Digital marketing KPIs you should pay attention to.

Your digital marketing KPIs can show you if your online sales and advertising are helping you achieve your business goals. However, some KPIs are more important than others. Here’s how to measure marketing performance accurately through the digital marketing KPIs that offer the most transparent picture of what is (and what isn’t) working.

Website Traffic and Behavior

The first priority is to get traffic to your website, ideally organic traffic that you don’t have to pay to acquire. Build your organic traffic by focusing on SEO, through targeting metrics such as page authority, Google PageRank and the number of inbound links. Surprisingly enough, unique site visitors is not the most important metric. What really matters is conversions, such as those who opt-in for a newsletter or download content. These are the 20% who will ultimately deliver 80% of your revenue. Pay attention to the behavior panel in Google Analytics to see how visitors navigate your site. Bear in mind that time on site can be misleading depending on where users exit, and that a page with a very high bounce rate could still be doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Email Marketing Metrics

It’s hard to look beyond open rate as the most important KPI, since nothing else matters if your recipients aren’t opening what lands in their inbox. Always test subject line variations to identify those that grab attention. The next most important KPI is click through rate. If your readers are opening emails but not taking any further action, it’s a sign that your offer is unclear, the CTA hard to find, or your email content too long or short. Never stop testing and measure against industry benchmarks for your sector.

Social Media Marketing

Before you assign budget to a paid campaign — where conversion rates are often as low as 2% — it’s vital to establish what will represent success or failure. You can modify campaigns that are underway, but you can’t recover ad spend. Given the lack of independent auditing on many platforms, and the abundance of bots that push up impressions, the only KPI you need to focus on is cost:

• CPM — ‘Cost per mille’ or the cost of showing your ad to 1,000 viewers.
• CPA — the cost per acquisition.

The so-called “vanity metrics” such as likes and shares might boost morale, but they offer very little business value and insight.

How to Set and Measure Your KPIs

The golden rule of digital marketing is to establish SMART goals from the start. Your targets should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. What does that look like? It isn’t “to increase page views,” which is too vague to measure success. It is “to obtain 1,000 sign-ups to our newsletter in the next three months,” which has clear parameters. Optimize your strategy throughout each campaign by:

• A/B testing to improve conversions
• Optimizing content for mobile
• Focusing on your best-performing channels
• Using Google Analytics tracking and other tools

Analyze to Inform Strategy

A word of warning: Your conversion rates will tell you the last action a user took, but don’t ignore what can’t be measured easily. Your most effective marketing strategy is to take a holistic view of your digital marketing throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Too many businesses struggle to look beyond acquisition, whereas retention and Customer Lifetime Value ultimately influence business growth more. Turning leads into repeat buyers and even advocates means including long-term KPIs that measure customer experience — such as reviews, referrals, burn rate, and so on.

Learn how EasyRedir can help you meet your digital marketing KPIs.