content that may generate higher lead generation.
Summary
You must measure KPIs in order to assess the performance of your digital marketing initiatives. With the right KPIs, you can align your digital marketing activities with your company’s ambitions and determine what is working (and what’s not).
The digital marketing team can reap the benefits by utilizing KPIs in tracking multiple spheres of business areas other than just tracking digital marketing campaigns.
In a nutshell, the top digital marketing KPIs and metrics include:
- Keyword ranking
- Social media engagement
- Return on ad spend
- Email click rate
- Web traffic-to-lead ratio
- Website Traffic
- Building inbound links
- Conversion rate
- Returns vs. time invested
- Traffic via video content
Ryan Allen is a content writer @ GoodFirms – a rating agency offering a level playing field to all software and mobile app development companies. He has a Master’s degree in Journalism and is an avid non-fiction reader.
