Why These Key Metrics Matter the Most for Measuring Your Marketing Campaigns
Humans are literally producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. That’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros. With so much data, you would think marketers would have access to everything they need. Instead, we’re overwhelmed with the amount of data created. Collecting data to gauge your core marketing metrics and monitor your KPIs (key performance indicators) doesn’t have to be complicated, though, when you know what to focus on. The team at Buhv Designs can help you narrow down your measurement strategy to 3 simple groups of KPIs that will help answer the big questions. Here are three of the most important data groups to analyze when measuring the success of your digital marketing campaign.
Need a refresher on key digital marketing terms & definitions? Check out our cheat sheet.
Reach
Reach is a valuable set of metrics because they show your overall opportunity for traffic and engagement. While typically a measurement tool used for paid advertising, it can also be useful for organic search – in terms of search volume or traffic potential.
- Advertising Impressions refer to the number of times your ad or content was displayed to a user. Impressions will give you a sense of how well you have penetrated your target audience and whether or not the audience pool is large enough for the advertisement to be effective.
- Ad Impression Share is an important competitive metric to watch. Impression Share gives you a sense of how many times your ad is being shown compared to other advertisers in the same space. The higher the percentage, the more times your ad is being displayed compared to others.
Organic reach metrics are slightly different than advertising reach because they demonstrate the total opportunity a site is able to capture as opposed to the actual number of eyes an ad received. The reach metrics for organic search to focus on include the following:
- Search Volume is the total number of users who searched for a specific term in a given month. This number is important because if your SEO campaign targets a high-volume search query, you will most likely receive a lot more site traffic than if you targeted a lower-volume search term (not that lower volume and long tail keyword targets are bad, but, for the purposes of this article, more volume = more traffic potential).
- Rank is where in the SERP (Search engine results page) your site appears for a specific keyword. Rank is important for many reasons. The higher up the page you rank, the more visibility your listing will get. With better visibility, you are likely to earn more clicks to your website.
- Estimated Traffic Share is a competitive metric that combines both search volume and rank. The keywords with the highest search volume, combined with a site with the highest rank have the most potential for site traffic and visibility. Alternatively, traffic share can be an effective way to measure a campaign’s potential success if competition for high volume keywords is difficult and you need to target lower volume terms at first.
Engagement
While reach helps you identify how many people are seeing your content, engagement helps you measure how they are interacting with it. Here are four marketing KPIs to help measure engagement.
- Traffic refers to the total visits to your website, and number of users will tell you how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic to your site. For example, how many users clicked on your link from your Instagram page? Look at whether your users are new or returning. This will help you gauge the quality of your content. Does it motivate visitors to come back?
- Click-through rate (CTR) is essential to maximizing ROI for your paid campaigns, as well as organic strategies. It tells you the percentage of people who viewed your ad or content (impressions), then clicked on it. The calculation looks like this: total clicks / total impressions = click-through rate.
- Time on page helps you understand exactly how users are engaging with your site, its specific pages, and social media posts. If your “time on site” or “time on page” is low and your “bounce rate” is high, engagement needs some work.
- Pages per Visit helps measure if the user is interested in other content on your site. If a user only visits one page and leaves the site then you know you can re-work the pages content and user flow or navigation.
- Traffic source helps you understand where most of your visitors are coming from. While not always considered an engagement metric, if your reach is good but you are losing users based on traffic source, you need to look at the off-site engagement factors. Examples of traffic sources include those that arrive at your site by directly typing in your website, those that find you through a search, those that get referred from another website or blog, and those that get there from a social media platform.
Conversions & Goal Completions
The definition of conversion will depend on the goal of your website. Online retailers will look at purchases. Your goal may be to gather leads by getting visitors to sign up for your newsletter or to fill out a form. Your definition of a conversion might not be related to a purchase, but it will help you determine your site is working and users are taking action.
Measure conversions by basing your marketing KPIs on key metrics. For example, page views may not tell you how many people converted, but it does represent the total number of times a page was viewed. This metric identifies your most popular pages and can help you determine where to place your content and where to put your calls-to-action – places where conversions are most likely to take place. You can also look at the number of pages visited or what videos were watched the most. The first step is to identify your conversion goals based on your overall business goals. Then, set your KPIs and identify the metrics you want to track.
Conversions and goal completions can include the following:
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- Purchases of a product or service directly from the website.
- Form completions that to capture leads and are then funneled into your CRM software.
- Emails or Phone Calls for service-based businesses where direct contact is needed to complete a sale.
- Appointments Booked if your site has an appointment booking feature.
- Sign Ups or Subscriptions for a user to receive email updates and promotions
- Video plays if a site-hosted video is watched to completion.
- Downloads if you have extra collateral (like a whitepaper) hosted on your site that can be downloaded and saved.
- Social Media Interaction or Follows either on site (links to profile) or follow on the profile.
Data-driven decision-making and understanding your KPIs and measurement strategy is the key to succesful marketing. Work with Buhv and we can help you align your marketing dollars.
