Best Marketing Metrics to Track for Digital Marketing Success

Introduction

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s so easy to steer into the wrong directions. You have so many opportunities, so many versatile channels to advertise on and different ways of tracking them. It’s hard to convert and monetize your leads. Because of that, it’s important to track every dollar you spend online.

Every successful marketing strategy also depends on successful metrics tracking and analyzing. If you’re not sure what your marketing metrics are telling you, here are some of the most important numbers to pay attention to:

1. Return on Investment – ROI 

If you’re using any form of digital marketing, this is the most important, bottom-line metric you will use to track your performance.

It’s a combination of all the factors that we will outline below, and it’s basically the ratio of what you invested in your marketing efforts and how much sales resulted directly from your ad campaigns.

For example, if you decide to set a $1000 budget for a social media marketing campaign and it results in $5000 of sales, it means that you have achieved a 400% ROI (it’s calculated based on your gain).

2. Cost per Conversion – CPC

Cost per conversion is a formula used to calculate how much it costs the advertiser to acquire a certain goal of their campaign (signups, purchases and similar) per lead.

It’s very easy to find out the result: you just have to divide the total amount spent on the ad campaign and divide it with the total number of conversions. 

Example: The total cost of an ad campaign was $500 and you gained 10 purchases from that ad campaign. Your cost per conversion would be $50.

3. Cost per Acquisition – CPA

This is one of the most important metrics in digital marketing and in marketing overall. 

If you’re a business owner and you have a meeting with a digital marketing agency, the most important and most common question you will get is: “How much is it going to cost me to increase my sales online? How could we increase the number of customers purchasing online?”

If you run an ad campaign and you spend a total of $1000 with the end result of 4 customers who purchased your product (acquisitions), it means your CPA is $250.

4. Bounce Rate

When you’re analyzing your site performance, it’s really important to use metrics that are relevant for your industry. 

If you own a blog and your only source of revenue are ads, it means CPA is less important for you because your primary focus is not selling products, but to have a high number of visitors on your site and more importantly - a high number of quality visitors. 

If visitors are leaving your site right away, it will be really hard for you to make any kind of revenue on your site because your CTR will likely be really low. 

Another important aspect of this is that it will be quite hard to sell ads directly to some companies because most businesses will ask for this type of report before placing their ads on your website.

5. Time on Site and Interactions Per Visit

Once you lower down the bounce rate, it’s time to improve the time on the site and the number of interactions on your site. 

If you own an e-commerce site, you want users to go straight to the landing page where they could purchase right away. Most of your marketing efforts will be directed this way. The more time your users spend on your site, the more they are likely to browse and find a product they will like. 

On the other hand, if you own a blog site, you want users to have many more interactions on your site in order to see more ads. 

This will help you in the long run because users who spend a lot of time on your site probably have a deeper connection with your site and will bring more users in the future by spreading and sharing the word about your site. They will be your word-of-mouth advertising channel.

6. Total Site Visits and Number of Users

You have to keep track of your overall site performance month by month and this number is the simplest way to do that.

 It’s really important to distinguish total visits and the number of unique visitors on your site. You should also track the number of returning and new users each month. 

Those numbers will be your feedback on whether your content is good if you’re a blog or whether your products sell and attract new customers if you run an online store. 

7. Tracking your Channels

When you start a new site, whether it’s a blog or e-commerce site, you will probably aim to spread the word around every channel, from YouTube to Facebook and Pinterest and so on. 

What you will find later on is that Pareto principle applies here as well: 20% of marketing channels will bring you 80 or 90% of users to your site. As time goes on you will focus your efforts on these channels only and relocate your resources. 

The same set of rules applies to advertising as well. Probably you will test every type of advertising until you figure out what’s working for your brand and what’s not.

8. Tracking Systems and Devices

When creating and publishing new content you want to know how many users are visiting from mobiles and how many from desktops. 

You want to track the number of Android and iOS users. If you’re a content creator, you must have device-friendly content, to provide the same quality to mobile visitors and to impact your Google search ranking in a positive way.

If you’re an advertiser, those metrics are even more important for you. You want to know where your campaigns perform better because you need to have landing and checkout pages optimized for mobile.

9. Location and Time of Day Tracking

This one is a no-brainer. It’s crucial to know in which parts of the country your campaign is performing best and where your products are being sold the most. 

“You want to know which time of the day, week, month and year is the most efficient for your campaigns. For each of your marketing channels, you will have to know the exact time you should post and act on the insight your audience has given you”, says Mary Boulline, a translation reviewer at IsAccurate.

Conclusion

Digital marketing metrics are quite simple and easy to calculate. You will have those calculated automatically in most analytic tools.

The hard thing is to actually achieve good results and numbers because it’s a highly competitive environment and it’s getting increasingly harder to attract the attention of users. 

The most important thing you have to do is to narrow down everything as much as possible and then invest your budget in that direction. Spend a lot of time analyzing the data, find out what’s working and then maximize your budget in that department.

Bio

Dorian Martin is a contributor at WowGrade and dissertation writer at SupremeDissertations. He’s passionate about digital marketing, WordPress and blogging and is always reading about new developments in this industry.