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5 Metrics to Measure Digital Marketing Success

measures digital marketing success

It is vital to emphasize the importance of digital marketing in this era because of the numerous benefits it gives to brands in helping to keep them relevant online.
Marketing across all digital marketing platforms is always more effective than just sticking to one platform. This is because it increases the chances of getting the attention of the brand’s target audience wherever they might be online.

Spreading the marketing tentacles of the brand across various digital marketing platforms obviously does not come cheap. It is important to be able to know if the brand is getting good returns on its marketing investments by keeping track of all that goes on with the various digital marketing campaigns. Doing this successfully would require that brands track certain metrics and monitor it closely to be sure that they are close to accomplishing their marketing objectives. In cases where they are not, they can equally look at these metrics to figure out what is wrong and address it immediately so that they can get better results.

If you would like to use specific metrics to track and measure your brand’s digital marketing success, it would be wise to seek the assistance of a digital marketing agency. They will hand-hold you through the process to ensure your success. Let’s take a look at the following 5 Metrics to measure digital marketing success.

1. Social media marketing metrics

When marketing on social media, brands need to track the number of impressions per post. They also need to track the number of reaches per post, the number of clicks – if they have inserted a link that they want their target audience to click on. It is important to also track the number of followers. Even if the brand isn’t marketing to get more followers, marketing a campaign could also lead to increase in the number of followers, so this should be tracked as well. It is also crucial to track the engagement level for each post, so look out for the number of likes, comments, and reposts. Your target audience can also choose to save the content, especially if it is an image, so track the number of saves or downloads too. Brands can also track the number of people talking about their brand on social media too, usually through hashtags created by the brand or created by the target audience. Some of these hashtags mentioned online can be negative or positive. For negative ones, brands can quickly respond and address concerns to avoid escalating the issue. For positive ones, a brand can leverage feedback to improve their products or services.

2. Search engine marketing (SEM) and Search engine optimization (SEO)

Even though these two are very different, we’ll group it together since they both target the relevance of brands on search engines. Any business that wants to thrive online is going to be living at the mercy of search engines, which implies that the SEO game of that brand needs to be strong. Brands have to track the number of organic traffic, organic bounce rate, organic conversion rate and the top organic referring sources. They also need to track top exit pages for organic traffic as well as the keywords search engines are picking to rank the brand high on search engine results page (SERP). Also crucial to track is local SEO (how visible the brand is within its locale), click-through rates as well as the pages that search engines index. It is important to take note of the number of pages crawled by search engine crawlers per day and any errors that pop up when web crawlers have issues crawling the website.

SEM is a paid search that allows brands to appear on search engines when certain keywords are used. Brands need to track impressions, number of clicks, keyword report to know the ones driving traffic or not, keyword cost per click, impression share (to understand the scale within a group of search adverts). It is also important to track the number of pages visited and average time spent on the website as well as any other action performed on the website by the visitor that clicked on the search ad link. Brands should also analyse the assisted conversion report which details the number of interactions the visitor has with the website before finally becoming a lead or conversion.

3. Email marketing metrics

Email marketing is one very effective digital marketing platform if properly used. Brands need to track the number of subscribers opening the email and the click through rate (the number of subscribers clicking on links inserted in the email). Businesses should also measure their conversion rate (the number of persons that clicked a link and completed the specified call-to-action) as well as the bounce rate. It is crucial to understand the number of new subscribers, the number of unsubscribers, percentage of spam complaints and the percentage of email shared or forwarded. It is also vital to analyse the engagement level (day of the week and time they open email to improve how emails are automated).

4. Smartphone marketing Metrics

Whether the brand is just sending simple messages to their target audience or using their free mobile app to do push notifications, these channels need to be properly tracked to see if the brand is making progress or not. Even using chat tools like Facebook messenger or WhatsApp to improve communication with the target audience and market to them – every marketing action taken needs tracking. Brands need to track average revenue per user, cost per install, user engagement level and the percentage of users that actually enjoy using the app. Businesses need to monitor the retention rate of app users, push opt-in rate, number of times a user taps a push notification and the number of times users manually open the app without tapping on the push notification. It is also crucial to track the total push opens, email open rate and unique email open rate.

5. Landing page metrics

This is integral to the success of any digital marketing effort. They are perfect for paid advertising because it can help with getting reasonable leads that a brand can market their products or services to. Brands need to track the conversion rates on the landing page, bounce rates, average time spent on the landing page, traffic source and form abandonment rate. Brands must also assess the landing page views, goal completions and sessions by source (to know which traffic source has the highest number of visitors that spend more time on the landing page). It is also important to measure the visitors contact ratio, pages per session, top pages by page views, visitor flow and content shared. Finally, it is essential to analyse new visitor conversions rate, the percentage of returning visitors, how they behave on the website and the value of each visit.

Other digital marketing metrics brands can track are affiliate marketing, content marketing, viral marketing and online advertising.