Did you know that over 72% of businesses haven’t seen an ad campaign in over a month? And that’s just the beginning. Many businesses fail to monitor their digital marketing performance because they don’t know how to measure their digital marketing success.
Watch your budget go straight to the toilet without constant measurement and monitoring. But it’s never too late to start tracking your campaigns! On this page, we’ll show you how to measure your digital marketing success by sharing seven metrics to watch.
Read on for more information!
How to Run a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign:
Before we dive into how to measure digital marketing, let’s first talk about how to run a successful campaign. To measure your campaigns accurately and effectively, you need to do three important things:
- Set SMART goals:
- Know vanity metrics:
- Set up Google Analytics:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these below.
1. SET SMART GOALS:
You can’t measure marketing success without setting goals first. You can’t accurately measure the success and performance of your campaign if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. Set SMART goals to accurately measure campaign performance.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: Your goals should be precise on what you want to achieve.
- Measurable: You should be able to measure whether you achieved your goal.
- Achievable: You should be able to accomplish your goals.
- Realistic: Your goals should be within reach and relevant to your business.
- Timely: You should have a deadline to achieve your goal.
SMART goals are great for digital marketing. This will allow you to create precise goals and see metrics to see if you’re achieving what you’re trying to achieve. When you set a general goal like “get more leads” it’s hard to know if you’ve achieved that goal. How many leads are “many”? How fast do you need to get those new leads?
How do you measure your goals? With such broad goals, look at your digital marketing metrics to see how you hit those goals. It is difficult to know if SMART goals, on the other hand, make it easy to use digital marketing metrics to determine if you’re achieving what you want to achieve.
Goals such as ‘Increase first quarter sales by 25%’ can be easily tracked and monitored to see if they are being met.
2. Know your vanity metrics
When looking at digital marketing metrics, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of numbers at your business’ disposal. But before you can measure marketing results, you need to understand vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are metrics that look good but don’t affect your digital marketing success.
Basically, these metrics do not indicate the success of your marketing campaign. Here are some examples of vanity metrics:
- Followers
- Pageviews
- Subscribers
- Running total of customers
For example, if you track your social media followers and see that your Facebook page has 5000 followers, you might consider this a sign of a successful social media strategy. But will his 5000 followers be interested in your content?
Will they buy your product? Whether it’s a follower or lead generation. Even winning sales doesn’t always mean you’ll reach your goals. So avoid using these metrics to measure overall success or his ROI.
3. Set up Google Analytics
To measure your digital marketing success, you need to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to store all your campaign data in one place and analyze its performance. Here’s a simplified version of the Google Analytics settings:
- Create or sign up with your Google account
- Set up your property
- Build your property’s reporting view
- Add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website
How to Measure Your Digital Marketing Success with These 7 Metrics:
Ready to Measure Your Digital Marketing Success?
Monitor to See if Your Campaigns Are Successful The seven key metrics to do are: You can find this metric in Google Analytics at:
1. Traffic by source
If you want to know how to measure the success of your digital marketing, start by tracking traffic by source. You can find this metric in Google Analytics at:
Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium
This metric is important to monitor as it tells you where the traffic is coming from. Google Analytics shows you where your traffic is coming from, including places like:
- Direct
- Paid Search
- Display
- Affiliates
- Other
This metric helps you view important information about the performance of your marketing campaigns.
See which channels generate the most traffic and the highest quality leads for your business. This helps us make more actionable decisions about marketing. For example, after looking at your traffic by source, you may find that you get a lot of conversions from pay-per-click (PPC) ads. As a result, we decided to double down and allocate more resources to her PPC to increase conversions.
2. Returning Visitors
Always track returning visitors when measuring your marketing success. Return visitors are people who return to her website after their first visit. You can track your returning visitors in Google Analytics by going to:
Audience > Behavior > New vs. Returning
Here you can compare the number of new visitors and the number of returning visitors. This metric is a great indicator of the user experience you’re delivering. Providing a relevant and positive user experience can increase your repeat visit rate.
This metric shows:
- You provide a functional website that users enjoy browsing
- You create marketing campaigns relevant to your audience
Return visitors are essential to generating revenue for your business. By tracking this metric, you can see if your digital marketing campaigns are successful in driving people back to your website, learning more about your business, and converting.
3. Average Session Duration
If you want to know how to measure the success of your digital marketing, watch your average session duration. Average session time shows the typical amount of time visitors spend on her website when they visit her website. To track average session duration for your marketing channels, in Google Analytics visit:
Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
Here you can see the average session duration for each channel, from paid search to direct.
Average session time should generally be high. This is because it shows that visitors are spending time on her website to learn about your company and products or services. The longer users stay on your site, the more likely they are to convert. Additionally, you can see which campaigns keep users engaged longer by clicking on individual channels to see each campaign.
You can analyze these campaigns to find out why users are spending more time on these pages and use the results to inspire other campaigns.
4. Exit rate
When measuring marketing results, be sure to include exit rate as one of your digital marketing metrics. Exit rate indicates how often visitors leave a page after viewing any number of pages on her website. You can check the exit rate of Google Analytics at the following URL.
Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
So how does the abandonment rate tell you about your digital marketing success? If you see a page with an unnaturally high exit rate, it’s an indication that something isn’t working on that page or campaign. Let’s say you look at your page and notice that product pages have an unusually high exit rate.
This may indicate a poor user experience due to missing information, a broken Add to Cart button, or similar. Remember – some sites naturally have high abandonment rates. For example, if you have a form submission page, you may experience high abandonment rates as users fill out the form and abandon it.
So before you tweak your page to make it better, consider the context of your page.
5. Bounce Rate
If you’re measuring marketing results, you need to make sure you’re monitoring your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the number of people who leave a page without visiting any other page on your site. You can find this metric in Google Analytics at:
Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Bounce rate and exit rate may look like the same metric, but they are slightly different.
Bounce Rate calculates the number of users who have left the page to visit his website. Exit rate, on the other hand, looks at the last page visited – someone may have visited multiple pages before leaving. Pages with a high bounce rate can indicate a bad experience and should be monitored.
A page can have a high bounce rate due to the following reasons:
- Your site taking too long to load
- Information being irrelevant to the search
- Website errors
6. Conversion Rate
If you want to know how to measure your digital marketing success, you need to know that you can’t measure it without including conversion rate as one of your metrics. A conversion rate tells you how many people converted when they visited a page on your website. Conversion rate data can be found in Google Analytics at:
Conversions > Goals > Overview
When tracking conversion rates, remember that you can track multiple types of conversions.
You can track conversions such as:
- Sales
- Subscriptions
- Sign-ups
- Downloads
Tracking this metric is important to ensure that your marketing campaigns are delivering the best results for your business.
How to Measure Your Digital Marketing Success: Partner with a World-Class Marketing Firm:
Measuring your digital marketing success will help you see if your campaigns are working for your business. But if you don’t know where to start measuring your marketing results, Xekera Systems can help. We have a team of marketing experts skilled in creating, launching and monitoring digital marketing campaigns.
Ready to get help with digital marketing? Contact us online or call us at (408) 982-5851.
