Are you trying to track your company’s growth, but not sure which digital marketing KPIs to include?
Over the past decade, digital marketing has grown into a complex network of channels to reach clients. Between PPC platforms, social media channels, email marketing, blogging, podcasts, and many more, there’s an endless number of ways to connect with your audience.
The only problem? How can you measure your marketing efforts to make sure they’re worth your time (and money?).
That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at in today’s article. Because in this post, we’ll check out the top 6 digital marketing KPIs you’ll want to include in every report.
Before we do, though, let’s get clear on why it’s so crucial to track your marketing efforts in the first place.
Why It’s Important to Track Data
It's important to track your marketing data for several reasons. By doing so, you can create stronger marketer strategies and a more realistic budget. Your data will also give you a better idea of how to improve your marketing campaign.
Here are just a few advantages of tracking your digital marketing KPIs:
- KPIs can be used as indicators for the success or failure of an online marketing strategy It's important to track your data because it will allow you to make better decisions about your time and budget
- You can increase the success of future marketing campaigns by looking at what worked in a previous campaign
- You should start tracking and analyzing KPIs as soon as you create an online marketing strategy or develop a marketing campaign.
This will allow you to make changes or adjustments during the process, and it'll also help in a post-strategy analysis of what worked well and what didn't work as effectively.
But now you might be wondering, “Ok… so which metrics should I track?”
Let’s take a look at the top 7 digital marketing KPIs you need to keep in mind as you work to grow your business.
Top Digital Marketing KPIs You Need to Track
1) Return on Investment (ROI)
Hands-down the most important KPI you should track is your ROI. Likes and clicks are all well and good. But they don’t pay the bills. If your ROI is low, then your digital marketing campaign has cost more than it’s worth.
Some digital marketing channels will help you out by giving you an ROI figure directly. It’s worth paying attention to how they calculate that since different platforms can use different attribution models to decide what revenue should be considered part of that campaign.
If you prefer to calculate ROI yourself, take the total revenue generated by your campaign and subtract the amount you spent on it. Then divide the new number by the total spend. Multiply by 100 to get a percentage you can use to compare campaigns.
Useful metrics to help you compare the ROI of your different campaigns include:
- ROI itself
- Cost per click
- Cost per conversion
- Cost per lead
- Total ad spend
- Total revenue generated
- Percentage of sales generated
- Cost per thousand impressions (only if your campaign’s main aim is growing brand awareness)
2) Conversion Rate
Another vital KPI to track is the conversion rate. It’s the percentage of visitors who take the desired action on your website. This helps you monitor the effectiveness of your funnels and your website’s design.
Conversions aren’t always sales. You might also want to track people who download a lead magnet, sign up to an emailing list, or submit a form.
There are plenty of different ways to look at your conversion rate. The one that is most useful to you will depend on your aims.
For example, monitoring the conversion rate of different landing pages can help you assess which copy and design work best to persuade visitors along your funnel.
Or you could compare the conversion rate of visitors who come through to your site from different marketing platforms. This can give you an idea of where to spend your marketing budget most effectively.
3) Audience Growth Rate
Reporting on your raw audience count is never particularly helpful. What is more interesting is how that number changes over time.
Ideally, you want to see a steady rate of growth in all of your digital audiences. This lets you know that you are on the right track to retain existing followers and engage new ones.
You won’t keep everyone on board for the long haul. But if your audience isn’t growing, you know there is something wrong with your current marketing approach. Either you just aren’t reaching the right people, or your content isn’t engaging enough to interest them.
Look at your audience growth rate across all your digital marketing channels. Metrics that help you monitor this KPI include:
- Website traffic
- New and returning website visitors
- New email subscribers
- Email unsubscribes
- Social media followers
4) Campaign Engagement
The best digital marketers are constantly testing new ideas and tracking how their target audience responds. The more data you can gather on how your prospective customers engage with your campaigns, the better.
This information is vital when you are coming up with new marketing strategies. By looking at what has worked well in the past and what has bombed, you build a picture of what is most likely to grab the attention of your target audience.
Examples of metrics that help you monitor this KPI include:
- Click-through rate
- Email open rate
- Social media engagement rate
- Website bounce rate
- Time on page
- Session duration
- Pages per session
- Most popular landing pages
- Most popular blog posts
5) Source/Medium
While social media sites are increasingly giving us tools to convert people within the platform, driving visitors through to your website is still the main aim of many digital marketing campaigns.
Knowing which channels perform best for you is essential to your future planning. It also helps you evaluate the success of your campaigns.
If you’ve been investing in SEO, you’ll want to see the number of visitors coming from organic searches increasing over time. If social media marketing has been your main focus, you expect to see more sessions from there.
You should also look at other metrics broken down by source and medium, such as conversion rate, bounce rate, and revenue.
Track these metrics over time to see that your digital marketing is having the desired effect. And compare the performance of different channels too, so you know where to concentrate your efforts in future.
6) Popular Keywords
It’s impossible to overstate how important search engines have become to how we find content online. Whether it's through PPC advertising or organic searches, Google and its fellow search engines are some of the best ways for potential customers to discover your brand.
Keeping an eye on the search queries that bring you the most visitors is vital for several reasons.
First, it helps you assess whether your content is bringing you the right people. If the search terms that are driving the most visits don’t match the main aims of your site, you know you aren’t reaching the right audience or optimizing for the right keywords.
Secondly, it tells you a bit about what your potential audience is interested in, which helps you create content to match their needs.
And thirdly, you can use the information from organic searches to plan which keywords to target in your PPC campaigns.
7) Lifetime Value
Last but definitely not least, tracking the lifetime value of the customers you acquire through your digital marketing helps you plan for the long-term.
With luck, your customers will return again and again. But not everyone will. The lifetime value of your customers tells you how much revenue they have brought you throughout their entire relationship with you.
At times, there is a noticeable difference between customers that come from different digital marketing channels. Your Instagram followers may be good for a one-off impulse buy, but do they return to purchase again? Or is it the visitors who came from organic searches who bring you the most revenue in the long run?
When you notice a channel has a high acquisition rate but a low lifetime value, you can start to work on retargeting ads and other content to keep customers engaged.
And that’s all for today! These have been 7 of the top digital marketing KPIs you should be tracking on a regular basis.
Need some help managing those KPIs in easy-to-read marketing reports? I recommend checking out Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is a reporting tool that lets you quickly and easily create marketing reports in minutes. You can pull KPIs from your favorite marketing channels and have reports automatically created and sent to your recipients.
Not only will Metrics Watch save you time and money in the long run, but it’ll protect your marketing reports from human error during data entry.
Plus, all the reports go straight to your recipients’ inbox. That means no more messy PDFs or user roles to manage for 3rd-party dashboards.
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Build Your Email Marketing Report Today!We hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, you’ll definitely want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have even more information on how you can strengthen your digital marketing strategy and continue to grow your business today.