Measuring your results can truly bridge the gap between struggling and making returns on your investment. There are numerous ways to gain insights into your digital marketing efforts, but it’s important to choose only those relevant to your overall strategy.
Let’s discuss the most essential metrics and how they can help you succeed. There are three categories, Traffic, Conversion and Revenue.
TRAFFIC
1) Site Traffic – This metric will provide insight as to whether your digital marketing techniques are effective or not. Remember to focus on unique visitors your site receives rather than website hits and page views.
2) Source of Traffic – How did your visitors land on your site? Maybe the keywords you used brought them there, maybe it was a search query or even referrals. This metric will let you know what channels you should be focusing on.
3) Click Through Rate-The CTR of any digital marketing plan is the number of viewers who actually clicked on the ad/offer. A great way to increase CTR is to combine it with effective content and a strong Call to Action.
4) Mobile Traffic – This needed to be on the list considering the growing mobile internet traffic in the digital marketing playing field. As more and more people gain access to the internet via their smartphones, new opportunities arise for bigger and better revenue sources. This metric provides insight on how to structure and plan your marketing strategy and achieve beneficial engagement with viewers.
CONVERSION
1) Conversion Rate – Conversion is the primary goal of your strategy. You need to convert traffic into sales/leads. Monitoring your conversion rate can help steer your strategy in the right direction.
2) Bounce Rate – If your site is irrelevant to the viewer, they will simply skip or ‘bounce’ off the page. Some insight into this will help you approach the right target audience/ potential leads.
3) Rate of Return – Your site’s popularity is not only defined by your traffic but also the rate of return by viewers. Knowing your rate of return can help improve your site so as to convert traffic into leads and to solidify the engagement.
Cost Per Conversion – Also known as cost per lead or cost per referral. This metric determines your overall profit margins. A higher CPC may turn negative if the costs are so high that they reduce your net income. There are even digital marketing training programs that include this as a course, thus making it an art that needs to be paid attention to.
REVENUE
1) Return on Investment – Insights on your ROI will determine which parts of your site are truly driving sales and bringing in revenue, and which parts require more effort on improvement. Your ROI is the ultimate measure on your success as it proves your marketing campaign to be either profitable or not.
2) Cost Per Acquisition -CPA is all about revenue and is accounted for only once a visitor becomes a paying customer. This metric will determine how much you spend, to get a customer to spend on you. Tracking your CPA will determine whether the strategies you’ve employed to gain leads is working or not.
Spending your digital marketing funds in an effective way and measuring metrics will ensure that you are doing the best for your company in this spectrum. The metrics will provide a pretty accurate picture of how you are doing and where you need to place more efforts, thus enabling you to adjust to the rhythm and convert traffic into leads.