Implementing a digital marketing strategy for the first time? You may be asking yourself, “What's the best way to measure the success of my campaigns?” If you want to gain a clear picture of your return on investment and the value of your campaigns, you'll want to look at these specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Understanding key metrics and KPIs can help you tailor your digital strategy so that you can get to the point of consistency and predictability in your revenue.
The Metrics That Matter: Conversions and Click-Through Rates
Digital marketers often focus on the number of impressions and clicks their campaigns generate. However, it's important to remember that these metrics only scratch the surface. To truly measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you need to focus on other key metrics like conversions and click-through rate.
What's a conversion exactly?
Conversions refer to the people who visited your website or interacted with an ad, social post, virtual event, email or other marketing channel and became a customer. For the most part, conversion types are qualified by inbound leads, such as form fills and phone calls, in addition to the number of pages viewed and website transactions. Conversions show how potential customers engage and take action when they visit your website, instead of just glancing at the site and immediately clicking away.
Let’s look at the different metrics we use when assessing the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
Impressions: Evaluating Reach and Brand Visibility
Impressions play a crucial role in measuring the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. An impression is counted every time your ad or content is displayed to someone, providing valuable insights into the reach and brand visibility of your campaigns. Monitoring impressions helps you understand the number of times your content has been seen by potential customers, indicating broader reach and increased visibility for your brand.
However, it's important to remember that impressions alone don't guarantee engagement or conversions. To assess the success of your campaigns more accurately, analyze other metrics like click-through rates, conversions, and customer actions. By evaluating impressions alongside these key metrics, you can refine your targeting, messaging, and content strategies to maximize the impact of your digital marketing efforts to achieve your marketing and business goals.
Click-through Rates: Understanding Audience Engagement
Click-through rate (CTR) is a crucial metric that allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your ad messaging in targeting your desired customers. It measures the percentage of users who click on your ad after viewing it. A low CTR indicates the need to experiment with new ad copy and potentially reevaluate your target audience, as it suggests that your current approach is not resonating with your target audience and failing to generate sufficient interest or engagement. By continuously monitoring and optimizing your CTR, you can refine your digital marketing strategy, improve audience targeting, and create compelling ad content that drives higher click-through rates.
Conversion Rates: A True Measure of Success
Conversion rates refer to the percentage of website visitors who visited your website or landing page and took action. This number tells you how relevant your website traffic is and how successful your website or landing page is at getting website visitors to take desired actions.
While impressions and clicks are a starting point, they don't necessarily indicate success. Instead, focus on your conversion rate, which measures the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. Whether it's making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter, conversions show how effectively your digital marketing efforts are driving people to click-through.
To calculate your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of website visitors and multiply it by 100. This metric provides a clear indication of the effectiveness of your website and landing pages. If your conversion rates are below industry averages, it might be time to rethink your digital strategy because you may be generating irrelevant traffic to your website.
Cost per conversion: Maximizing ROI
Cost per conversion measures how much it costs you to acquire a customer. This metric looks at how many people viewed your ad or content and how many took action to become customers. In order to determine your cost per conversion, divide the total cost for generating traffic by the number of conversions.
Key Performance Indicators: Customer Lifetime Value and Acquisition Costs
Another reason you can’t just rely on impressions and clicks alone to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts is that with all of the advancements in how people search online (smartphones, voice search, tablets), there are a multitude of touch points for each online search inquiry. The quantity and variety of touchpoints create a very complex path to purchase for your customers. So when measuring the success of a digital campaign, marketers should look at more customer-centric metrics, like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs.
Customer Acquisition Cost
To determine your customer acquisition costs, start by establishing the baselines from which you'll collect data. Begin by choosing the time periods in which you're going to look. Next, put together data on how much you’ve invested in your sales and marketing expenses over that period of time. Finally, put together a report on how many new customers you've secured during that same time frame.
Tip: Start by looking at a year, and then, as you refine your process, narrow it down to quarters. Eventually, you can get to a point where you’re looking at it monthly so you can see some trending averages.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (LTV) refers to how much money a customer will spend over a period of time. You can use your LTV to quantify your return on marketing spend. You may feel like you want to see a return on your investment right away, but don’t forget to consider the value of a single customer over several months or years.
Goals for Success
Measuring digital marketing success goes beyond surface-level metrics. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, tracking actions, and aligning your goals with key performance indicators.
To set achievable and meaningful goals for your digital marketing strategy, conduct industry research and benchmark against industry averages. Understand what success means for your specific business and adjust your strategy accordingly.
The ultimate goal is to get to a point where you can better predict your business revenue for the year. By using the metrics and KPIs mentioned in this post and adjusting your digital strategy accordingly, you can get to a place where you are consistently achieving desired outcomes and conversions, creating a strategy for predictability.
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