Digital marketing is a vast industry with a multitude of strategies and activities. Professionals spend around 8-9 hours planning and executing strategies across multiple channels every day. But all of that work is for nothing if you don’t measure the Digital Marketing KPIs correctly.
As they say, “If you can measure, you can grow.” In the digital marketing industry, it’s essential to keep track of your metrics and performance. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time!
It is common for most Digital Marketers irrespective of their industry experience, to get confused about what exactly should they measure. What KPIs and metrics should they check to optimize the performance?
Read the entire article to understand everything about the KPIs and metrics for Digital Marketing that bring guaranteed success to a business in 2022.
What are KPIs and metrics in Digital Marketing?
As said earlier, you can never improve your performance if you don’t measure the aspects involved in it. That’s when KPIs come into the picture.
In digital marketing, KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics are used to measure the success of a business’ online activities. KPIs can help you track how well you’re doing in different areas, while metrics can show you whether your digital marketing strategies are effective or otherwise.
Usually, businesses set goals for their digital marketing campaigns, such as improving brand awareness or generating leads. To achieve these goals, it’s essential to keep track of the metrics affecting them.
KPIs also vary from channel to channel. Social media platforms, advertising networks like Google ads, analytics tools, etc help you a lot by giving detailed reports of the KPIs & metrics.
Why is it important to measure the Digital Marketing KPIs & metrics?
By now it is quite comprehensible why measuring KPIs & metrics in Digital Marketing is crucial. However, let’s elaborate on the points for a lucid understanding.
- No tracking No Growth. You need to track the results of the different campaigns you run across multiple channels to optimize the performance.
- By a keen study of the KPIs, you can always align your business activities with marketing strategies that are working the best for you.
- The biggest perk of measuring KPIs & metrics is that you save a lot of time & avoid any hustle that comes along the way in the long term.
- You can save yourself from overspending your budget.
- You can justify your efforts by showing real-time reports of the results.
Now that you have a better interpretation of the importance, keep in mind to track & measure KPIs regularly.
KPIs & Metrics across the Digital Marketing Funnel
Businesses come up with out-of-the-box ideas to achieve their goals online. But for the ideas to work in favor, they have to walk their audiences through different stages of the Digital Marketing Funnel.
Let’s have quick look at how a basic funnel works,
Imagine you have a real-estate business and you are promoting your projects online intending to get great conversions. So your audiences might go through the following steps in the funnel.
- Awareness – Your audiences may see your ads on different platforms like – Facebook, Instagram, and other websites & get the awareness of your company.
- Interest – Then they might further visit your online assets i.e. your website, social media pages, blogs, etc.
- Desire – They might then show their desire for your projects by liking your pages on social media or by subscribing to your newsletter.
- Action – After going thoroughly through your company and its project they might fill out a form on your website, DM you on social media, or the silver lining they might directly call you.
- Loyalty – The audiences tend to stay loyal once they are converted and return to your company but they might very well need some exclusive offers.
This is what a basic digital marketing funnel looks like. But how are KPIs involved in this?
From each stage in the funnel, you will be able to measure some of the other KPIs. For example – In the awareness stage you can get the count of impressions, from the action stage you can check on the conversions. Checking KPIs based on the stages of the funnel makes it easier to have a smooth tracking process.
Digital Marketing KPIs & Metrics that works the Best in 2022
Now that you have a clear idea of how and why KPIs work, it’s time to explore what are the common yet important KPIs to measure in 2022 to ace your digital marketing strategies.
#1. Traffic & Its Sources –
Traffic in simple terms indicates to your visitors (website visitors or social media visitors).
When you perform digital marketing activities on multiple channels you are likely to get traffic. Let’s assume your analytics tool shows a good figure of traffic – that will certainly make you very happy. But what next?
You need to identify which channel is giving you more traffic inflow and vice-versa. Thankfully the analytics tools give you a discrete report on the traffic and the channel they came in from.
You can find the traffic segregated as –
- Organic
- Social
- Paid
- Referral
- Direct
Take a note of which channel works the best and invest more time in it. Also, revamp the strategies used in the channels generating lesser traffic.
#2. Conversions –
The whole point of performing any digital marketing activity is to get conversions.
Conversions indicate how many people helped you achieve your goals which most of the time is sales.
Tracking conversions can be done very easily today. All you have to do is install the tracking code of your analytics tool and it keeps track of how many people are performing the conversion action i.e. filling a form or calling you.
It would be ideal if a conversion funnel is made to understand the customer behavior and the loopholes that might be problematic.
#3. Cost per conversion –
Nobody wants to go over budget. But due to the inconsistency in tracking the costs involved, many tend to spend more than the limit.
Conversions from paid media come for a cost. Whenever you get conversions check on how much you have spent to get each of them. That helps you maintain your budget.
Set profitable parameters and always try to have a lower cost per conversion. The higher the conversion value the higher the cost of maintenance in the long term.
#4. New vs Returning Visitors –
You should always keep an eye on the number of new visitors vs returning visitors.
The best marketing strategy should always attract new and past audiences. Let us assume your returning audiences are lesser than the new audiences this week. You get an opportunity to work on the marketing strategy you used to regain the audience.
Losing either type of visitor would result in a noticeable loss to your business. So it’s essential to track this KPI on a weekly or monthly basis.
Also, make sure to calculate your expenses along the lifetime of the conversion process. For example, the cost for your product is Rs.100 and the audience bought it for four months consecutively which means you have got Rs.400 from the same customer. Now check on the conversions of new customers. If the amount spent to get new customers is less than the lifetime value of retaining customers you can continue marketing on that channel.
#5. Overall Return on Investment –
ROI is one of the most important KPIs everyone should measure.
The best way to know if your digital marketing strategies worked or not, you check your ROI.
You can calculate your ROI by dividing the returns by your investment. For the overall ROI get the data from all the channels and sum it up.
ROI calculations can be done every month to come up with new strategies if necessary.
#6. Other Important KPIs –
- Click-through Rate – it is a metric that tells you about the number of clicks you get per impression.
- Bounce Rate – It indicates the percentage of users coming to the site and leaving without checking the other pages.
- Dwell Time – The amount of time the user takes to analyze the web pages before going back to the search results is Dwell time.
- Social Shares – This metric shows how many people have shared your web content on their social media assets.
- Leads – Leads are the prospective customers. A visitor is considered a lead if they do an action on your site for example – they fill out their details in your contact form.
Conclusion –
Digital Marketing is huge. As a digital marketer, you need to work on a lot of strategies and channels. Each channel and activity might have different sets of KPIs and Metrics that you need to identify and understand.
There is no one mantra to measure the KPIs. The best way to understand them and improve your business’s performance is by monitoring the metrics regularly.
Have trouble determining your company’s key performance indicators? Contact our experts today!
