Companies use digital marketing as a strategy to target the vast number of potential customers who engage in online activities.
Marketing professionals analyze digital marketing metrics to gain insight into user behavior and the cost of attracting consumers to company websites or social media platforms, in order to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns and develop new tactics. By understanding these measures, you can optimize your marketing efforts and enhance your business.
In this article, we will discuss the purpose and function of digital marketing metrics and provide a compilation of commonly utilized metrics in the industry.
Types of digital marketing metrics
Here are the digital marketing metrics categorized based on the specific marketing activities they describe, as the metrics used to measure success will differ depending on the types of digital marketing campaigns implemented.
- Awareness –Typically, these metrics track what happens when your business comes in contact with a lead for the first time, typically through a paid ad, a field event, or organic search engine results.
- Engagement – These metrics show what happens after first contact. The engagement metrics measure how often and quickly top-funnel leads are converted into qualified leads and ultimately into sales.
- Performance – These metrics measure marketing success in dollars and cents. By comparing costs and results, performance metrics track the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns.
Digital marketing metrics businesses can use
Digital marketing metrics provide a variety of data that can impact budgets, advertising campaigns, and sales projections. These metrics are determined by marketing professionals through the use of website analysis tools provided by online providers or software programs tailored to calculate precise figures.
Industry professionals use the following digital marketing metrics to gain insight into the effectiveness and profitability of their efforts.
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)/keywords
Search engine optimization is utilized by marketing professionals as a strategy and metric to increase website traffic and assess outcomes.
SEO utilizes keywords for generating organic search results, which can increase the number of users visiting your website. SEO metrics are employed to generate potential keywords, assess the primary keywords pertaining to your site, and evaluate the impact of keyword strategies on driving more traffic to your website content.
2. Total website traffic
Analyzing the complete traffic or visits to your website can enable you to gain a comprehensive understanding of the sources of your traffic, the number of prospective customers visiting, and patterns in visit frequency during specific periods. Enterprises aim for consistent enhancement in the overall traffic to their website.
By examining the quantity of visits to your website, you can obtain a fundamental comprehension of your online existence. Verifying the overall website traffic can provide insight into the effectiveness of a campaign aimed at attracting visitors to your site, who can subsequently be converted into customers making purchases.
3. Traffic from channels
By examining how users accessed your website, you can assess which strategies are most successful in attracting traffic. Marketing professionals utilize channel traffic metrics to determine where consumers were online prior to visiting their site and how they arrived at it. This encompasses various channels, including:
Direct traffic refers to users who manually enter your website URL into the search bar at the top of a web browser. This results in consumers directly accessing your site without the assistance of a search engine or any other platform. High intent visitors who are already familiar with your brand are indicated by direct traffic, suggesting a strong brand awareness.
Organic search results are the links that appear between paid ads when consumers use a search engine to find a specific term. SEO uses keywords to increase the likelihood of top results from search engines, making organic search results an essential factor in the process.
Social media platforms provide an additional channel for consumers to visit your website through links. This can be achieved by accessing posts from your accounts or by clicking on ads on social media.
Users might arrive at your website by clicking on a link or discovering a mention on another site, which can happen through activities such as guest blogging or through forming partnerships with influencers or other businesses.
4. Conversions
Conversions provide marketers with information about the number of visitors to a website who become subscribers or paying customers. Conversion metrics also include users who download content from the website.
The objective of having more website traffic is to convert visitors into clients, which can result in either more followers or direct purchases. Successful marketing campaigns, appealing web content, and effective product incentives are indicated by higher conversion rates.
5. Average bounce rate
Bounce rates indicate the quantity of users who departed from your website after viewing only one page. By using bounce rate metrics, you can determine the exact duration of time that consumers spent on your page prior to exiting, down to the second.
The bounce rate is more significant as the amount of time shortens. If the bounce rate is low, it means that users are finding the desired content and are willing to spend time on your site. This can potentially result in more conversions rather than missed opportunities.
6. Trends in searches
The study of search trends examines how people utilize organic search results to access your website. Keyword trends can indicate the necessity to update content such as blog articles and landing pages.
