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Sometimes it helps to recall the clichéd. What cannot be monitored cannot be measured. Assuming your brand has adapted itself to being digitally savvy and is connected with users important to your bottom-line. Online marketing strategies have been carefully devised and intelligently implemented. But what about monitoring these efforts?
Measuring performance and comparing the outcomes to an established line of performance is key to identifying success areas and pain points of your online marketing programs. Although there are several metrics that call to be measured, here are the Top Ten for your dashboard that you cannot afford to miss! We’ve broken them into three specific categories – Traffic Generation, Conversion and Revenue metrics.
Traffic Metrics
1. Overall Site Traffic: The Google Analytics dashboard is a treasure trove of metrics! Use it to measure your overall site traffic, which not only includes overall page views or the number of website hits, but also the number of unique website visitors on a per week and monthly basis.
2. Traffic Sources: This is a great metric to evaluate if a certain set of keywords or channels are working for you or not and if your traffic distribution is ‘healthy’ – relying on just one source for a majority of your traffic can cause problems if that source changes or ceases to exist. Access the Channel and Source/Medium reports on Google Analytics to get detailed traffic information such as traffic source, referral traffic and traffic from promotional activities. Additionally, you can also incorporate metrics to understand your mobile audience.
3. Email Subscribers: Free tools such as Feedio provide metrics such as email subscriptions per post and subscriber tracking. These metrics will help you understand what topics and content resonate well with your audience.
4. Social Sharing Counts: Social sharing metrics help you track the number of shares each post has received on each social media site. You can use tools like Social Metrics to track the shareability of each post; per-post level tracking helps you understand what content your social audience likes and dislikes and you can accordingly implement improvements.
5. Click Through Rate: CTR is a metric that measures how many people actually clicked on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads each time your ad is viewed and an impression is created. A higher CTR means better Quality Score, which translates to lower PPC costs from Google AdWords.
Conversion Metrics
6. Conversion Rate: Also known as Call-To-Action rates, CVRs measure the number of website visitors that get converted into valuable leads. Understanding your CVRs can help you evaluate what aspects of your digital marketing campaigns have worked the best, so that you can set benchmarks for your next set of campaigns. Use tools like Bit.ly and Kissmetrics to measure your CVRs or CTAs and work towards optimizing your campaigns.
7. Bounce Rate: Another metric that helps you evaluate the resonance capabilities of your content with your audience, Bounce Rate measures the site visitors that leave your site immediately on arriving, if they find your content irrelevant. Bounce Rate assists you in improving the quality or impact of your content.
8. Return Visitors: It is important to measure the rate of return of your site traffic, to gain an insight into ideal targets for lead conversion. The higher the Rate of Return of your visitors, the more interested they are in your brand’s online activities. Use this metric to target returning visitors and proposition them with hard-to-resist offers.
Revenue Metrics
9. Return on Investment: The ROI metric measures website traffic that is converted into revenue-generators for your business. This metric helps you identify areas of your digital marketing campaigns that are working well to drive your top-line and bottom-line and areas of opportunity.
10. Cost of Customer Acquisition: Better known as Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC), this metric measured by dividing the total cost of online marketing efforts for a particular period by the number of new buyers for that period. This can be further broken by source to evaluate best sources for conversion.
These 10 key metrics are a must-have for your digital marketing dashboard as they help you gain incredible insight into what is working for you, what aspects of your campaign can be improved upon and what features you need to do away with. Measuring your campaigns from the Traffic generation stage all the way to the Revenue generation stage is a prudent move to establish an overall hold on your digital marketing efforts.