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Thought Leadership

27 Digital Marketing Performance Metrics You Should Be Paying Attention To

When it comes to digital marketing, your endgame is an increase to your bottom line – more sales, more bookings, more dollars. But, the path to that endgame is not always a straight line: not every marketing effort will result in your end goal; some marketing simply inches consumer through their customer journey, directing them toward your ultimate goal.

For this reason, not all digital marketing can be measured equally: success is determined on an individual basis. And that’s where these metrics come in, providing you with 27 different ways to measure, compare, and evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of your marketing efforts in the following categories:

Website Traffic Metrics

There are so many marketing metrics to track but, at the end of the day, the most important is website traffic. Bottom line: the more traffic you receive to your company website, the greater your opportunity to increase your bottom line. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Total Site Traffic: Your site’s unique visitor count measures all traffic to your website (or specific landing page) and is one of the most important metrics for your website, as it gives you an accurate, big-picture understanding of traffic flow over a given period. Specifically, spikes and craters in total traffic, especially to landing pages, provide insight into the efficacy of various marketing efforts.
  2. Direct Visitors: This metric tracks who visits your site by typing your URL into their web browser.
  3. Referrals: Referred visitors are referred, or linked to your site from another website.
  4. Organic/Search: These visitors come to your site via a search query. This metric is particularly important to measuring the value of your SEO efforts.
  5. Social Media: If you run social media campaigns, you’ll want to know which visitors arrive at your site via your social accounts and marketing.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics help you track how web visitors engage with and respond to your various marketing efforts, whether from ads, email, social, or other sources. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Bounce Rate: The lower, the better for this one: bounce rate shows the ratio or percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking onto any other pages. (In other words, how many people land on one page of your site and then navigate away.) A high bounce rate is an immediate call for improvements to your marketing and/or on-page elements.
  2. Conversion Rate: This incredibly important metric essentially represents how effective your marketing efforts are (in terms of converting recipients into customers), by tracking how many website visitors, email newsletter recipients, blog visitors, etc. convert to leads and/or sales.
  3. Conversion Funnel Rates: A more detailed version of the metric above, this shows you which steps of your marketing process need strengthening, to better direct leads through the conversion funnel.
  4. Cost Per Lead (CPL): This financial metric links lead conversion to its associated cost, providing insight into the profitability of your marketing campaigns.
  5. Cost Per Conversion: Like CPL, this is a double-down metric that compares the cost associated with marketing, to your rate of lead-to-conversion. 

Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing averages one of the highest returns on investments (ROI) out there – as of a 2015 survey, a startling $38 return for every $1 investment – so this is one effort you want to track, refine, hone and improve. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Deliverability/Delivery Rate: This basic metric compares Sent emails to Delivered emails, showing you what percentage of your email marketing even makes it into customer inboxes. Pay attention to specific emails (or campaigns) with low deliverability, as they’re likely getting snagged in spam filters.
  2. Bounce Rate: Related to delivery rate, this shows how many emails failed to send (due to undeliverable email addresses). Remove false emails from your list.
  3. Open Rate: This metric displays how many people actually read your email, by comparing your delivery rate to unique opens (and, we hope, reads).
  4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your email click-through rate tracks how often customers engage with your emails via clicks – aka, by taking the desired action upon opening emails.
  5. Conversion Rate: Typically, click-through is not your ultimate goal. Conversion rate tracks how many people follow through to your ultimate goal, such as purchasing an e-book or making an appointment.
  6. Unsubscribe/Disengagement Rate: Again – the lower, the better for this one! Disengagement tracks the rate with which email recipients unsubscribe and/or mark your email as spam.

Social Metrics

By now, you know how much social media marketing can contribute to brand awareness, customer engagement, building meaningful relationships, and even driving traffic to your website. Be sure your efforts are as effective as possible. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Followers: Use this number to determine the quality of your social efforts. Great content and engaging social posts attract followers.
  2. Engagement: Likes, shares, and comments help track social engagement, and can be leveraged to determine which types of content attract the most social engagement.
  3. Reach: This measures how many people have received your message, including how many of your followers have seen it + how many non-followers have viewed it through shares.
  4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is back, this time to track how many times people have clicked on your social shares.
  5. Referrals: Looking at website traffic from the other side – from the referral site, not your website – social referrals track how many times your social shares send people to your website.

Mobile Metrics

Mobile marketing is here to stay and growing every year, which means that it’s one of the most important metrics to track. After all, more consumers today access the internet via smartphone or tablet, than do by a desktop. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Mobile Traffic: This tracks your percentage of mobile customers – how many people visit your site via smartphones and tablets. You may also want to track what devices and browsers they use.
  2. Traffic Source: As with standard traffic metrics, this shows what sources – organic search, social media, referrals, etc. – send the most mobile traffic to your site.
  3. Other Metrics: For mobile, you’ll want to track all the standard metrics for web traffic, including direct visitors vs. referrals, bounce rate, etc.

Revenue & ROI Metrics Revenue & ROI Metrics

Return on investment, or ROI, helps assign a value to the success of any digital marketing campaign. These metrics can show you what efforts need improvement, which are doing well, and perhaps a few you might want to abandon. Beyond easily tracked ROI metrics, like Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Conversion (CPC), others will help give you a big-picture view into the success of your efforts. Here are a few key metrics for this category:

  1. Unique Website Visitors: Harkening back to our #1 metric – total website traffic – an upward trend in unique visitors to your website, often paired with landing page metrics, goes a long way in assigning a value to your various marketing efforts.
  2. Inbound Links: Effective digital marketing campaigns will naturally result in an increase in inbound links or backlinks from other websites.
  3. Lead Source: You always ask your leads how they heard of you, right? This metric provides definitive insight into the efficacy of your marketing.

Remember, you don’t need to track every, single one of these metrics. Pick and choose. Determine which will deliver the best insights to you, depending on your marketing efforts. Then, track them faithfully over the long-term, and observe how they help you refine and improve your marketing campaigns.