Mediaboss Marketing

How are digital marketing metrics effectively measured for success with brand growth? Youre probably thinking: leads and sales.

But a successful marketing campaign can be determined by much more than just those types of conversions!

Ask yourself:

Do you want more organic traffic to your website?

How about a broader reach on social media?

Or, a higher email click-through rate?

These are all valid goals to aim for and are backed by analytics data you can gather over time. As youll soon learn, there are a number of important digital marketing metrics to track and guide your campaigns, both for sales conversion and brand awareness.

Whenever you are focusing on your marketing efforts, think about this:

Its important to build a brand, not just a business.

Branding, in essence, is creating a distinct feeling and experience for your customers.

You might be wondering:

Well, how do I measure something so touchy-feely?

Branding needs a strategy, to communicate who you are and why people should care.

Its marketing that will execute on that brand strategy, and how you build awareness for your brand. Especially through digital marketing, these days.

And digital marketing campaigns can certainly all be tracked with digital metrics. Therefore, so can your branding efforts!

But in order to build a strong brand that can scale effectively by leveraging digital marketing tactics, the following questions have to be answered first in a strategic way:

>> You can learn how to do all of this brand strategy stuff here.

Now:

Depending on your particular business plan and marketing efforts, some digital marketing metrics may be more important than others.

Narrowing down your reporting to include the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) will reflect what digital marketing success looks like for your brand.

This in-depth article will cover:

Youll find out which digital marketing metric that brands use to determine website success. And, which of these metrics is especially important to branding campaigns.

Ready to dive in?

Before you can determine if your digital marketing campaign is a success, you need to set objective, achievable goals.

Much of your online strategy is born from your goals.

Goal setting ensures you have something to strive for. Whats more, it provides a guideline for the digital marketing metrics youll use to measure the success of one or more campaigns.

Ill put it another way:

You really cant measure success without goals!

That fact holds true no matter what youre attempting to measure. From digital marketing success to personal financial success, without goals you are limited to two basic analyses:

I seem to be making some progress.

Or:

This doesnt look like its working.

Kind of vague, huh?

Take a look at the sample below from Sprout Social. It shows five distinct social media metrics and a detailed plan for how the company intends to achieve them.

Your digital campaign will have more than just a social media element. However, this template offers a nice overview of how you can set goals for anythingand during any point of your marketing funnel.

SEE ALSO: 10 Ways to Set Realistic Social Media Goals for Your Business

There are a few key details youll want to include above and beyond what you see in the diagram.

Ill break down exactly how to set the goals you can use when measuring digital marketing KPIs:

Accountability is a large, if not the largest, part of reaching a goal. Whether you have 5 days or 5 months, you must include a concrete time frame.

Determining the time frame for your digital marketing campaign goals will help create a sense of urgency as well as accomplishment.

A time frame can also set parameters for comparison when you run marketing metrics reports for month-over-month or year-over-year progress.

Lets say your goal is to earn 500,000 impressions from social media campaigns and drive 10,000 new visitors to the website. Those are two excellent digital marketing success factors.

The key to this step is determining a quantifiable result to achievereal numbers that could be an educated guess or based on a pattern of growth.

Keeping a time frame in mind, be sure to determine how long you have to reach this milestone. It can be one month or 12 months, depending on the effort behind the digital marketing campaign.

When you think about digital marketing KPIs, there should be numbers assigned to them.

Simply saying, expose target audience to brand content isnt enough. Set yourself up for success by providing as much detail as possible.

Being specific with details will better prepare you to execute your campaign by serving as a roadmap. Furthermore, it helps you pinpoint what works and what doesnt when youre ready to measure efficacy.

Once you have selected the digital marketing metrics for your campaign, putting together a marketing measurement template is easy and provides valuable insight.

This document will serve as a guideline. It is something you can use (and modify as necessary) with each campaign.

A marketing measurement template might include things like:

As a refresher, this graphic from Perdooexplains concisely how to write SMART goals for any project or campaign:

Now youre prepared to set goals before executing a successful digital marketing campaign for your brand.

