By Maria Potter – digital executive
Any effective marketing campaign needs to include traditional tactics, paired with a strong digital marketing foundation in order to reach your target audience and gather quantifiable data and results. Digital marketing can span any number of techniques, including paid ads, email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, affiliate ads and video marketing.
With so many avenues and potential metrics to look at, it can be hard to know where to focus your attention. Read on to find out more about which key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be using to measure your performance and influence your future digital marketing strategy.
Learn more about digital marketing and integrating online campaigns into your PR and marketing strategy.
Why do I need to track KPIs?
Tracking your chosen KPIs will give you a baseline to measure your campaign success against and will show you which techniques are working for your brand and should be pursued further. It’s also important to gather as much information as possible about your audience, how they come to your brand and how you make sales, so that you can build on these findings. You might be wasting time, energy and, more importantly, money on marketing streams that don’t give you a return on your investment (ROI). Tracking KPIs means you can be sure that your budget is being spent in the right place.
7 digital KPIs you need to be tracking
1. Website traffic and sources
This is an essential SEO metric. Make a note of when any changes to your site were made in analytics, then monitor if your changes have made a difference to your site traffic. Producing SEO-rich, relevant, user-friendly content will increase traffic and engagement.
It’s also important to investigate thoroughly where your traffic is coming from, (organic search, direct, referral etc…) and to see if there are particular spikes around campaigns or seasonal events. You can expect to see other metrics change in line with traffic, such as time on page, pages per session, bounce rate and transactions.
2. Conversion rate
Your marketing calls to action will usually influence your conversion rate. This will allow you to see how many times a particular goal has been reached. Goals are generally broken down into four types; destination, duration, pages per session and events, which could be anything from button clicks, to downloads or form conversions. Track conversions from your chosen channels such as social media, newsletters and video marketing to see how many users are carrying out your desired action.
3. Keyword rankings
Whether you’re targeting specific locations or service offerings, tracking where you rank in search engines for your chosen keywords is an essential part of any content campaign. Ranking organically for industry terms increases visibility, which in turn will increase organic traffic and will likely result in more conversions. The more keywords you start to rank highly for, the easier it becomes to build content hubs and gain trust and authority with users.
4. Click through rate
Typically tracked as a paid marketing KPI, this refers to the percentage of clicks on a link that generated impressions. It’s indicative of how many users are taking action based on the strength of your messaging.
5. ROI
Return on investment or ROI is one of the biggest metrics to look at when considering how effective the overall campaign has been. Essentially, it’s the value your brand is getting from your marketing activity, compared to the amount of money and time you’re investing in it. Where the goal is financial, e.g. sales through the website, this is easier to calculate and will show the success of marketing designed to reach potential customers.
6. Backlinks
The number of quality backlinks to your site can have a big impact on traffic and domain authority. If lots of reputable brands and industry leaders are sharing your content, this signals to users and search engines that you’re an expert in the field and that your information is trustworthy.
7. Social and digital engagement
Engagement is a great metric for getting an immediate picture of whether users are responding to your content. This could be in the form of likes, comments and shares on your chosen platforms. This metric usually goes hand in hand with a growth in social media followers and traffic to your social channels.
Digital marketing agency Nottingham
Need help analysing, developing and implementing your campaign ideas? Get in touch today and get a free proposal from our Nottingham digital marketing specialists. Whether you need an SEO-friendly website, content creation or advertising advice, our team can help you increase traffic and convert leads into customers.
Contact us now to get the best support on offer and let us help you reach your business goals.
