Monitor your digital marketing metrics

What metrics should you monitor/optimise for digital marketing

Putting money into digital marketing efforts without tracking your results is like driving a car with blacked out windows. You’re moving, but how do you know how far you’ve gone, which way you’re driving or even when it’s time to stop and change direction? Tracking and monitoring the right metrics are vital to ensuring digital marketing success, but it’s something both small and large businesses struggle with. Let’s look at how you can limit resource wastage and get the most bang for your buck by focusing on the right metrics based on your business goals.

Align business goals with digital marketing objectives

Defining your business goals is the first step in solidifying your digital marketing strategy. Here are some examples of how businesses can align their goals with digital marketing objectives using the SMART criteria (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound):

Specific: A specific goal might be to increase website traffic by 20% in the next quarter.

Measurable: A measurable goal might be to generate 100 new leads through a digital marketing campaign.

Achievable: An achievable goal might be to increase social media engagement by 10% over the next month.

Relevant: A relevant goal might be to enhance brand awareness among a specific target audience, such as millennials or Gen Z.

Time-bound: A time-bound goal might be to increase conversions by 15% in the next six months.

By aligning business goals with digital marketing objectives using the SMART criteria, you can create clear and actionable targets that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. This approach can help ensure that digital marketing efforts are focused and aligned with the overall business strategy, leading to better outcomes and ROI (return on investment). You can read more about setting SMART goals here.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) to align your business with

Each business has their own goals and challenges that are unique to them and finding the right set of KPI’s is important. As a rule of thumb though, the following KPI’s can be considered important across the board and should be a key focus area, especially for your new business.

Cost per lead (CPL)

This metric shows the individual cost of each lead earned, making it possible to understand how much money is spent from the budget to get a new contact. The goal is to evaluate if the amount invested is compatible with the efforts applied to get the lead. It’s necessary to evaluate the time and resources applied to the strategy within a specified period. In this time, the investment must be placed in parallel with the number of leads obtained.

Don't be discouraged if your CPL is higher than anticipated at first. As you improve your campaign strategies and refine your target audience, you'll start to see improvements.

Remember this formula: Marketing spend / Number of leads earned E.g. R2500 spent on Google ads generated 12 leads therefore the cost per lead is R208.

Cost per conversion

This KPI is applied to find out what has been invested in turning leads into a (revenue) converting client. Simply put: How much did it cost you to earn a paying customer for your product or service. The higher the conversion, the better as this means it costed you less to sell your product or service.

If you're a Business-to-Business (B2B), you would use your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track the number of leads received during the period you're assessing and measure how many conversions it performed. Often the sale of a product or service from one business to another has a longer lead time which should be factored in when calculating this metric.

If you're a Business-to-Consumer (B2C), and prospective customers can either buy your product or book your service directly, you would more than likely skip the lead step. You would measure your cost per conversion by calculating your marketing campaign spend / converting clients.

Tip: Measure each step of your lead to conversion journey so that you can measure the quality of your mid-funnel strategies. E.g. Are you doing enough to keep your lead warm? Is your product details page descriptive enough to nudge customers to check-out?

Monthly website traffic

A fundamental but straightforward metric, this KPI shows the monthly traffic volume on your website. You can find this information in Google Analytics, including details like:

• visitors in pages

• visitors in product categories

• visitors by price filters

• visitors in landing pages

• visitors on the blog (when it’s integrated into the institutional website)

If you have a website but you're not making use of your free Google Analytics 4 profile, find out what it is and how to get started here.

Average time on page

Average page time is one of the ranking factors that Google’s algorithms consider when a customer searches for a product or service on Google. If users spend a short time on a page, Google can understand as if the page is not offering all the information the reader is looking for. In Analytics, you can track this KPI and check the metrics individually by pages like:

• homepage

• product category

• blog posts

• landing pages

Traffic from organic search

This KPI is simple: with it, you can visualize the volume of access your site had from a regular Google search. This traffic source is free and comes because of a good job adapting to the search engine optimisation (SEO) parameters that Google requires. You can find this metric in Analytics as well.

Digital Marketing KPIs are essential in campaign monitoring and strategy definition. Without them, it’s impossible to measure the result of investments and efforts, which puts the company’s marketing plan at risk.

Align digital marketing objectives with KPI's

After establishing the objectives of your digital marketing campaign, it’s time to take a closer look at how to track the progress of your efforts and keep your eye on the end-goal while sifting through irrelevant measurements. KPI’s come in handy here as they essentially help you determine which metrics to take note of. For example, if one of your objectives is to increase positive product reviews, your KPI’s would consist of how many reviews you’ve received on your products and/or the number of past clients who will recommend you.

Align KPI’s with metrics

Digital marketing metrics are quantitative, meaning that they are expressed in numbers. There is a myriad of metrics available on different analytics and insights platforms, which might tempt you to take note of all the data at your disposal. Unfortunately, tracking metrics that add no value will end up wasting resources and time while also shifting your focus from the metrics that do matter. The simplest way to tackle all the information at your disposal is to identify the performance metrics (which communicates a result such as conversions) and divide these into output and outcome metrics.

Output metrics are direct measurements of your activities and the work you’re putting in on a daily/weekly basis, such as the amount of blog posts you’ve published.

Outcome metrics track the impact of your output metrics, such as clickthrough rate, number of leads, sales and actual conversion metrics.

If you’re struggling with identifying the metrics worth tracking, ask yourself whether the information is something you can act on or if it feeds into your KPIs. If you answer no to both those questions, it’s most likely a vanity metric and not worth monitoring.

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