How Professionals Monitor Digital Marketing Metrics

Monitoring digital marketing performance is vital for understanding how marketing spending and activities affect a company’s profits and success. Many marketers feel pressured to be able to show a clear ROI on their digital activities and justify their actions and spending. Digital marketing metrics help, to a great extent, to measure how much marketing expenditure contributes to a company’s profits.

However, one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers stems from the fact that marketing activities often yield many intangible benefits too. Digital marketing can, for example, play a huge role in raising a company’s profile and growing awareness about a brand. It can also contribute to team motivation and success, enhance trust in a brand, create a clear company profile and reinforce relationships with stakeholders. Online presence is more important than ever.

It’s clear that monitoring the digital performance of marketing campaigns and activities is important for a wide variety of reasons. Here are the top ways professionals monitor digital marketing performance and the key digital marketing metrics they use:

1. Website Traffic

There are various metrics for monitoring and analyzing website traffic.

Visitor Numbers

Knowing the total number of visitors, or traffic, to your website can help you get a basic understanding of the overall online presence. Importantly, you should also consider the quality of your traffic.

Visitor Origin

You can see where your traffic is coming from, for example through searches or social media channels, which in turn can inform whether strategies related to social media campaigns or SEO are working effectively. If analysis shows that a significant number of people arrive at your site from referrals, such as mentions on other websites, this could guide you towards developing a more robust guest-posting strategy.

SEO

Metrics related to search engine optimization (SEO) and search trends enable you to understand whether current SEO strategies are working. You can gain insights into keywords and phrases that are successfully bringing visitors to your site, as well as knowing which keywords aren’t performing effectively. Furthermore, you can generate keywords that may potentially be useful for your goals.

Peak Traffic Times

You can analyze visiting trends, such as when your site attracts the most visitors, which can then better inform content and posting strategies.  

New or Repeat Traffic

Breaking it down further, professionals also consider how much traffic is made up of repeat visitors and new visitors. Monitoring returning visitor numbers can provide insights into your website content, such as how interesting and relevant content is. Measuring new visitors enables you to quantify the effectiveness of particular campaigns.

2. Interaction with Website

It’s beneficial for professionals to evaluate how visitors operate while viewing the website. 

Time on Site

Knowing how much time users spend on your site is a major indication of the usefulness and relevance of your content, which is also suggestive of how well you are conveying your business to potential customers.

Site Navigation

Seeing how users navigate their way through your site is relevant at showing the most popular types of content and how people access your content (for example, through internal linking or via the menu). This shows how customers ultimately chose to convert. Understanding navigation trends can help to show the effectiveness of marketing activities.

Pageviews

As well as understanding the total time spent on your site and navigation paths, seeing the total number of pages viewed is a good indication of how engaging your site is.

Exit Rate

Seeing whether people immediately leave your site and knowing at what point they decide to leave can help to build upon and improve campaigns so as to be more appealing to visitors.

3. Advertising

Many marketers use paid advertisements as a tool to try and reach new customers. It’s vital o understand the effectiveness and usefulness of advertising campaigns.   

Advertising Click-through Rates

While many people might see an advertisement, the number of people who actually take the action to follow through and click on it is significantly smaller.

The goal for marketers is to get a high number of views in order to reach more people who are likely to take action. These people who do click through are essentially people interested in the advertisement and who may become customers or subscribers.

Measuring click-through rates enables you to see which advertisements are performing effectively and develop ways to enhance click-through rates.

Cost Per View or Click

Measuring the cost per view or click of advertisements lets you understand whether particular advertisements are actually worth the cost when balanced against the advertising price.

Cost Per Lead

Taking into account advertising and organic traffic via search engines, the cost per lead indicates how much a company must pay for each lead. Essentially, this shows how much it costs a business to turn somebody into a customer.

While it invariably costs money to make money, monitoring the cost per lead can inform decisions over marketing budgets and spending and areas where spending is making good returns as compared with activities that are not producing financial benefits. Information can also help you to create the best lead volume.

4. Financial (Or Other) Gains

Ultimately, businesses need to make money to survive. Professionals need to analyze various financial metrics to understand the viability of business activities and understand areas where there is scope for improvement.

Conversions

Conversions is a major digital marketing metric and one that helps to overcome some of the biggest challenges for digital marketers; conversions can provide solid proof of successful marketing activities and help to show a direct link between marketing and profits.

Whether it’s through making a purchase, booking an appointment, signing up for a service, subscribing, or performing some other desired outcome, creating conversions is the ultimate goal for any business. High conversions are what marketers strive for.

Conversion metrics allow marketers to see how many users became customers.

Revenue Per Customer

This shows how much money each particular customer is spending. These figures enable you to find the most worthwhile market areas and also identify areas that are underperforming.

Returns Per Channel

Understanding the returns, or profit, for different channels shows you where the most money is coming from. This information assists with planning marketing activities effectively.

It may be the case, for example, that you decide to give extra attention to under-performing channels to try and boost revenue. Conversely, you may decide that certain channels aren’t worth the energy or expenditure and that resources are better spent elsewhere. Until you know the figures, however, it is difficult to plan your digital marketing activities appropriately.

Return on Investment

Overall, you can see how much money you had to spend in order to make a certain amount back. This can help to show whether marketing activities are effective.  

Even More Digital Performance Marketing Metrics

Professionals monitor performance using an array of other digital marketing metrics, including:

• Net profit
• Response rates
• Retention rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Brand searches
• Social media likes, comments, and shares
• Number of online followers
• Brand mentions
• Market share
• Search engine rankings

Scoretize makes it easy to improve your digital performance and see at a glance with a single easy-to-understand score how you are performing and, more importantly, how to improve. Arrange your free trial today.