Did you know that 72% of businesses haven’t glanced at their ad campaigns in more than a month? That’s only the beginning. Far too many businesses fail to evaluate their digital marketing performance, frequently because they don’t know how to gauge success.

You’re seeing your budget flush down the toilet if you don’t constantly measure and monitor it. However, it is not too late to begin tracking your initiatives!

As websites become increasingly crucial in the consumer journey, the requirement to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing grows. This is a burden shared by individuals selling digital media as well as business owners and marketers wanting to maximize their ROI.

This article will go through how to measure digital marketing results by presenting key metrics to keep an eye on.

• Why Should you Measure Digital Marketing Results?
• How do you Measure Digital Marketing Results?
• How do you Measure the Results of a Marketing Strategy?
• What are 7 Key Metrics that all Digital Marketers Should Measure?
• What are the 5 Key Performance Indicators in Marketing?

Why Should you Measure Digital Marketing Results?

Marketers today must be adaptable and ready to change at a moment’s notice. This entails maintaining a close eye on customer-centric data that can generate actual change through an organization’s marketing initiatives.

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Working with a performance marketing agency like Valve+Meter provides you with a fresh strategy and direction in which tests are deployed to uncover the most repeatable and scalable opportunities.

The ultimate marketing goal is to build programs to the point that the agency only receives payment when a specified activity, such as a lead, click, or sale, is completed. This gives the agency more leeway to try approaches that are slightly beyond your comfort zone, knowing that you can pivot swiftly if the desired results are not obtained.

How do you Measure Digital Marketing Results?

Digital marketing is a critical instrument for increasing consumer and sales. It can drive traffic to your website, increase your company’s social media following, and turn potential clients into customers. It is obvious that it is critical for any online business to employ digital marketing appropriately and to have a thorough understanding of which initiatives work well and which do not.

Here are five ways to measure your company’s digital marketing results:

1. Overall Site Traffic

Most businesses use website traffic to gauge the performance of their marketing activities. In the world of marketing, your website serves as both your home base and your brand’s digital storefront. Your digital marketing efforts will most likely be centered on attracting traffic to your site.

While some marketing initiatives may focus on expanding social media reach or list development, the primary goal is to drive more people to your website. As a result, consistently evaluating your website traffic stats can give you with valuable information into which ads are effective for your organization.

It is also critical to collect traffic-related data. Separating new and existing consumers can help you identify whether a campaign is bringing in new visits and which, if any, are turning into sales. You can also utilize revenue operations software to aid with things like this.

2. New or Returning Traffic 

You may want to increase new or returning users depending on your website’s goals and the consumer’s buying cycle. The goal here should be to determine what is most essential to you at the start of the campaign and to develop a plan to attain that goal.

In other words, if you want to attract as many new visitors as possible, watch for the percentage of new traffic to rise. However, if you discover that the average consumer returns to the site numerous times before completing a purchase in-store or online, you may want to create a campaign that encourages people to return to the site and, as a result, study the percentage of returning visitors.

3. Session time

The amount of time a person spends on your website can also be used to predict digital marketing success. This is determined by the function of your website or the industry in which you operate.

The average session time is a useful estimate of how much time users spend on your site overall. This might assist you to determine how your site is performing in terms of user experience (UX).

Consider whether your website is straightforward to use, whether users find what they are looking for quickly enough and whether the information is valuable and worth their time. The length of the session can assist answer these and other questions.

Improved content, better visuals, speed difficulties, and style can all help users spend more time on your site. Because web design is inextricably linked to marketing your company, this can be an effective approach to gauge your digital marketing performance.

4. Mobile Traffic 

Smartphone devices and mobile apps account for more than half of all online digital traffic. As a result of this trend, knowing how many users access your site via mobile devices each month should be a priority. Examine your mobile traffic data to find out how many people are viewing your site from a mobile device.

In addition, look at how long visitors stay on the site and how far they go on a mobile device. Compare those to your non-mobile traffic to see if people are more or less engaged with your site on mobile devices, and utilize that information to improve the user experience.

5. Social engagement

Any company that wants to succeed in the twenty-first century must have a strong online presence, particularly through social media. The level of engagement on various platforms can indicate how well your social media marketing is working.

The total number of interactions on a social media post is referred to as social media engagement. This may include likes, shares, clicks, reposts, comments, and other actions. All of your social media success is measured by engagement. In fact, 79% of organizations polled by Brafton reported using content marketing to raise brand recognition.

There are numerous things you can pay for on social media, such as a manager, a content creator, or advertisement spots, but engagement is only achieved when consumers connect with your content on a frequent basis. You can quickly rank your content based on how your users interact with it, which can aid in the creation of future content.