Depending on the industry you operate in, trends may follow predictable patterns, such as seasonal surges in organic traffic for specific products or services. Additionally, you can utilize search trends from specific timeframes to analyze annual variations in search outcomes, enabling you to assess peak and off-peak periods of traffic.
7. Page views
A pageview, according to Google’s definition, is the action of loading a webpage in a web browser, either by opening it for the first time or reloading it. Each time a person opens or views one of your web pages, a page view is counted, regardless of whether they are loading it for the first time or reloading it.
Pageviews offer a glimpse into the accessibility or appeal of different content by indicating the number of views received for each page. However, it is important to remember that having a higher number of pageviews does not necessarily equate to having more users.
Publishers consider pageview counts significant for ad campaigns, particularly when selling ads at cost-per-thousand views (CPM). This is crucial because each ad impression on a page contributes to the pageview count.
8. New vs returning visitors
New visitors are those who visit your website for the first time using a device, while returning visitors are individuals who come back to your site more than once, as recorded by Google’s tracking snippet.
Databox suggests that the count of returning visitors might be underestimated due to various scenarios where Google Analytics may mistakenly categorize them as new visitors.
Tracking the behavior of users who return to your website allows you to identify the reasons behind their conversions on subsequent visits and enhance the rates of conversion. In general, returning visitors tend to spend a longer duration on the website compared to new visitors. Additionally, the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors serves as a measure of the effectiveness of your inbound marketing endeavors.
9. Exit rate
The exit rate is a measure that calculates the frequency at which visitors depart from a particular page of a website. To illustrate, if an e-commerce visitor arrives on the homepage, proceeds to a category page, then goes to a product page, and ultimately departs, that would be considered an exit from the product page.
By analyzing exits, you can gain a better understanding of the performance of individual pages and/or page groups. Identifying the pages with the highest exit rate will help you determine which pages require improvement.
10. Average page depth
The measurement of users in terms of page depth is based on the number of clicks they make from the home page to reach the next page. For instance, to reach your ‘services’ page starting from the user’s landing page, the number of clicks required is taken into account. The term ‘click depth’ is used to describe this measurement.
The reason why search engine optimization performance is impacted by this is that Google is less inclined to crawl deep pages. By utilizing this metric, you can acquire knowledge about visitor behavior on your website and subsequently optimize it.
11. Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) quantifies the number of clicks advertisers obtain on their ads for each impression. Typically, you can monitor your CTR on your PPC account dashboard. An elevated CTR indicates a substantial proportion of clicks on your ad.
It is crucial to pay attention to the click-through rate as it directly impacts the Quality Score. Ads that are highly relevant, in other words, that satisfy searchers, receive pricing discounts on Google Ads and other search marketing platforms.
To achieve this, the most effective approach is to assign higher Quality Scores to ads that attain high click-through rates on Google Ads.
- A high click-through rate leads to a high Quality Score.
- Your ad position can be improved or maintained for lower costs with High-Quality Scores.
By achieving a high click-through rate on relevant queries, you are maximizing the number of people being directed to your business.
12. Brand awareness
Although brand awareness can be difficult to quantify with numerical data, marketers can gain insights into a brand’s performance in the overall market through anecdotal evidence such as brand mentions in third-party reviews and social media conversations. Here are some ways to measure brand awareness:
Brand searches refer to the act of consumers directly searching for your brand name on search engine websites. It serves as an additional method to gauge organic traffic.
By tracking the likes on social media posts, you can assess the level of interaction or engagement occurring on your site.
One alternative approach to quantifying the level of online brand recognition is by assessing the quantity of individuals who share your social media content, which may encompass reposting material from your brand’s page.
Social media comments indicate consumer interaction with your brand, providing insight into your brand’s online popularity.
The level of brand recognition can be directly measured by the number of followers your brand has on online social media platforms. Increasing your followers can result in higher website traffic and serve as evidence of effective marketing strategies.
Brand awareness is constituted by chatter or mentions online. Marketing professionals track both negative and positive mentions in order to determine ways to shape the digital image of a brand.
