It’s no secret that digital revolution has disrupted the entire marketing industry. Gone are the days when the job of a marketer was to develop a campaign and use the creatives to communicate with the audience.
With the advent of digital marketing, the role of marketers within an organization has grown. The job of a marketer is no longer limited to promoting products. Marketers are now involved in all facets of a business.
This is especially the case in tech businesses where marketers help the product team during the design process, they help develop the business’s long term strategy, and most importantly, they are responsible for assisting in business growth. Metrics, also known as analytics, are the most powerful tools that marketers possess in this crusade.
Why Metrics Are Important?
Simply put, metrics serve as key performance indicators of a campaign, and we will use the following example to illustrate their importance.
Suppose you develop an extensive marketing campaign for Windstream high-speed internet. The objective of this campaign is to increase brand awareness, and you have a budget of $50,000 to achieve that goal.
The campaign’s duration is a month, and at the end of it, you will have to present a detailed report on its performance. Your bosses wouldn’t be impressed with creativity in your advertisements. What they will look for are numbers.
They would want to know how many people you were able to reach through your communications, how many times the target audiences saw your message, and what proportion of these people converted into customers.
Marketers get all of this information, and so much more, through metrics. The trick is to make sure you are using the relevant metrics. This process requires knowledge and research but fret not! We’re here to provide you details regarding different digital marketing metrics. Here’s a look at them:
Traffic
When you are analyzing campaign performance, you especially need to be wary of vanity metrics. These are metrics appear great on paper, however they don’t have any kind of impact on the business.
Some examples of vanity metrics include registered accounts, page views, page likes and followers. On surface even traffic might appear to be a vanity metric, however scratch a little deeper and you can extract useful insights from this metric.
You can divide your overall traffic into five channels: organic, direct, referral, social, and paid.
Organic traffic refers to visitors who came to your website after finding it on search engines. Direct traffic refers to visitors who types the website’s address in the URL and got on your website directly.
Referral, as the name suggests, is the traffic that came on your website after clicking its link on another website. Traffic that comes on your website through social media channels is known as social and paid traffic refers to people who are redirected to your website after they click on promoted content.
Using a content management system, you can dissect traffic by source and get information like what kind of content resonates most with customers, what actions visitors take upon visiting your website, and at what point visitors drop off your website.
This information is crucial when you are developing your customer’s journey. It allows you to identify your weak points and address them to ensure that more of your visitors turn into customers.
Engagements
Through engagement metrics, you can determine how many people are interacting with your digital assets such as your social media, your website, and ads. The higher this number is, the better. Some examples of engagement metrics include:
1. Average Time Spent on Website
The more time customers spent on your website, the more they engage with the content. The average time spent on a website also helps you identify the areas of your website that need improvement.
These areas might have slow loading times or poor navigation, issues that adversely affect overall customer experience so, you will need to address them as quickly as possible.
2. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visited your website only to leave it immediately. A high bounce rate is an alarming sign because it’s an indication that customers don’t find the content on your website engaging enough.
It’s also obvious that visitors who leave immediately are less likely to convert into customers. A high bounce rate also affects your website’s SEO rankings, which is another reason you need to keep a close eye on this metric.
3. Net promoter Score
This metric is useful for getting an idea regarding what customers think about your brand. It allows you to gauge overall customer experience and find out if customers would be willing to recommend your business and products to others.
NPS is essentially a survey where customers rank various facets of a business on a scale of 0-10. People who give rankings between 0-6 are known as detractors and, people who give ranks between 9 and 10 are known as promoters. Anyone who gives ranking between 7 and 8 is referred to as a passive customer.
Detractors are people who think negatively about the brand and would discourage others from trying your products. Promoters are the opposite. These are people who are loyal customers. Passive customers are people who neither recommend your products nor discourage others from using it.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion metrics indicate how many people have taken a desired action on a specific piece of content. These are the metrics that are directly connected with your business’s performance so you need to pay close attention to them.
1. Conversion Rate
This conversion metric tells you how many of your website visitors have converted into customers or have completed a specific goal on your website. Goals are specific actions that a business wants customers to take on a web page. Adding products in a shopping cart is a good example.
The simplest way to calculate conversion rate is to convert the number of conversions with the total number of visitors on your webpage.
Conversion rate is also beneficial for marketers because it gives them an idea regarding which website elements are working and what kind of content is resonating with the audiences.
2. Click through Rate
Click-through rate measures the total number of clicks on an advertisement against the total number of impressions. Simply put, it lets you calculate the number of people who clicked in your ad after they saw it over the internet.
You want this number to be high because that’s an indication that your pay-per-click campaign was a success. If your ad is relevant and is engaging enough, there’s no reason it shouldn’t generate the desired response.
3. Cost per Click
Speaking of PPC campaigns, you also need to know the cost you incur on every single click. This metric is known as cost per click. Every single click in a PPC campaign is an indication that users have an interest in the kind of services you are offering.
Google calculates the cost of a click based on the average bid amount in an auction. The cost of a click is also affected by your ad quality score, your competitor’s ad rank, and the maximum bid.
Revenue Metrics
These are the metrics you turn to when you need to assess the impact that a marketing campaign has had on your overall revenue.
1. Customer Lifetime Value
This metric allows you to determine the maximum amount of money you expect a customer to spend on your business in their lifetime. It is an essential metric because it lets you determine how much you need to invest in acquiring new customers and how much money you should spend to retain old ones.
This metric is also useful for identifying the best performing products in your portfolio. All you need to do is find out which products customers with the highest CLV have historically been interested in.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer acquisition cost is the cost that a business incurs in trying to acquire a new customer. This metric is used in conjunction with customer lifetime value to determine if investing in new customers is worthwhile or not.
Let us illustrate this with an example. Suppose you spend $1000 in acquiring a particular customer. However, that customer’s lifetime value is $700. The cost of acquiring that customer exceeds the revenue generated by that customer, so the business is better off without them.
3. Return on Ad Spend
Suppose you spend $1000 on an ad and managed to get $4000 from customers who clicked on that ad. The Return on Ad spend, in this case, is $4.
The calculation illustrates how this metric works. Return on Ad spent is useful for measuring the success of PPC campaigns and gives you an idea regarding the revenue you get against every dollar that you spend
4. Return on Investment
Perhaps the most important metric of them all, Return on investment, gives you an idea regarding the profit or loss that you made as a result of a digital marketing campaign. This metric also tells you whether you effectively allocated your budgets or not.
The Tools of Success in the Digital World
The metrics we have mentioned are effective tools that allow marketers to develop effective campaigns and help a business grow. Sure working with numbers can be daunting initially but the goal of using metrics is to focus your energy on areas where your strengths lie.
If these metrics are used properly then we have no doubt that your campaigns will prove to be a success both creatively as well as financially.
Baldwin Jackson is a successful digital marketer with expertise in search engine optimization and content marketing. The perfect balance of his analytical ability and creative thinking is what sets him apart from other practitioners in the digital marketing realm. He has helped a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in crafting their digital marketing strategies that are not only cost-effective but delivers results as well.
Baldwin is also a proud father of two kids and a Sports enthusiast. When he is not working, you will find him watching ESPN and NFL network. He has been able to get an amazing package on his favorite channels from Buytvinternetphone.com.