How do you Measure the Results of a Marketing Strategy?

Marketing effectiveness is determined by how well a company’s marketing initiatives enhance revenue while lowering customer acquisition costs. You will always win if your marketing reduces the expenses of finding and winning business while raising the value of that business.

How, though, does one go about quantifying both outcomes?

Measure Marketing Success from the Consumer’s Point of View

Customers should be at the heart of your business plan, and marketing teams in particular must ensure that they maintain a steady pulse on potential customers. Putting the consumer first will help you understand how the market sees your brand and goods. Many marketers are starting to recognize this, with 84% saying that customer expectations will make person-level data a crucial competence by 2023.

This is especially significant when modern consumers interact with advertising across multiple media. Assume an automotive marketing team discovered that pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google are generating a staggering number of leads for local dealerships.

Before pouring additional money into the campaign, companies should take a step back and examine the various touchpoints that comprise the normal client journey. PPC advertising are likely the penultimate touchpoint in their sales funnel, because consumers engage across several touchpoints across a variety of channels before displaying any willingness to buy. They may not be able to grasp how brand-related touchpoints influence sales if they did not adequately manage brand data.

To determine the correct metrics, it’s critical to understand how each of these touchpoints interacts from the customer’s perspective. Otherwise, you will miss out on important nurturing activities.

Choose Important Metrics that Measure Marketing Impact

Marketing impact measurement has never been straightforward, and the difficulty of this work is increasing due to the ever-expanding number of marketing channels combined with a focus on customer data protection. So, how should the impact of a campaign be measured?

To begin, marketers must refrain from relying on feel-good vanity metrics. Reporting that “web traffic increased by 20%” or “we obtained 100 new followers” may appear to be signs of success, but they are difficult to correlate with sales and brand performance – especially across many campaigns. It is critical to begin with consumer-centric measurements, with performance data serving as a backup. As a starting point, consider the following metrics:

• Repeat purchase rate – This customer-centric metric will provide indications into how loyal your customers are and can also be used to forecast sales.
• Customer lifetime value – Over the course of their relationship with your brand, each customer will contribute a different amount to your bottom line. This metric estimates how much they will spend in the coming years.
• Churn rate – This metric will provide more information about when people leave your sales funnel and why. It will also provide insight into which campaigns are causing or reducing customer churn.
• Funnel velocity – How quickly are your customers moving through the sales funnel? An increase in funnel velocity means you don’t need as many touchpoints to turn a prospect into a sale.
• Sales growth – Sales growth examines the trajectory your sales are trending in, helping you estimate how much ROI a campaign will net.
• ROMI – When you divide your total revenue by your total marketing investment, you’ll find your return on marketing investment – also known as ROMI. This can be used to gauge the success of campaigns, or as a foundation for scaling a successful campaign.

Once you’ve decided which metrics to track, turn them into marketing KPIs, also known as key performance indicators. Remember that KPIs must be measurable, time-bound, and linked to an ongoing campaign.

Get Data from Outside of Marketing

Marketing does not operate in a vacuum; nearly every department in your company is continually consuming and providing useful data. Similarly, your brand is likely to have collaborations with other brands or agencies, providing yet another fantastic channel for data collection. Cross-organizational or cross-departmental collaborations, as savvy analysts know, can provide a whole new element to gauging campaign performance.

Consider an automotive manufacturer that generates a high volume of leads for their dealerships after promoting a special offer for trade-ins. This may appear to be fantastic news for their marketing team. Leads, however, do not generate money on their own; therefore, the marketing team must request access to both qualitative and quantitative data from the dealerships’ sales teams.

When compared to earlier campaigns, you may notice that relatively few leads convert, indicating that the campaign was not as successful as it appeared.

When marketers realize their campaign fell short, they can turn to an information partner to contextualize the findings and gather more data for future initiatives.

For example, they could collaborate with a financial institution to determine whether long-term consumer spending on autos is down or to understand which interest rates clients are most likely to accept during the negotiation process. This additional data may be all that is required for the marketing team to discover new metrics and turn a mistaken campaign into a decisive victory.

What are 7 Key Metrics that all Digital Marketers Should Measure?

Because marketing is an ever-changing world, you must continually be aware of new information, trends, and practices. Metrics that were significant one or two years ago may no longer be so now. Here are seven digital marketing indicators you should be analyzing if you want to remain on top of the newest analytics trends and improve your marketing.

1. Mobile traffic

Users spend more time than ever before on their mobile devices and phones. In fact, smartphones accounted for more than 52% of all website traffic worldwide in 2018.

People use their smartphones and tablets for everything, including grocery shopping, ordering takeout, and shopping for shoes and apparel. This is why you should monitor your mobile traffic: the percentage of your total web traffic that comes from mobile devices.

