The marketing journey for any small business owner can be challenging. Especially with the importance of digital marketing continually increasing, promoting your brand online to connect with potential customers should be a critical part of your marketing strategy. 

To truly know if the marketing tactics you implemented are working and that your business is receiving a return on your investments, digital marketing metrics will be your best friend. There are hundreds of statistics and data that you could track to provide you with insight into your marketing efforts, but not each one will be relevant to your business. We will focus on a few key metrics that are universally applicable to determine your digital marketing success. 

What are digital marketing metrics?

Digital marketing can also be referred to as online marketing, and it focuses on the usage of the internet and other digital forms of communication to connect with consumers. It can include email, multimedia messages, social media, web-based advertising, and mobile marketing. With the multitude of ways to connect with users online, it can be difficult for your business to keep track of various platforms. 

Metrics provide a method of measuring the results of something, and in this case, for digital marketing. These are numbers, analytics, graphs, and spreadsheets that provide you with data to learn how your marketing plan is performing. The number of metrics that exist and can be measured may sometimes feel overwhelming and a little daunting. The important thing to remember is that not every metric is helpful to your business. You should be looking at your main objectives and goals to decide on which metrics you will track. 

We will provide you with ten metrics that are essential to measuring your digital marketing strategies. If you’re struggling to understand the metrics and are unsure where to get started, this blog will provide you with some handy tips!

10 metrics for any business

There are various services or software that can track and report data from your website. The most commonly known one is Google Analytics since it’s free, readily available for any website, and effective for almost every business owner. Despite which service you choose to obtain your information from, any service will provide you with analytics to modify and improve your business’s online presence. Let’s get started with our suggestions of metrics to measure your digital marketing:

1. User Demographics

For all businesses, you typically have a target demographic in mind as one that you want to attract. This can be dependent on a specific age group, gender, or even location. Looking at the user demographics for your company will tell you who is interested in your offerings, their age, gender, location, and potentially their interests. This information, especially location, is an indication of where your users are coming from. That may or may not be relevant to your main objective; however, if you reach users in another continent when you only want to focus on the domestic market, some changes should be made. For example, if your business reaches 30-34-year-olds when you aim to target an age group of 20-24-year-olds, this information will help make adjustments to your content or product. 

2. New versus Return Visitors

New and returning visitors are essential to track since they will indicate how your content is performing. If users find it valuable and helpful, then it will entice them to come back several times. Attracting multiple visits to your website or online platforms means that you are obtaining returning visitors. If you have many new visitors, your new content is doing what it should to drive traffic. However, if you find you have a large portion of unique visitors and not many returning ones, then your content may be attractive but not helpful. Track this rate over a few weeks and months, and you will have a good idea of who is viewing your site. 

3. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is how many people view your site, typically only one page, and then leave without performing any further actions. Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be low since this indicates users are continuously looking for more information within your site. On the other hand, a high bounce rate can reveal problems in your digital marketing plan. For example, weak landing pages, loadings speeds, or irrelevant content can cause visitors to leave. 

However, keep in mind that the bounce rate for different pages is relative. Therefore, just because a specific page has a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem. For example, users may have found what they were looking for and then decided to leave. Or, potentially, a contact page has a high bounce rate since users will contact your business after finding this information. For this reason, looking at the bounce rate of individual pages can be very useful in finding out if there is a problem or if the user is satisfied before leaving. 

4. Exit Rate

The exit rate differs from the bounce rate since it measures precisely where a user left after exploring your site for some time. This will help identify drop-off points in the conversion process so you can optimize your pages and website accordingly. That is especially helpful for sites that have a multi-page conversion process.

Since the exit rate will tell you where users lost interest, you can adjust your content to ensure the user doesn’t leave before taking action or making a purchase.

5. Page Views

Although this is the broadest of all the page-related measurements for digital marketing, it is an essential website traffic metric. It will tell you the total number of pages viewed on your website. That can help you understand what pages on your site are valuable, which are not, and if there is a focus on a particular few. Creating and publishing content is one thing, but making it beneficial to the customer is another. If you find you have pages that receive no views after several months, that can be an indicator of unhelpful content and something to avoid in the future. 

Another helpful metric is the most visited pages. That can further determine which parts of your website are most valuable and potentially what consumers are highly interested in. In the behaviours section of Google Analytics, you can find out what sites your visitors are going to and how long they spend on each one. 

6. Overall Website Traffic

Often, traffic can be a measurement used by most companies to determine the success of a website. With the website being the focal point of your business, most of your marketing efforts will be put towards this outlet. Even with the various other digital platforms of social media or email marketing, your main objective is to get the consumer to your website. For this reason, measuring the website traffic metric can give you a solid idea of which campaigns are successful or which aren’t working so well. Just as a steady rise in traffic can mean you’re doing something right, a decline can signal that you need to make some changes to your website. 

7. Traffic by Sources

While your website’s overall traffic is a great metric to pay attention to, looking into the specific channels or sources of this traffic is very helpful. You will be able to pinpoint exactly where users are coming from and which marketing campaigns are performing well or not. The channels can include organic/search, referrals, social media, or direct visitors. This information will tell you where users are coming from and what sources are most important to your business. If most users come from social media and almost none from organic search, you are successful in your media management but may need to work on how your site appears in a search engine. 

8. Search Trends

Analyzing what users search for and what is currently trending will help target the right keywords for your campaign. You want to ensure you are using keywords relevant to your business and the current popular searches. Often, search trends can depend on the season, holiday, economy, or social media trends. Either way, you want to be on top of it and checking this metric every few months to ensure your keywords are up to date.

9. Return on Investment (ROI)

The return of investment metric reflects the cost of your investments compared to the returns in benefits you have earned. It is the ultimate metric for measuring if your marketing efforts are profitable and get the expected results. Sometimes it can be challenging to track marketing expenditures or count the hours of action towards a campaign. However, any business needs to know what is worth investing time and money into. A marketing campaign’s ROI is a crucial way to determine if you have been successful or not. 

10. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate refers to the number of visitors who have completed the desired action out of the total number of visitors. Examples of conversions can be signing up for emails, a sale, completing a download, starting a trial, or filling out a contact form. Looking at the conversion rates for a particular campaign will be one element in determining the efficacy of your overall digital marketing strategy. A low conversion rate can be the cause of a disinterested audience or unappealing offerings. If parts of your website are experiencing low conversion rates, it can indicate which components aren’t working and need an update.

Takeaways

Now that you have a better understanding of several key digital marketing metrics, your business can get started on tracking and analyzing right away (okay, maybe not right away, but soon). Although there are endless metrics to track for any business, some may or may not be relevant for your specific company. For these reasons, you must know your main objectives and overall goals for your company and, from there, decide what metrics are most helpful and will make a significant impact on your company. 

FAQs

What are digital marketing metrics?

Digital marketing metrics are values used to measure and track the performance of marketing campaigns. As a business owner, you may decide to use several tools to track your website’s results and promote services and products.

Why do I need to track specific metrics for my business?

Often, you decide to run a campaign for your business or want to establish a presence online but aren’t sure how to go about determining if it’s successful or not. Tracking results can be time-consuming, challenging, and overwhelming. Using specific metrics to track the progress of elements of your business, such as on your website or social media platforms, will let you know what you need to improve on and what is working well for your brand. 

What are other valuable metrics for digital marketing?

Although this blog covered some critical metrics for your business to track, a few more can be helpful among the hundreds that exist. Others include queries, top organic landing pages, brand sentiment, value per visit, click-through rates, lead to close ratio, and cost per conversion. 

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