You’re spending so much time, effort and resources in executing your digital marketing strategy, but are you keeping tabs on how well you’re performing?
Unlike traditional forms of marketing and advertising, there’s no need to predict your success. Digital marketing provides you with endless valuable metrics to measure the performance of your campaigns and presence online.
Where to begin though? This is where Google Analytics becomes your best friend! Different metrics will provide you with different insights, but generally speaking they will fall into 3 categories – traffic, conversions and revenue.
Here are 5 basic metrics worth measuring that are relevant to most digital marketing strategies. As your marketing evolves and your hunger for results grows, you can delve into the myriad of metrics available to you.
Total site visits
At the bare minimum you should be reviewing visits to your website. And if you’re not, aren’t you the least bit curious? Your total site visits provide you with a basic level understanding of how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic to your site. Based on your activities, if you track your visits month by month you should be able to get a sense of what is working and what is not. Take your analysis a step further and review your visits based on channel specific traffic.
Bounce rate
This refers to the number of users who visit your site and leave straight away without as much as a click on a link. This is particularly important if you run an e-commerce site, where bounce rates are mostly associated with cart abandonment. If a high percentage of visitors aren’t sticking around long enough to engage with you on your site, then it’s a sure sign you need to review things.
Total conversions
Conversions can be seen as actions performed on your site such as filling out a form, making a purchase, downloading content or subscribing to a mailing list. This is one of the ways you can measure how profitable your marketing efforts are. If your conversion rates are low, then you should sound the alarm bells and start testing for improvements. You can easily set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics if your site doesn’t automatically measure this for you.
Cost per conversion
How much are your leads costing you? This is important if you engage in paid advertising, because it helps you manage your budget based on the performance of your ads.
Return on investment (ROI)
The ultimate measure of how well your digital marketing is performing. Are your activities proving profitable and delivering results to your bottom line? This brings into play a few other metrics such as comparing your cost per lead against your lead to close ratio verses your average customer value. A positive ROI means things are looking good, whereas a negative ROI is just that, and clearly means some changes need to be made. Sound confusing? Don’t worry we’re here to help if you need it!
We’ve only just scratched the surface on digital marketing metrics here, but if you’re not measuring any of your activities at the moment, then this is a great base to get started.
Not sure how to measure your digital marketing efforts? Get in touch with Cloud Cartel – Perth’s digital marketing experts.
