Digital marketing is an essentiality for any modern business that wishes to remain competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace. But how can you be certain that your digital marketing efforts are directing you on the right path? How can you measure your overall success?
In this article we’re going to highlight the key digital marketing metrics to help you easily track your success – or lack thereof.
Ready?
Digital marketing metrics to help gauge your success
1. Total website traffic: a fairly good indication of how well your digital marketing efforts are faring is how much traffic you are attracting to your website. If your website traffic was painfully low before you started working on your search engine marketing for example, and now you are seeing a drastic increase in numbers, it’s a fairly good sign that you are on the right path. However, traffic doesn’t = more money. There are other metrics that can help…
2. Traffic by channel: another important metric is to measure where that website traffic is coming from. If you’ve been crushing your social media marketing and publishing great content and adverts to Facebook for example, you should hopefully see a spike in traffic coming from that specific channel.
3. Exit rate: the exit rate of your website can be especially helpful in identifying when and where your website visitors are leaving. If people reach your homepage, head to your services, and then immediately leave, there’s clearly a problem that needs addressing. Are you meeting expectations? Could your service descriptions be better? Do you have a solid offer that is too good to resist?
4. Average session duration: how long are people spending on your web pages when they arrive on your website? Combine this metric with your ‘bounce rate’ and you’ll be able to easily identify the aspects of your website that need some serious attention.
5. Average page depth: page depth is an excellent metric to measure as it can tell you how ‘deep’ into the sub pages of your website your visitors go. If your users are delving deep into your old blog content and spending plenty of time sticking around, you’re clearly meeting their expectations.
6. Conversion rate: the conversion rate of your website is, in my opinion, the most important metric of all. After all, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you attract, what your average page depth is, or how low your bounce rate happens to be; if people aren’t ultimately converting into customers, then you’ve got to figure out why and make the necessary changes.
Conclusion
There are many different digital marketing metrics and the ones you choose to measure will largely depend on the digital marketing strategies you are working on – and indeed what your overall goals are.
In any case, you should study your website’s analytics and use the many tools available to you to identify which aspects of your website are performing well, and which are clearly hindering your long-term success.
Alternatively, if the thought of digging into data and tapping into the more technical aspect of your website doesn’t appeal to you, you can outsource these requirements to an online marketing agency and let them take care of the grunt work for you.