Digital Marketing is the lifeline of most businesses these days with Covid-19 making it impossible to get leads from other sources. For the foreseeable future, we are not going to see events, trade shows or even much of in-person meetings which means that even the most seasoned businesses should get onto the Digital Marketing bandwagon.
Businesses need to spruce up their online presence to be seen. Being discovered online is the only way to get clients during these precarious times. Are you investing the right resources for your online presence? There are a lot of things that need to come into place for you to be successful with your online presence.
Right from the content on your website to the UX will have a bearing on your business. Do you know your communication strategy? What are the different types of content that you have prepared for various segments of your audience? Which is going to be the channel where you are going to concentrate most of your efforts on?
For businesses that are new to this, it might seem overwhelming as there are a lot of pieces in the jigsaw puzzle to handle. But thankfully, it is not as tough you might imagine. The folks at SurveySparrow are here to help you with digital marketing metrics that you need to concentrate on.
10 Digital Marketing Metrics that Matter
The best part about digital marketing, unlike traditional marketing, is that you can measure the ROI of your campaigns. If you spend $x on an activity, you will be able to tell the kind of impact it had on your business. We present you with 10 digital marketing metrics that matter:
#1 Number of website visitors
The visitors on your website will tell you the kind of effect that most of your campaigns has on your potential customers. You will be able to tell from which channels these people are visiting your website. If you think that there are more visitors from LinkedIn than Facebook, then you need to concentrate on the former.
This is one of the most important metrics that you need to consider because most of the sales happens through potential customers visiting your website. Even if your sales happen mostly through qualified sales people, the prospects that they are talking to will surely visit your website.
If there is constant activity happening on your website in terms of people visiting, then it is a good sign. If there are hardly any visitors, then that might tell something about your sales efforts so far. You will be able to see the number of visitors on a particular day, week, month, quarter, and so on. It will help you understand the trends associated with the increase in traffic. The spike in traffic could be because of an event, contest or seasonal like a Black Friday sale.
The number of visitors to your website will keep changing every day, week and month. Your objective should be to get it higher. But if you see a downward decline in the number of visitors, then there is something seriously wrong.
#2 Qualified leads per month
The number of qualified leads that you bring in each month to your business shows the quality of your marketing campaigns. Whenever someone responds to your ad by taking an action, they become a lead. It could be filling an online form to know more about our services, or asking for a demo. But these leads are unqualified, but they are a step above others who haven’t initiated a contact yet.
Your salespeople can get on calls or in-person meetings with these leads to understand how you can help them. Understand how your services will affect their business and then you can pitch a customized solution to them. Once you know that there is a fit, your lead is qualified.
The next steps of the business is all about quoting the price, negotiating it, and so on. Your salespeople have to be qualified professionals who can take a client from “interested” to “sold”.
The audience that you target needs to be the ones who might be interested in your product. Remember, not everyone is your customer. So if your targeting is awry, then it will affect your ability to get good leads that make sense for your business.
Your campaigns should be highly targeted which will help you reach the right audience and create value offerings that are unique to them. Keep track of the number of leads that you get, both unqualified as well as qualified because you also need to know how many of these unqualified leads are getting converted into qualified ones and then into customers.
#3 Cost per conversion
How much money did you spend to acquire a customer? This is one question that both your CFO and CMO will ask. Let’s say that the lifetime value of a customer is $100, and you spent $150 to acquire them, then your company will soon shut shop. Even if the lifetime value of a customer is similar to the acquisition cost, you are still not making a profit. You are only wasting your marketing resources.
When you conduct a campaign, let’s say there are 100 leads that you get and you convert only 5 of them, the marketing expenses are calculated for the entire campaign to measure the value of those that you converted. It is exactly why your targeting should be on spot. Otherwise, you might cover a lot of areas, but then those will rarely be the right people.
When you calculate the resources and money spent on acquiring a client, you should include everything, right from the money you spent on blogs to the cost of the social media tools to your paid campaigns. Every single penny is accounted for when calculating the cost. If you find that there are channels which offer better reach than others, then make it a point to spend more time on it.
