The benefits of digital marketing for businesses cannot be emphasized enough. But is your business getting the right ROI from digital marketing campaigns? The only way of tracking the success of your digital marketing activities is by paying attention to KPIs. KPIs can increase or lower your bottom line. Measuring the correct set of KPIs ensures a high return on investment.
So, keep reading to discover what digital marketing KPIs are and how to track them.
What Exactly are Digital Marketing KPIs?
KPI is short for key performance indicator and is a measurable metric that brands use to track the success of different business objectives. In digital marketing, KPIs can be used to track the effectiveness and success of your business’s digital marketing objectives. These include sales growth, cost per acquisition, lead generation, and the lifetime value of your customers.
Is Tracking Digital Marketing KPIs Worth It?
Established brands have one thing in common. They all rely on data to make informed business decisions. Businesses that track digital marketing KPIs get a faster return on investment than those that don’t. This is because digital marketing KPIs give marketers a real-time view of the performance of each digital marketing campaign. Let’s discuss why you should track the proper digital marketing KPIs.
✅ Auditing Your Current Digital Marketing Strategies
Tracking your digital marketing KPIs can help determine whether your current digital marketing efforts are on track. KPIs will give you a clearer insight into the performance of each strategy. For instance, KPIs can help determine whether you are reaching the right clients. You can also track the performance of your website using digital KPIs.
✅ Tracking Progress Toward a Specific Objective
Tracking digital marketing KPIs can also help your marketing team measure the progress toward a specific objective. The good thing with KPIs is that they allow you to break your objectives into smaller milestones. For instance, if you want to increase your lead generation by 150% within one year, you can break down this objective into monthly goals. From there, you can use KPI data to track progress.
✅ Make Real-Time Decisions
Embracing a proactive marketing approach leads to the highest return on investment. Above all, it allows your brand to stand out from your competitors. Fortunately, tracking your digital marketing KPIs can help you do just that. These metrics highlight vital areas that require your immediate attention. You can use data from your KPI reports to address these issues quickly.
Top Digital Marketing KPIs that You Should Track
Now that you know digital marketing KPIs and how tracking them helps your brand, you are probably eager to learn the digital marketing KPIs you must track. Let’s discuss the most important digital marketing KPIs in detail below.
✅ Website Traffic KPIs
The first set of digital marketing KPIs your marketing team needs to pay attention to is website traffic. A functional and mobile-friendly business website enhances your credibility and awareness. Furthermore, a website increases your chances of getting more qualified leads. It’s also a cost-effective way of providing reliable customer service.
To ensure that your website is helping you accomplish your business objectives, you must analyze website traffic. This means that you must track the number of visitors your website gets. Moreover, you must analyze their interests, mobile devices, traffic source, and demographics to improve your ROI. That can only happen when you track website traffic KPIs.
The website traffic KPIs you should track include the following:
✅ Online Conversion Rates
Online conversion rates measure the percentages of online visitors who complete the desired action. It could be reading your blog posts, subscribing to a service, following your social media channel, or even making a call.
✅ Social Media Marketing KPIs
Did you know that 82% of Americans have a social media profile? This translates to around 223 million Americans. Savvy business owners know that social media is no longer a luxury. It’s mandatory for any business that wants to reach more customers and enhance brand awareness. Social media is also a cost-effective way of staying ahead of the competition.
But creating engaging content alone is not enough. Marketers also need to track the performance of social media marketing strategies from time to time. By monitoring social media KPIs, you can determine whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off.
The essential social media marketing KPIs that you should measure include the following:
- Engagement metrics such as comments, likes, shares, followers, bounce rate, and conversions
- Reach KPIs such as impressions, followers, reach, and audience growth rate
- Customer satisfaction KPIs such as testimonials, surveys, and recommendations
✅ Content Performance KPIs
Demand Metric states that content marketing delivers three times the leads generated by other marketing channels. Unsurprisingly, many well-loved brands leverage content marketing to enhance brand awareness and credibility. These brands also use content marketing to drive more traffic to their website. Moreover, content marketing can boost SEO performance and lead generation.
Having a killer content strategy is not enough. You also have to track your content marketing efforts to get great value for your money. The content marketing KPIs to keep a watch on include the following:
✅ Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a quantifiable metric for determining the value of each customer. Note that CLV does not just focus on sales. Instead, it’s a measure of the value of a customer throughout the whole relationship. Measuring CLV can help your business acquire new customers and retain existing ones without lowering your profit margins.
CLV is especially important for companies that have multi-year relationships with customers. These include businesses that provide subscription services. Essential CLV KPIs you should track include touchpoints, customer journey, and revenue at each touchpoint.
✅ SEO KPIs
Studies show that the page ranking in the first position in Google search results gets 42.25% of all organic traffic. The website ranking in the second position gets 11.94% of all the traffic. To rank high on SERPs, you must leverage SEO. SEO or search engine optimization refers to all the white hat strategies you can use to improve your SERP rankings.
Ranking high on SERPs can help your business get more leads. Studies show that leads generated from SEO have a 14.6% conversion rate. Tracking SEO KPIs can help you identify keywords that increase your website’s traffic. SEO KPIs can also highlight keywords and pages that require improvement. Furthermore, you can use data from KPI reports to monitor your competitors.
SEO KPIs can also improve your ROI when you run search engine marketing campaigns. These metrics will give you more insight into your impressions, total clicks, and click-through rate.
The following SEO KPIs can give you a clear insight into the performance of your SEO campaigns:
✅ Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per acquisition, or CPA, is a measurable metric that measures the total cost of acquiring a customer. To calculate your CPA, divide all your marketing expenses by the number of customers you acquire in a given period. Let’s say all your marketing costs in a specific month total $500, and you gain 100 new customers. Then, your customer acquisition cost in that month is $5.
Tracking your cost per acquisition provides vital data on your marketing campaign’s effectiveness. This way, you can ensure that you invest in the proper channels. With CPA, it’s advisable to focus on the total amount spent to acquire qualified leads through a specific channel or campaign.
ROI in Marketing
A high ROI means that your investment has performed well. In terms of digital marketing, ROI evaluates the profitability of a digital marketing strategy. ROI is further divided into hard ROI and soft ROI. Hard ROI refers to digital marketing activities that have immediate financial benefits. It could be from customer acquisition, website traffic, purchase, or lead generation.
On the other hand, soft ROI are the marketing activities that don’t generate revenue and sales. These include brand awareness, social media followers, engagement, and more. Although these activities don’t have an immediate financial benefit, their impact is felt in the end.
Wrapping Up
Regardless of your digital marketing goals and objectives, keeping an eye on the correct digital marketing KPIs can make or break your marketing efforts. Tracking digital marketing KPIs allows your business to make prompt and real-time decisions. Not only that, but it helps you evaluate current strategies and measure progress over time. Fortunately, there are many tools, such as Google Analytics, you can use to measure the performance of each digital marketing campaign.
If you have more questions about digital marketing ROI and KPIs, don’t hesitate to contact JetRank today. Our digital marketing specialists are more than happy to help you visualize and understand your digital marketing KPIs.
