Top Key Metrics to Analyse and Report on your Digital Marketing.
By Kristine Aitchison
Author & Content Specialist
Unlike traditional marketing strategies, digital marketing can provide you with real-time data and results. This is so you can see what’s working and what’s not — allowing you to adjust your marketing strategy as you see fit. So, what are the top key metrics you need to focus on to start reporting on your digital marketing? Read on to find out!
Why Marketing Analytics?
Understanding your data ensures your marketing efforts are directed in the right place. Therefore, it will help you understand your customers’ behaviour and identify any trends so that you can improve future campaigns. Above all, analytics help us paint a picture of what is happening with our marketing. Allowing us to focus our efforts on the channels that give us the most return on investment.
Metric 1: Sales & Revenue Data
If you’re an eCommerce business, sales and revenue is probably the top key metric you’ll be monitoring to evaluate success. Because sales and revenue provide insights into what’s selling well and what’s not. If your marketing isn’t generating revenue, it might be time to re-evaluate your strategy.
When evaluating revenue a key metric to look at is Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Because your CAC is basically how much you had to spend to acquire a new customer. For instance, say you spent $100 on advertising and acquired one new customer then your CAC is $100 per customer. Comparing this to your Lifetime customer value (LTV) can provide you with information on whether your marketing is profitable.
For example:
You’re a hairdresser and you charge $100 a cut, and on average your customers come in three times a year. That’s $300 per customer, so if you’re spending $100 per customer then you’re still making a profit. However, it’s when your CAC exceeds your LTV that you might start to run into trouble.
According to Shopify, the higher your LTV is compared to your CAC “the faster your business will grow.”
Metric 2: Web Traffic Analytics
Google Analytics is your strongest marketing tool for tracking data from your website. The most popular metrics to monitor in Google Analytics are Sessions, Unique Visitors, Bounce Rate, and Average Session Duration. These metrics help us to understand how potential customers interact with your website.
Sessions indicate the total time a user is active on your site, and Unique Visitors provide us with information on how many people have visited your site. Engagement metrics like Bounce Rates and Average Session Duration tell us how engaged a customer is. For instance, whether they bounce away as soon as they land on your website. Or how long they are spending consuming content per webpage.
It’s worth setting up Conversion Goals for your site to track potential leads. By doing so you can better evaluate and understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Also, by enabling Ecommerce Tracking in your Google Analytics you can track the conversions of people who have bought something from your site.
Monitoring these metrics can help you understand how engaged people are with your site. Therefore, the more engaged a person is the more likely it is that they will become a customer.
Metric 3: Lead Generation Data
Common lead generation sources include paid advertisements, email marketing, and social media.
Social Media Insights
Such as Likes, Shares, Comments, Impressions, and Reach can help you to understand things such as; how your brand resonates with your target audience. Also, what channel is most useful in reaching and engaging your intended audience.
Email Marketing Analytics
For email campaigns, Open Rates and Click Rates can indicate if your subject or message content resonates with your subscribed audience. A good open rate shows you have an active subscriber list and a click-worthy subject line and pre-header text. Link clicks indicate that you have intriguing content worth reading.
Paid Advertising Results
The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on a paid ad indicates how effective that ad is to the audience you’re showing it to. In addition, Cost-Per-Click (CPC) indicates how much you’re spending per click. If you’re getting a high click rate, but no conversions, there could be a problem with your landing page. Or if you’re getting low clicks and no conversions, this likely indicates that people may have clicked on your ad by accident.
A Final Word about Data.
Data and analysis can help us understand our customer behaviour and inform our marketing messages. Overall, it can help us focus our marketing efforts to enable us to make better business decisions. But all this data means nothing if you have not clearly defined your goals. Setting quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to appropriately track your marketing efforts. Whether you want to increase your brand awareness or get more followers, analysing your data will allow you to maximise your return on investment. In both time and dollars spent on marketing.
Want to know more?
Our Diploma in Digital Marketing provides you with an understanding of practical insights into digital analytics. As well as how data can be used to improve your online experience and achieve business goals. Visit our course information page for more info.
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