#4 Net Promoter Score
It is one of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics on the planet. NPS asks a simple question to customers on a 10 rating scale.
“How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or family”
The best part about this metric is that it is easy for your customers to fill and the responses are more likely to do that based on their emotions for the company. So it is also considered as an indicator of loyalty. Let us explain.
There are three levels in Net Promoter Scores:
Promoters: These are people who rate you with a 9 or a 10. They are extremely satisfied with your product, won’t mind sharing how good your product is to their friends. Promoters are easy to cross-sell and upsell to as they believe in your product. It is easy to sell premium products to them. They will be loyal to you, unless you don’t treat them properly, they will stay with your company as customers.
Passives: They are people who give you a rating of 7 or 8. These people are not extremely satisfied with you, but they are not entirely disappointed with you either. They will move to a competitor when they find even a slightly better option.
Detractors: These people are not happy with your service and they won’t mind ranting about the same in social media channels. Not only should you be trying to make them happy, but you should also put damage control measures in place to combat any negative posts about your company in the public.
By keeping track of this metric, you will know when there are more Promoters than Detractors and vice-versa.
NPS= % Detractors – % Promoters
Calculate your NPS score, if it is in the negative, it means that there are more detractors than promoters, which is bad for your business. It means that there are a lot of customers who are unhappy with you and are going to badmouth your brand in public.
Your goal should be to convert Passives into Promoters, Detractors into Passives and then to Promoters while keeping the Promoters happy with you always.
#5 New Sessions
Whenever a new visitor comes to your website, it is defined as a session in Google Analytics. They might spend anywhere from a 100 minutes to a single second. The more time they spend on your website, you are bringing them closer to your brand. Google Analytics tells you how much time they are spending on your website, the number of pages they are browsing, and so on. Each of these metrics will open your eyes to something or the other. The best part about this is that you can also see the data over a long period of time, which means that it is helpful to unearth patterns.
When you see a decrease in these sessions, you know that there is something wrong as it means that there are fewer people visiting your site. Keep an eye on this metric especially during any promotions as the spike you witness during this period is the effectiveness of it. While it doesn’t directly affect your bottom line, it is still a prediction of how many potential customers are coming to your site. Based on the number of visitors you get every month and the number of conversions, you can even calculate the number of website visitors that you would require to pull off every single conversion.
#6 Bounce Rate
We go to a website and leave it right away, maybe because it is slow or we found something better. All of us do that, right? The Bounce Rate metric that you see on Google Analytics says exactly that. It is the percentage of people who left without engaging or clicking on any page on your website. In a utopian world, your bounce rate would be 0%, but that number is impossible and not worthy of chasing because it is never going to happen.
Here’s what you should do. Find pages on your website that have a high bounce rate. Sit with your team and find out the reasons behind such high bounce rates. It could be because the copy on the page is terrible or there is a mismatch between the content and the offering or because the design is awful. Your website visitors might be turned off by any of these, which is why they leave the website immediately.
Make the necessary changes based on your consultation with your team and you will be able to see a reduction in the bounce rate. At the end of the day, it is all about giving your customers what they want. Your objective should be to keep your visitors to stay on the website as long as possible. The chances of them converting into a customer are high when they learn more about your offering and value proposition. It can happen only when they linger on your website for a long time.
#7 SEO Traffic
It is one aspect that most businesses are ready to spend a lot of money on because they know that it will bring in the all-important customers. But there are a lot of things that need to come together if you want to rank your website on top in the search engine results. SEO traffic is organic and you need to write stellar content, brilliant creatives and an even better communication strategy. All the three should align for it to work like a charm.
SEO has been important for more than a decade and a half and is a huge contributor to the traffic share of some of the most successful websites. With a lot of importance given to content, SEO’s clout is only going to grow bigger. SEO has to be seen within the context of your marketing efforts as well as website’s performance.
