Did you ever feel the need to justify your marketing efforts to your clients?
The number of leads and sales can satisfy your client’s curiosity for a short while—telling them you are doing something. But how would you know in the long term that you are strategizing your campaigns in the right direction?
The most successful digital marketing agencies focus on metrics to analyze a strategy. They measure their efforts after every milestone they achieve to plan their next move.
In fact, creative agencies base their strategies and decisions on analytics. They depend on data to understand their clients’ needs and positioning and devise a profitable strategy for them.
So, your first step towards success is to know how to measure it. Here are 18 digital marketing metrics that can help you.
Five types of digital marketing metrics you should measure
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for different channels and strategies you apply for promoting your clients’ business. So, you should measure the efficacy of every strategy discretely.
Type #1: Website metrics
You can measure 4 different website metrics.
Metric #1: Daily unique visitors
It measures the number of unique visits every day on your website. Many SEO companies consider it an important metric to measure their organic marketing strategies.
Formula: Average daily unique visitors in a month = daily unique visitors in a month / days in that month.
Metric #2: Bounce rate
It measures visitors’ overall engagement with your website. It is the percentage of single-page sessions—the visitor doesn’t go beyond the first page after they land on your website.
Formula: Bounce rate = (total number of single-page sessions / total number of visits to a website) x 100
Metric #3: Average time on page
It gives you a clear idea of the time visitors spend on a particular page of your website. It can be a product page (throwing some light on what products your customers prefer the most) or an information page (that shows what your audience is looking for).
Formula: Average time on page = total time spend on your page / total number of (pageviews) – (total number of exits)
Metric #4: Exit rate
It gives you a fair idea of your “worst” performing pages—that your users visit and directly exit your website. Technically, the exit rate is the percentage of users that leave your website after visiting a particular page, switching to other sites.
Formula: Exit rate = (total exits from a page / total visits to the same page) x 100
Type #2: Email marketing metrics
5 metrics to measure for your email marketing campaigns:
Metric #5: Sign up rate
It gives you the percentage of people who are ready to join your email list and receive updates from your company.
Formula: Sign up rate = (number of conversions/number of visitors on your website in a given time frame) x 100
Metric #6: Open rate
It is basically a test of your emails’ subject lines! The open rate measures the percentage of people who open your emails (after reading your subject line/brand name).
Formula: Open rate = (total number of emails opened / total number of emails delivered) x 100
H4 Metric #7: Click-through rate (CTR)
Yes! You can use the same metric to track your adverts, too. It gives you the percentage of people who have clicked on your emails’ links (or on your ad).
Formula: CTR for email = (number of users who clicked on the links/number of emails delivered) x 100
CTR for ads = (number of people who clicked on the ad/number of impressions (times when people see your ad)) x 100
Metric #8: Spam rate
It gives you the percentage of people who are not interested in your services or do not to hear from you anymore. They mark your emails as spam.
Formula: Spam rate = (number of people who marked your emails as spam/number of emails you sent (number of people in your email list)) x 100
Metric #9: Unsubscribe rate
It tells you what percent of people sign up for your email list through your campaign but back off when they don’t find it interesting or useful in the long run. They unsubscribe from your email list.
Formula: Unsubscribe rate = (number of users who unsubscribed / number of emails that got delivered) x 100
Type #3: Social media marketing metrics
You can measure 4 different social media marketing metrics.
Metric #10: Follow growth rate
It determines your consistency to get new followers within a specified time frame. Technically, it is the percentage of new followers that add up after the initial count.
Formula: Follower growth rate = (number of new followers / initial follower count) x 100
Metric #11: Engagement rate
It gives you the percentage of interactions on your social media post. The interactions are in the form of likes, comments, and shares (and not impressions or views).
Formula: Engagement rate = (number of interactions on your post/number of followers of your account) x 100
Metric #12: Post reach percentage
It determines the percentage of people who have seen your social media post. Simply put, post reach is the number of views your post gets on social media.
Formula: (total post reach (number of views on your post) / total followers on your account) x 100
Metric #13: Social media conversion rate
It gives you a fair idea of what percent of conversions have come from your social media channels. You will have to add a link to your post that adds a “cookie” on your follower’s/viewer’s device, to measure it.
Formula: Conversion rate = (number of conversions on social media / total number of conversions) x 100
Type #4: SEO metrics
There are 2 main SEO metrics you can measure.
Metric #14: SERP Visbility
It helps you analyze the traffic you can receive from a query’s rankings on the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Formula: SERP visibility = (number of times a query is searched (query search volume) / click-through rate of the query’s rank)
Metric #15: Click-through rate
This metric will help you analyze the efficacy of your SEO metadata. It will tell you how attractive or “clickable” your title tags and meta descriptions are.
Formula: CTR for SEO = (number of clicks your website gets / number of times your website shows up in the search results) x 100
Type #5: Paid marketing metrics
We have listed the top 3 paid marketing metrics that you can measure.
Metric #16: Cost per click (CPC)
CPC is the measure of the total cost incurred in an ad campaign. It is important you know the CPC of your campaign to invest your marketing dollars wisely.
Formula: CPC = (total cost of your ad campaign/number of clicks on your ad)
Metric #17: Conversion rate
It gives you the percentage of people who converted as a result of your paid ads. This helps you gain in-depth insights into the ad that got you more conversions.
Formula: Conversion rate = (number of conversions from your ad/number of clicks on your ad) x 100
Metric #18: Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
Simply put, it helps you determine the ROI of your advertising campaigns. If your returns are significantly greater than what you have spent on adverts, paid marketing is a profitable strategy for you.
Formula: ROAS = (total revenue from your conversions / total cost of advertising)
Did you know about these metrics?
Prepare a checklist of digital marketing metrics and start checking the ones you already measure. Of course, the ones we mentioned above are not the only metrics you should measure. But, these values can paint a clear picture of where your marketing campaigns are headed to.
So, gear up for some more research and back up your success with data from digital marketing metrics.