If your website receives little mobile traffic, one cause could be that it isn’t mobile-friendly or optimized for mobile. If this is the case, you should meet with your development team to identify areas of your website that can be enhanced.

2. Cost per lead

This is the cost of a lead generated by a given campaign. Calculating your cost per lead for any of your campaigns requires some basic math. Cost per lead is essentially the entire amount spent on a lead generation campaign over a given time period divided by the number of leads created during that time period.

$ Cost of campaign ÷ Number of leads = $ Cost per lead

Knowing your campaign’s cost per lead allows you to assess its effectiveness. The lesser the cost per lead, the better the campaign.

3. Close ratio

Another technique to evaluate the effectiveness of your lead generation activities is to compute their close ratios. The distinction is that this measure tracks conversions rather than leads.

To calculate a campaign’s closure ratio, multiply the total number of conversions (or successful sales) by the total number of leads generated by that campaign. Finally, divide the value by 100 to see the ratio as a percentage.

Number of conversions or sales ÷ Number of leads x 100 = % Close

4. Channel-specific traffic

Your website traffic comes from a variety of sources, including the following:

• Direct traffic – when users visit your website directly without clicking on a link from an external website
• Referral traffic – when users click on a link leading to your website from a different site
• Organic search – when users find your website via a search engine
• Social media – when users click on links in social media posts that take them to either your homepage or a specific page on your site
• Email – when users click links embedded in your email messages
• Paid search – when users click links on paid ads and sponsored listings.

You can discover where your audience is coming from and which channels are the most value by analyzing traffic from multiple channels. You can then devote additional resources to this channel in order to increase traffic.

5. Exit rate

This is the percentage of your visitors who leave after seeing numerous different pages on your website. Exits and bounces should never be mistaken. A bounce occurs when a user leaves your website after just viewing one page. Exits, on the other hand, are only counted if a user views more than one page in a session before leaving a given page. Keeping an eye on your website’s exit rates is a smart approach to identify which pages need work.

6. Conversion funnel rates

Whatever product or service your company provides, you almost certainly have a conversion funnel. This is the process of converting potential customers into leads and subsequently converting these leads into paying customers.

Read Also: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy Example?

Pay close attention to how users act at each stage of your conversion funnel. In this manner, you can deal with any potential issue before it worsens. For example, if you’ve found that you’re capturing relatively few leads through a certain landing page, there’s probably an issue (or faults) with the landing page that needs to be addressed. It could be because the design is very intricate, that the headline fails to capture attention, or that the advantage to the potential consumer is unclear.

7. Top landing pages

Your landing pages both drive traffic and generate leads. Because they are an important part of your overall marketing plan, you must determine which landing pages are effective at capturing leads (top landing pages) and which are not. You can optimize your top landing pages once you know what they are. This allows you to maximize their performance and produce more leads.

What are the 5 Key Performance Indicators in Marketing?

When considering your marketing key performance indicators, there are a few elements that should be considered regardless of the metric:

• The source. If you have a certain metric that’s valuable to your business, knowing where it came from will prove to be highly important to get more of them.
• The content, form, page, etc. contributed to the creation of a valuable metric. For example, if all of your leads are converting on a single piece of content, it’s a fairly good bet to say that other content like that will be successful in the future as well.

So, let’s get into which indicators your company should be paying attention to!

Visitors

The first marketing key performance indicator to consider is the number of visitors to your website. Simply said, the number of visitors to your website over a set period of time is useful to know because it serves as a starting point. Knowing how many visitors you’ve obtained will help you determine how many of them need to travel through each stage of the funnel in order for your company to close the number of consumers it requires.

Leads

The leads are the next critical performance metric to consider. This may seem apparent, but it is a critical metric for the overall health of your company. Keeping track of your leads over time will allow you to identify patterns in performance and provide insight on what your visitors value the most.

Qualified Leads

Unfortunately, not all of your leads will be ideal for a B2B company. As a result, qualified leads are the next critical performance measure. Knowing which leads are qualified sheds light on how effective your website and content are at attracting leads that are a good fit for your company.

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads are two types of qualified leads (SQLs). Both are necessary to maintain track of in order to identify any gaps in your funnel.

Opportunities

The next metric indicates your “opportunities,” or people who are interested in and a good fit for your company. When it comes to opportunities, the most crucial thing to know is how many of them turned into customers. This, along with other less quantitative factors, will aid in the refinement of your sales process.

Conversion Rates

Last but not least, the percentages of those who progress from one stage to the next. Knowing the rate at which customers go down the funnel will be your most powerful ally in reducing gaps and improving the marketing and sales process for everyone involved.