Lets take a look at the exact marketing metrics you will use to measure the success of those goals.

When it comes to measuring digital marketing success, there are seemingly endless digital marketing metrics. Below is a compilation of the most important ones youll need to consider.

Not all of these digital marketing KPIs may be relevant to your particular business goals, but its a starting point on the road to finding ROI (return on investment)!

These first 10 items outline the website traffic metrics that matter most for success with digital marketing. Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website? Youll need it, or something similar in order to track this type of data.

What do most companies measure to determine the success of their websites?

Traffic.

Your website serves as your home base, and the face of your brand. Therefore, all of your digital marketing efforts will likely focus on driving traffic there. Individual campaigns may focus on list building or increasing social media reach, but the ultimate goal of that activity is to send more traffic to your website over time.

Because of this, measuring website traffic metrics regularly will provide you with a number of insights such as which campaigns are working and when.

If at any point you see a steady decline in traffic while still conducting consistent marketing efforts, consider troubleshooting your website. You may find broken links, a Google Algorithm penalty, or other technical issues deterring visitors.

Tips for sending more traffic to your website:

More resources to help you improve this website traffic metrics:

This useful website traffic metric sheds light on exactly where your website visitors are coming from.

With the myriad of marketing platforms available and limited time to capitalize on all of them, the Traffic By Source metric is one to watch.

Use it to determine which sources are winners, and which ones need a little more attention. Or, use it to narrow down where youll spend your valuable time creating content.

Here are the four main website traffic sources tracked by Google Analytics:

The value of this dual metric is that it helps you determine how relevant your website content is over time. Multiple visits can indicate you are providing informationthat people find so valuable, that they keep coming back.

As you release new content on a regular basis (think: blogs), you can review your New vs. Returning Visitors marketing metric to see how any given content piece is performing.

Simply put:

If youre looking to drive more organic traffic to your website, New Visitors may be of importance to you.

If you would like to measure how many people come back to browse and consume info, the Returning Visitors website traffic metric is important to note.

Tips for increasing new and returning visitors:

More resources to help you increase visitors to your site:

Sessions refer to the number of visits your website receives. Google specifically counts this in 30-minute increments, meaning it triggers this website traffic metric only once every half hour for each individual user.

Think of Amazon, as an example:

Users may trigger a session in the morning to shop, and then visit again later in the day to add something new to their cart. Each of those are considered unique sessions.

Depending on your websites function (informational, ecommerce, etc.) or the industry, the time on site metric can vary in its relevance to your campaigns.

A study by Brafton found these average session duration numbers by industry.

Average Session Duration is a general indicator of how long visitors spend on your site entirely. This helps you to understand how your site performs from a user experience (UX) standpoint.

Average Session Duration (time on site) can help answer these questions and many more.

Tips for increasing a visitors time on page:

More resources to help you improve average session duration:

This is the total number of pages viewed. A user who repeatedly visits the same page will trigger this marketing metric, so its the broadest of all page-related measurements for digital marketing success.

However, its one of the most important website traffic metrics.

Its relevant to know how many pages are visited on your website in a given time period. This helps you to understand if your entire site is of value or if only certain pages are.

To further determine which areas of your website are most valuable, look at this metric. You can find it in the Behaviors section of Google Analytics.

The Most Visited Pages metric uncovers all sorts of information about exactly where your sites visitors are going and for how long. For a deeper analysis, check out the Behavior Flow.

Heres a marketing metric that is very specific and reveals quite a bit about your website design and user experience.

If your campaign is meant to drive new users to your website for a more general learn more branding effort, the Exit Rate metric will show you exactly where they left after they reviewed your content.

Unlike Bounce Rate which triggers when someone views only one page, Exit Rate tells you where the user lost interest after spending some time exploring.

Make sure they dont lose interest in your brand!

More:
19 Digital Marketing Metrics for Measuring Success in 2020