5 Useful Metrics for Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Digital Marketing

A robust digital marketing strategy can help your business build a stronger brand, reach more customers, and generate sales. However, many business owners struggle to understand whether their digital marketing efforts are working, and according to HubSpot’s annual report, just 39 percent of companies believe their marketing strategies are effective.

The solution? Metrics.

To truly understand the impact digital marketing has on your business, you must continuously measure and monitor performance. The right metrics can help you better understand what’s working – or not working – so you can make adjustments to maximize your return on investment.

What Metrics Matter To Your Business?

As a business owner, you need actionable metrics to influence future marketing decisions and move the needle for your business goals. Since goals vary quite a bit from one business to the next, the metrics that matter to your company are unique. In other words, there is no universal list of metrics that every business should measure. You must dig deeper to determine which metrics are relevant to your specific business and marketing plan.

That said, there are some metrics that are generally useful, such as:

1. Engagement Rate: It feels good to gain more social media followers, and monitoring the increase (or decrease) in your following each month can provide insight into whether you’re connecting with your target audience. However, having a large following on social media doesn’t help your business if the majority of your followers are not engaging with your content or clicking on your ads. Instead of putting so much focus on follower count, track which organic posts and paid ads generate the highest engagement rate. This information can help you produce more of the content and conversations that mean the most to your audience.
2. Bounce Rate: Getting a lot of views on a web page or blog indicates you’ve created valuable content for your audience, but it doesn’t tell you where the views are coming from, how long visitors spent on the page, or whether the content inspired visitors to learn more about your brand. Instead of measuring the success of your web content by the number of people who saw it, look at bounce rates. This will tell you the percentage of people who visit a web page or blog and leave without clicking further into your site. On the other hand, sometimes an increase in your bounce rate has little to do with the user experience on your website. Some users might be visiting your site just to find your phone number or office hours before they contact you in person or over the phone. For this reason, it’s also helpful to look at….
3. Exit Rate: This measures how many people left your site from a specific page as a percentage of all people who viewed that page. This helps you identify weak areas in your content strategy, so you can optimize accordingly.
4. Click-Through Rate: It’s helpful to track whether customers are opening your emails, as the open rate correlates with the effectiveness of your subject line and timing. However, a better metric for email marketing is click-throughs. Include a focused call-to-action with a link in your email to draw users to your website, then measure the click-through rate on those links. This will tell you whether your email campaign is actually generating leads. Click-through rate is also an important metric for paid advertising campaigns. If it’s below average, but impressions are high, you’re either targeting the wrong audience, or your content isn’t compelling enough to get them to click your link.
5. Channel-Specific Traffic: While measuring overall traffic gives you a general view of where you stand, analyzing where your visitors were immediately before arriving on your site can often be even more insightful. Monitor whether your web visitors came directly from your URL, a search engine optimization, social media Marketing, or from a referral on a different domain. This will allow you to see which channels of your digital marketing strategy are bringing in visitors, so you can focus on creating more of that type of content, as well as increasing your efforts on that channel.

When it comes to measuring the success of your digital marketing, there’s no shortage of methods and metrics available to you. Focus on the specific results that actually matter to your business, and you’ll be able to make more informed decisions to improve your online strategy.

Contact Triton Commerce for a Custom Digital Marketing Strategy

Are you too busy managing your business to manage your digital presence? We’re here to help!

At Triton Commerce, we provide digital marketing solutions that are effective, measurable, and tailored to your business. When you contact us to get started, our team will analyze your business and website, as well as your competitors, then create a custom Digital Marketing Plan outlining exactly what your business should be doing online for maximum results.