Digital marketing metrics refer to quantifiable data that you can use to measure your digital marketing campaign’s success and performance.
These metrics allow you to compare different marketing strategies and stick with digital marketing opportunities that provide the best benefit to your business.
Since there are tons of digital marketing techniques and strategies, using these metrics to analyze data is extremely important for businesses to ensure their marketing investments are profitable for the business and how you can make better decisions along with them for the future.
In this article, we will analyze different types of digital marketing metrics and understand how you can use them for your business.
Table of Contents
- What Are Digital Marketing Metrics?
- Key Digital Marketing Metrics To Track
- Effective Tools for Tracking Digital Marketing Metrics
- How To Interpret and Analyze Digital Marketing Metrics
- How To Improve Digital Marketing Performance Based On Metrics
- Conclusion
What Are Digital Marketing Metrics?
Digital marketing metrics are quantifiable figures that can help you understand the performance of different digital marketing strategies and campaigns. Different types of digital marketing metrics help you analyze different insights from a given data.
Generally, there are 4 main types of digital marketing metrics:
1. Traffic Metrics:
Digital marketing traffic metric measures traffic received on a marketing element. For example, the number of visitors, page views, or, to be more specific, the number of female viewers vs. male viewers. These help you understand how popular your marketing is.
2. Conversion Metrics:
Digital marketing conversion metrics measure how many visitors/viewers took the action you advertised in your marketing campaign.
For example, how many visitors to a website filled out the newsletter subscription form, or how many viewers clicked the Subscribe button for a YouTube channel?
This shows how persuasive your marketing is.
3. Engagement Metrics:
Digital marketing engagement metrics simply measure how many users interacted with your marketing elements. For example, how many people liked, commented on, or shared your Facebook advertisement? This shows how people receive your brand.
4. ROI Metrics:
Digital Marketing ROI (Return On Investment) Metrics measure the profitability of a marketing campaign or strategy by comparing the revenue generated by it with the costs it incurred. This helps management make better financial decisions for marketing.
Each type of digital marketing metric identifies different types of performance measurements for the marketing strategies of the business. Each type of digital marketing metric has even more specific metrics that help marketers and managers analyze the performance of different marketing elements.
Key Digital Marketing Metrics To Track
Within each type of digital marketing metric, there are specialized metrics and KPIs that help you identify the performances of distinct digital marketing elements.
We will now look at the most common digital marketing metrics used by businesses all over the world.
Traffic Metrics
Traffic metrics simply show the popularity of a marketing campaign by measuring how many views/visits it receives.
- Pageviews: Tracks how many pages of a website are viewed by how many visitors. This is a good metric to understand how popular the website is.
- Unique Visitors: Counts only a single view for each unique visitor your digital content receives. This shows the range of your audience and how much reach your website/content has.
- Bounce Rate: Tracks the number of users that leave your website after viewing only one page. This helps you understand how invested users are in your website and how good your website’s impression is.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics show how users interact with your marketing strategies and attempts.
- Time on Site: Measures the average time a user spends on your website. This helps you understand how immersive your website experience is to users.
- Pages per Session: Tracks how many different pages users view on your website during a single session. This helps you understand a general sense of the user’s interest in your website and how practical your website navigation is.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Monitors the number of users that click on the marketing elements you attract them towards. For example, a specific link you wanted the viewer to open or a CTA you wanted the visitor to interact with. This helps you understand how effective your persuasion is.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion metrics track the benefit your business receives from each marketing campaign. Many ROI metrics are considered to be Conversion metrics as well.
- Conversion Rate: Tracks down the number of visitors that actually went ahead and completed the task you were attracting them towards, for example purchasing the discounted shows you were advertising on Instagram. These show the direct result of how many users are converted into customers through your marketing strategy.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): CPA helps you understand how costly each new customer is to your business. This helps you understand how cost-effective customer retention and customer acquisition are for your business.
- Return on Investment (ROI): Analyses the revenue your business directly generates from a marketing campaign against the costs that were incurred to launch and operate it. This helps determine how financially effective your marketing campaigns are.
Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics aren’t technically a different type of metric, however, since most form of digital marketing is done through social media, it makes sense to make a separate list of digital marketing metrics used in social media marketing.
- Likes/Follows: Tallies the number of likes and follows your social media handles receive. This indicates how popular your business’ social media presence is.
- Shares/Retweets: Tallies how many shares or retweets your uploaded posts receive. This indicates the reach and virality of your social media content.
- Comments: Tallies the number of comments your social media posts receive. This helps you understand how well your brand is received by your target market.
Email Marketing Metrics:
Similar to social media metrics, email marketing metrics are also listed separately just because of how popular this digital marketing channel is.
- Open Rate: Measures the percentage of recipients of an email that actually opened the mail from their inbox. This helps you understand how attractive and effective your subject lines for emails were and how well-reputed your business’s email is.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how many people clicked on the action that was advertised within the mail. This is usually a link to the business’s website. This helps you understand how persuasive and effective the email’s content was.
- Conversion Rate: Tracks how many readers converted into customers for a business. This is mostly used for cold-emailing campaigns where if a recipient makes a purchase from the business after receiving an email, they are said to be converted into customers. This helps you understand how effective your email’s content was in selling your product.
Effective Tools for Tracking Digital Marketing Metrics
Digital marketing metrics aren’t something you need to manually solve to identify the performance of your marketing strategies. In the digitally advanced age we live in, we can safely rely on different software and web applications that can use the above mentioned digital marketing metrics and analyze our marketing performance for use.
