10 Digital Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking
More marketing metrics don’t necessarily translate to more money. You can have all the fans, likes and comments in the world but if these people don’t buy from you, then you don’t have a viable business model.
This article provides Baker Marketing’s top 10 digital marketing metrics that help you track more than just vanity metrics.
Digital Marketing Metric 1: Qualified Leads
It is quite common to measure the number of leads that your business is generating and analyse whether this figure goes up or down month on month or year on year. What is less common is to investigate the quality of these leads. Focussing on quantity can mean the numbers look good on paper, but you are potentially spending a lot of money bringing in leads that are unlikely to convert or are not your target market and less profitable.
One way to overcome this is to dedicate the job of qualifying online leads to a team member. In this way, you can monitor which campaigns are driving the highest quality, contact each of the high-quality leads individually giving them personalised attention and you can improve and optimise your campaigns to increase the quality of your leads.
Digital Marketing Metric 2: Likes and Comments
Continuing the theme of focussing on quality over quantity, this also goes for measuring the likes and comments that your content is receiving. At a top level, these metrics can provide a false assessment of engagement as there may be negative reactions in the mix. Instead, analyse these metrics at a qualitative level to understand how the content made the user feel.
Digital Marketing Metric 3: Sharing of Content
The goal of content is to create messages that your target market would be inclined to share with their network. Therefore, measuring how many people are sharing your content is a great way to assess how many organic brand ambassadors and how much trusted content your business is creating.
Digital Marketing Metric 4: Cost Per Acquisition
Within the different digital advertising tools such as Google Ads and Facebook Ad Manager, you can see a cost per acquisition measure which helps you to understand how much a lead has cost. What this doesn’t take into account is other associated costs such as salaries and overheads. Calculating all your marketing expenses will give you an accurate cost per acquisition, from here you will be able to determine the viability of your digital marketing activity.
Digital Marketing Metric 5: Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score is a popular catch-all metric that lets you know if your customers would recommend your brand to their friends, family or peers. A high net promoter score signifies that you have prosperous and strong word of mouth. The real benefit from net promoter score is being able to benchmark yourself across the same metric within your industry.
Digital Marketing Metric 6: Revenue
Ultimately all of your marketing activity should translate into revenue for the company, and ideally, this number will be experiencing incremental growth. Depending on your business type, revenue can be measured month on month or year on year if seasonality is a factor in the industry.
Digital Marketing Metric 7: Customer Lifetime Value
Understanding the lifetime value of your customers is essential so that you can fully comprehend your cost per acquisition (CPA) metric and the sustainability of your business. For example, you may have a high cost per new acquisition but to offset this, you know that the customer lifetime value is much higher due to the average spend of a customer over their period of time with your brand. In this way, you can assess the sustainability of your marketing efforts and set appropriate CPA goals.
Digital Marketing Metric 8: Conversion Rate
Converting leads into customers is one of the most critical activities for business and measuring conversion rate is an analysis of how good your business is at turning those opportunities into paying customers.
Digital Marketing Metric 9: Return On Investment
Return on Investment (ROI) measures the profitability of your marketing activity as it takes into account revenue made versus how much you have spent. This is an excellent figure to look at when assessing which digital channels and tactics are working and not working so budgets can be allocated accordingly.
Digital Marketing Metric 10: Quantitative Website Metrics
Qualitative measurements of online engagement should be analysed alongside quantitative website metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate and time spent on site. This will ensure that you get all the pieces of the puzzle concerning converting your content engagement into actual sales on your website or app.