Let’s say you start your SEO marketing efforts, you can’t expect to get results in a few weeks or even one or two months. It is a long-term marketing effort which will take time to show results. Keep benchmarking your organic results on all channels to measure the performance of your SEO efforts.
#8 Conversion Rate
Your website’s conversion rate is not the number of people who have become paid customers after visiting your website. Remember, conversion rarely happens on the first visit. It is when you capture the attention and interest of your user. Conversion Rate is defined as the amount of visitors who have taken some sort of action on your website. It could be filling a form asking for more information about your offering or scheduling a call with your team or sharing contact details to download a PDF that acts as a lead magnet for you.
All of these acts will bring your prospects closer to you. Now that they have shared their information, you are more likely to close them than earlier when there was no relationship at all.
Conversion Rate = (Conversions/Total visitors)*100
Let’s say you had 10,000 visitors, out of which 200 converted into paying customers, it means that your conversion rate is 2%.
To increase your conversion rates, not only do you need to improve your web copy, but you should also optimize the various elements in your website. Here are some questions to be considered:
- Are all of your landing pages fully optimized?
- Is your CTA button clear and is it placed at the right position?
- How’s the experience for the visitor when using your website?
#9 Click-through rate
It is the ratio of users who click on a specific link that you have posted to the number of users who viewed that particular page. CTR is used to measure the success of a marketing campaign, it is a metric that is usually used for email campaigns.
CTR= Clicks/Impressions.
Let’s say you have 100 impressions for an ad and 7 people click on it, it means that your CTR is 7%. The higher the CTR, the better it is for your campaigns. If you keep noticing an uptick on your CTR, then your campaigns are getting optimized and it will soon translate into revenues.
The average CTR in AdWords is 1.91% for search and 0.35% for display, but that’s just the average. A good AdWords CTR is 4-5% on the search network or 0.5-1% on the display network.
CTR is pivotal to your digital marketing campaigns because it tells you what works when you are trying to reach your correct audience. If you have a high CTR rate, then it means that your targeting is perfect while a low CTR rate will mean that either your copy is bad and not persuasive or you are knocking on the wrong doors.
Elements like the images you use, keywords, CTA, copy, positioning, etc., can seriously affect the chances of your campaign. You can achieve higher CTR by bidding on targeted keywords, integrating keywords with ad text and landing pages, efficiently segmenting keyword groups, etc.
#10 Customer Lifetime Value
It is the amount of money that a customer is expected to spend on your business over his/her lifetime. Based on the CLV, you can make a lot of decisions, right from how much to invest on ads, retention decisions, and so on. If your customer’s CLV is $1000, then spending $1200 to retain them is a loss for your business.
CLV= Average value of a purchase*Number of times the customer will purchase in a year* Average length of customer relationship.
Your CLV will also tell you who are your most profitable customers, the kind of products that your customers with the highest CLV want, products that are most well-received and wanted.
You can increase CLV with the following:
- Collect their feedback at regular intervals to see how they love your service and your products.
- Work based on the feedback provided by the customers.
- Give your customers an upgrade.
- Offer exceptional customer service.
- Make it easy for your customers to contact you.
Conclusion
There is an ocean of data that you need to track to be on top of your marketing metrics. Some of them are vanity metrics while some of them can be game changers for your business. Choose the ones that are right for you and observe them like a hawk. When you have a clear understanding of your goals, you will know which are the digital marketing metrics that matter for your business
The metrics that matter to your business will help you understand how to improve your marketing efforts and find out which are the areas that need a complete overhaul. It should matter to your bottom line one way or the other and help drive revenue, leads, growth and newer customers. Once you follow these metrics, then slowly concentrate on other metrics too which will drive revenue and increase your customer base.
With every passing day, the concentration should be on improving your offerings, enhancing the experience for the user and providing value to your customers. If you can do that consistently, your customers will love you for it and the digital metrics that you measure will also be a testament for the same.
