Number, when handled recklessly, make a gamble. When dealt with carefully, they pave the way for crafting impeccable strategies that result in business success.

In marketing, numbers lie at the heart of every successful campaign and powerful strategies. With the right metrics, businesses can understand what goes on in the minds of their customers. Most importantly, tracking the right metrics allows a business to determine the return on investment (ROI) on its digital marketing efforts. In other words, to know whether your investments are profitable, you have to monitor them continually.

Which Digital Marketing Metrics Should You Track?

There are several different metrics brands can monitor to analyze and improve the performance of their digital marketing campaigns. Determining the ROI for a campaign depends mostly on its objectives. While you can choose to monitor all analytics, most of your campaign’s goals will require you to segregate and choose significant metrics to track.

1. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one of the most favored metrics for determining ROI for conversion-based campaigns. It effectively measures the number of site visitors that convert to leads and sale points. You can monitor conversion rates by channel or conversion through different devices. Channels that generate more traffic demand better investment. If some device makes increasing traffic but witnesses poor performance, re-evaluate your marketing strategy.

2. Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is a simple ROI monitoring analytic where you divide the total expenditure of a marketing campaign by the number of leads produced. If the cost per lead is less than your profit at lead closing, your campaign is delivering negative ROI and is prone to failure.

3. Lead Close Rate

Lead close rate is an essential digital marketing metric that helps project ROI and also determines lead quality. The lead close rate determines the overall profitability and efficiency of your campaign.

4. Overall Site Traffic

Almost all digital marketing campaigns recognize the importance of monitoring site traffic. If you want to analyze your campaign effectively, monitor unique visits along with clicks, and frequent visitor visits. More unique visitors per month increases the number of potential customers. However, do not make the mistake of lowering content quality just to attract heavy traffic.

5. Mobile Traffic

An increasing number of people are accessing content from their smartphones instead of laptops. This calls for digital marketers to devote more attention to mobile traffic. Mobile traffic metric gives you an idea of the number of users that use their smartphones to access your product. Tracking mobile traffic metric opens diverse revenue sources and provides effective insights on structuring content to make it more smartphone friendly. Naturally, if your content derives more attention, the probability of gaining new customers increases, thereby boosting ROI.

6. Cost Per Acquisition

As the name suggests, cost per acquisition is the amount spent to acquire a new customer. To calculate this, divide the total ad spends by the total attributed conversions. If the value a customer brings to your campaigns is less than the amount spent on acquiring that customer, your ROI is negative and your campaign, faulty.

7. Average Order Value

Average order value is simply the amount a customer spends on an order. To determine this, divide the total revenue generated from orders by the number of orders placed in the same period. Increasing the average order value is the simplest way to boost ROI.

8. Customer Lifetime Value

Future projections are vital to the success of your marketing campaign. Once you acquire a customer, you must know what they intend to spend on your products. If the customer is not profitable for your business in the long run, you will receive a negative ROI.

9. Click-Through Rate

Pay per click is a good method to determine the number of clicks your ads receive. Every time a visitor clicks on an advertisement on your website, an impression is created. If your click-through rate is high, your quality score will be good enough for you to receive discounts from advertisement platforms like Google Adwords.

10. Rate of Return Visitors

Any popular website needs more than just high traffic. If someone visits your site once and never returns, there is little chance for him/her to be a potential customer. Track the rate of return visitors. This conversion metrics will help you determine the number of people that repeatedly check your website. As a result, you can modify your content to make it more engaging and generate more leads and paying customers.

How Tracking Metrics Boosts ROI

In 2006, Buzzfeed was merely a social media-driven entertainment website. It followed a specific template to attract visitors towards fun-filled content. By tracking traffic metrics, Buzzfeed realized the need to shift focus from website and app based marketing and started publishing complete articles on social media websites. To boost ROI, they acquired an aggressive social media marketing strategy by tailoring content to the outlook of different social media websites. On Facebook, Buzzfeed posted silent and square videos that users would watch while scrolling through their feed. On Twitter, they posted exclusive list-template articles that would prompt the user to click on them and open the full website. Slowly, the creators started experimenting with serious news items but stuck to the original template that had attracted customers initially.

Today, Buzzfeed competes with traditional news establishments like the New York Times in delivering long form news articles. In essence, Buzzfeed tracked conversion and traffic metrics and derived an effective marketing strategy to boost ROI.

Buzzfeed’s digital marketing plans demonstrate importance of tracking digital marketing metrics and adapting changes as dictated by them. When you track marketing metrics, you do not have to rely purely on customer feedback to judge the effectiveness of your strategy. Tracking the right metrics gives you room for immediate improvement and enables you to make real-time judgements about the quality of your products. If some plan does not work for your audience, conversion metrics will show a lower percentage of visitors converting to sale points. Traffic metrics clearly show decreased web traffic in case of a faulty strategy.

Conversion, revenue, and traffic generation metrics when synchronized provide the best determination of ROI. This, in turn, is known to help brands identify campaign goals, create new business models, and use appropriate key performance indicators. When you repackage or experiment with digital marketing methods by learning from the aforementioned analytics, you steer away from blind market risks and move towards a profitable venture.

References:

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