Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Marketing measurement and analysis of reports in Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Klaviyo, or your email services provider has in-depth insights into how your marketing strategies & tactics are growing your brand, engaging with your audiences, and leading your customers through the path to purchase.
Digital marketing KPIs determined to measure the success of a marketing campaign are quantifiable metrics that measure performance across marketing channels. KPIs provide actionable insights into how your website, paid digital media, email marketing campaigns, SMS, social media and videos are performing.
Having the right KPIs informs the marketing strategy and growth of your business. Start by looking at which areas of your business or brand and target goals you want to prioritize. Then choose the key performance indicators that will be most effective.
Focusing on KPIs that align with your digital marketing strategy and the complete customer journey is important. There are five main marketing KPI categories:
- Lead Generation
- Website and E-commerce Metrics
- Paid Advertising
- Social Media Tracking
- SEO Optimization
Marketing measurement in the most simple form is about justifying investments by a company to increase sales and profit. Today marketers have a broad toolset to measure marketing performance and learn valuable insights about the target audience’s behavior throughout the digital marketing ecosystem.
Marketing KPI’s to Measure Performance
Metrics and KPIs are most important varies for every business. It’s best to start with a few key metrics that you know are solid indicators for scaling your business. Then ensure you have the correct tools to measure them.
The essential metrics to measure digital marketing to propel your business forward include the following:
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click Through Rate (CTR) is one of the most common metrics. CTR is the percentage of clicks on a link that generates impressions. CTR is how many people clicked on the link, and tracks how many users are taking the desired action and engaging with your brand.
A good CTR benchmark can vary by industry and may average:
- PPC: A good click-through rate on Google Ads is 6–7%.
- Facebook: The CTR will be lower on social media channels than a Google Ad. An average CTA is under 1%.
- Banner/Display Ads: Offer similar click-through rates as Facebook Ads with a CTR of 0.46%.
- Email: D2C email campaigns can range from 1.6 to over 4% dependent on the industry. B2B newsletters tend to have higher CTR than D2C newsletters. On average, a 10–20% CTR is considered good.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the number of visitors that completed the desired action divided by the total number of users who took the first action. Conversion rate is applicable across industries and digital marketing channels.
Conversion rate is critical to analyze your marketing campaign’s success throughout the customer journey.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost per Click or CPC is one of the elements important to track on your paid digital marketing campaigns.
CPC has a simple formula where you calculate the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks the ad received. This shows the average cost of paid digital media, Google Ads, and Bing including PPC, programmatic, display ads, and retargeting.
The CPC varies depending on product, keyword, competition, price, and demand. For example, CPC for a pharmaceutical brand can cost $80 but a beauty brand may cost $1.00. It is an important metric for marketers to track performance, and manage the daily spend and paid digital media budget.
SEO
SEO and organic search sessions commonly known as SEO, the organic search traffic metric calculates the percentage of website traffic earned through organic searches. Healthy organic traffic means your content is performing well because it has value, is relevant, and people find it engaging.
KPIs identify where the organic traffic is being generated by channel and keyword to support marketing strategies, SEO, content marketing, link building, and opportunities for growth and optimization to continue to grow and position favorably in the search engines like Google and Bing.
Google Analytics – GA4 allows you to view organic search queries and see which keywords and phrases produce website visitors to your website. You can measure metrics like traffic, rankings, keyword traffic, click-through rate, conversion, average order value, and sales.
Return on Investment (ROI and ROAS)
Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Advertising Spend are metrics that are at the top of every marketing leader’s list to measure success. The ROI and ROAS of digital, e-commerce and integrated marketing initiatives and action is key to consistently achieving and exceeding revenue goals. ROI is a key metric that CEOs and C-suite marketing executives lead and oversee.
Digital marketing ROI evaluates the effectiveness of the ad campaign and its contribution to the business’s profitability. It is calculated by dividing the profit generated by the cost of the digital media or ad.
A strong ROI means marketing dollars are being invested effectively and providing tangible results. With a moderate to low ROI, the marketer will evaluate and analyze the performance, and industry benchmarks and develop testing plans to optimize campaign performance to continually improve ROI.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a digital marketing KPI metric used to measure total revenue generated per advertising dollar spent. It is calculated by dividing the campaign revenue by the campaign cost.
ROI and ROAS are often used interchangeably, but there are differences. ROAS focuses on an ad campaign’s effectiveness in isolation, while ROI shows if the overall strategy is working and worth the investment.
Used together, ROI and ROAS provide the marketing team and leadership with a more comprehensive picture of the effectiveness and profitability of an ad campaign.
Reporting and Analysis
Marketing measurement and reporting are required to understand how you are building your brand awareness, engagement, and sales of the organization. Tracking, monitoring, and measuring how your audience is engaging with your brand across individual marketing channels is critical to acquiring new customers, customer retention, and business growth.
The game-changers in the measurement of digital marketing initiatives have grown with a wide variety of analytics reporting tools for marketers to pivot quickly armed with data-driven insights to invest more heavily where strategies are paying off and reduce resources on efforts that are not performing as intended.
After aligning digital marketing strategies with senior leadership and ensuring there is clear communication about how marketing strategies are laddering up to the goals of the organization marketers begin launching marketing campaigns structured to generate leads, produce traffic, customer acquisition, and eCommerce conversion create new customer sales to achieve profitable business sales.
Proving return on investment (ROI and the ROAS) in digital marketing campaigns is critical and an integrated approach to measuring outcomes using digital marketing analytics, social media, email marketing, and other tools data to learn how the campaign performed.
Selecting the right metrics, and benchmarks, and using various attribution modes in your measurement plans being mindful of meaningful insights will be learned to improve the outcomes of the programs.
Some of the game changes in measuring digital marketing include:
- Google Analytics and other website analytics programs when enabled correctly can track your target audience demographics, psychographics, search, and other important site behaviors.
- Google Tag Manager is a system that allows you to easily update measurement codes known as tags for your website and mobile app sales.
- Integrate the social media tracking tools that you are using and leverage the social media data into your data analysis.
- Email marketing systems offer free email campaign reporting tools to measure campaign results, engagement, and consumer behavior.
- ECRM for lead generation and lead nurturing to enable faster sales through strategic inbound marketing efforts through targeted content focused on the listening needs of prospects to develop relationships with them throughout the sales funnel.
- Establish metrics to measure success and be aware of vanity metrics versus the metrics to measure the conversion goals.
The team should always test the digital marketing campaigns by conducting different types of tests to make sure the tracking is working correctly with your reporting systems. Once digital marketing tracking has been tested and confirmed you are ready to schedule the launches to measure the performance of the marketing campaigns.