Some of the most popular digital marketing metrics are:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular digital marketing web analytics tool that provides various and comprehensive data on key digital marketing metrics such as user behavior analysis or accurate traffic metrics.
Pros
- Wide range of metrics and reports
- Easy to use and integrate with websites
- Free version available
Cons
- Has a bit of a learning curve
- Limited real-time date
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular digital marketing tools out there that offers comprehensive features for SEO, paid advertising, and social media. Key metrics that SEMrush is popular for are its thorough keyword research, competitor analysis, and more.
Pros
- All-in-one digital marketing tool
- Extensive multipurpose keyword research and analysis
- Competitor research
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- High prices for advanced features
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is considered to be the pioneer digital marketing tool that offers comprehensive insights and extensive analytics for websites. Key metrics that Ahrefs uses to analyze websites are domain authority, backlinking, organic keywords, and organic traffic.
Pros
- Robust backlink analysis
- Extensive keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Site auditing
- Website rank tracking
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- High price for advanced features
- Limited features for SMM
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is a metrics tool created for businesses that run Facebook pages. Using Facebook Insights, they can better understand how well their Facebook presence is and how effective their Facebook ad campaigns are running.
Key Facebook metrics include audience engagement, reach, and demographics.
Pros
- Specialized in extracting Facebook metrics
- Easy-to-use interface
- Detailed demographic info
Cons
- Limited to only Facebook SMM
Buffer
Buffer is used for tracking the performance of social media marketing done by a business across various social media platforms. Key metrics that Buffer uses are analysis of post-performance, engagement, and audience growth.
Pros
Cross-platform support
Scheduling and publishing of posts
User friendly
Cons
Relatively limited depth and insights
May require additional integrations
Mailchimp
Mailchimp not only analyzes the performance of email marketing campaigns but also executes them proficiently. Key email marketing metrics that it uses in reports are open rates, CTRs, and subscriber behavior.
Pros
- User friendly
- Automation features
- e-Commerce integration
Cons
- Limited to email marketing
- Advanced analysis requires paid subscriptions
How To Interpret and Analyze Digital Marketing Metrics
Digital marketing metrics are the best solution to understand the performance of your marketing campaigns and strategies. These metrics can help management make data-driven strategies and optimize their strategies to be the most cost-effective for businesses.
However, with the same metrics data, different businesses can derive different decisions. To ensure you make the right decisions, it is important to carefully analyze each digital marketing metric.
Analyze Within Contexts
It is essential to analyze digital marketing metrics considering the context of the situation, instead of looking at it in isolation. Here are some contexts that you should consider for each digital marketing metric.
- What are your goals and objectives?: Each marketing campaign has different goals and objectives. For example, if your objective was to increase brand awareness, a high Open Rate for an email campaign can indicate success, however, if the goal was increased sales, a high Open Rate does not mean anything unless it is matched with a High CTR.
- Comparing it with the past: Analyze your metrics over different timeframes to better understand if your business is succeeding in the bigger picture or not. Additionally, this can also help you identify if your business operations are prone to seasonality.
- What are your competitors achieving?: A good method that helps you understand whether your digital marketing metrics are good enough is to compare them with industry benchmarks of the niche you operate in. For a more practical comparison, compare with competitors that are on the same scale and size as your business.
Making Decisions Using Metrics With An Example
Only after you analyze different digital metrics using different contexts can you fully understand the performance and position of your marketing campaigns. With variable information in hand, you can now understand different marketing opportunities in a more in-depth way.
Let’s use the example of analyzing Conversion Rate to make data-driven decisions.
The conversion rate shows if users actually took action for the marketing element that you advertised in your campaign. Now, different conversion rates can be received for different digital marketing channels. Once we receive a percentage for each digital marketing channel, it is now important to analyze that number compared with past metrics to identify growth and industry benchmarks to identify competitive advantage.
Only after you analyze the conversion rates through different contexts, can you understand which digital marketing channel is the most effective for your business and more budget and resources can be allocated for that channel as a result.
How To Improve Digital Marketing Performance Based On Metrics
Analyzing digital marketing metrics thoroughly can only bring success to your business if it practically and realistically helps you improve your business performance. Fortunately, digital marketing metrics have a linear relationship with the overall improvements a business faces upon a successful digital marketing performance.
But digital marketing metrics aren’t only useful for indicating where your success is, but it also indicate your shortcomings. These gaps in your digital marketing strategy can be further analyzed by using different metrics to overcome underperforming areas and identify ways of improvement.
Identifying areas for improvement allows you to focus your efforts on the most impactful aspects of your digital marketing strategy, helping you optimize resources, allocate budgets effectively, and generate better results.
With detailed digital marketing metric reports over a long period of time, businesses are more likely to make strategic changes that significantly boost the business’ success. Some of these strategic changes can be adjusting targets, refining content, optimizing digital marketing channels, or conducting A/B tests.
Conclusion
In summary, digital marketing metrics are the most essential indicators for your marketing campaigns and strategies. Since there are hundreds of metrics you can use, marketers mainly categorize different metrics upon their applications and results.
Further analysis of these digital marketing metrics can be done using digital marketing tools. This can not only help you interpret and analyze your metrics better but can also ultimately lead to improvements in your digital marketing strategies.
Interested in more? Check out What Are The Best Email Marketing Practices To Get Conversion?