Years ago, if a business wanted to increase its sales revenue, it would hire additional salesmen, print and distribute flyers, and place ads in newspapers. Now with digital marketing, businesses can invest in websites, social media platforms, online paid advertising and more. But how do you know if your digital marketing investment is paying off and your return on marketing investment? In this video, I’ll be demystifying this all explaining 10 important marketing metrics you can start watching today to improve your success online. Let’s get started!
Marketing metrics help you improve your business by monitoring the numbers that matter. If you are coming from a traditional business environment, the idea of growing a business using digital marketing might still seem farfetched and unattainable. By the end of this article, I hope to demonstrate the power of digital marketing metrics and the few things you can track today to help grow your business and turn the needle up on sales.
How will this help you? Years ago, if a business wanted to increase its sales revenue, it would rely on hiring additional salesmen, printing and distributing flyers, placing ads in newspapers and industry publications, and hope that it would bring in more customers. Although these tactics worked (to a point), they were extremely expensive and there was no accurate way of knowing what worked best.
Enter digital marketing! The power of the internet has transformed the modern business environment. Today, business owners can quickly (and cheaply) expose their brands to multiple audiences around the world in an instant. Websites are much cheaper to build and manage than large brick and mortar storefronts. Advertising to a targeted audience is now affordable to anyone and has the power to be tracked and optimised. This is the power of digital marketing metrics.
This new way of doing business puts the power back into the owner’s hands. Set up well, it can be leveraged to increase sales and maximise profits.
10 Marketing Metrics to watch
1. Overall Website Traffic
On Google Analytics it is possible to see how many times your website was used in a given period. You want this number to increase all the time. To see how many users engaged with your website log into your Google Analytics account and find the value underneath the word “Users” in the very first chart on the home screen. Here we see that there were 175 visits to this website in the last 30-days (236.5% up from the previous month).
2. New vs Returning Visitors
Now that you know how much total traffic your website is getting, the question becomes, “How many new visitors are visiting my website, compared to returning visitors?” This is an important marketing metric as it shows you if your brand reach is growing and if you have users that loved your website so much, they have returned to consume more of your amazing content. Both of these values should be increasing all the time. Look at the pie chart on the right-hand side of the Audience > Overview screen inside Google Analytics.
3. Traffic Channel
Where are your website visitors coming from? How are they finding your website in the first place? Those are the answers you will get from this chart inside Google Analytics. It displays the number of users who visited your website and exactly where they came from.
This could be from a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram, an email they received from you with a link to your website, typing your website URL directly into their web browser (direct), searching for something on Google and then clicking on your website in the list of results (organic) or from another website which referred to yours via a link. Head over to Google Analytics > Home and you will see this chart after a short scroll down the page.
4. Session Duration
Once a user is on your website, how long do they spend browsing through all your pages before leaving? This marketing metric is called the “Session Duration” and it can be found again in Google Analytics > Home on the very first chart. Just click on the “Session Duration” tab on the top-right to view the stats. You always want this number to keep growing, especially if you have a blog or a shopping cart. The longer a user spends on your website, the more they enjoy your content and are likely to convert into a paying customer.
5. Social Engagement
It takes time to plan, prepare and publish social media content. What you want from all your hard work is that social media users love and engage with your content. The number of times people engaged with your posts through reactions, comments, shares and clicks, determines how much they enjoy your posts. Many social media platforms offer insights/analytics which you can access from your page’s admin screen. To see your engagement on a Facebook Page, click on the Insights tab from your page’s admin screen. Use this marketing metric to strategise your posts, create content your audience is engaging with.
6. Total Number of Leads
As I mentioned right at the beginning, marketing is meant to result in sales. And sales start their journey as a lead. On your website, you can gather leads from a contact or enquiry form, a newsletter subscription box, by offering a free download (lead magnet) on your website or even something fun like asking a user for their email address to take a fun quiz on your site. It is good practice to set up goals on Google Analytics to track when a user submits a form on your website. But if you haven’t done that yet, sum up the total number of submissions/emails you received for a given period (week, month or year). Here I can see how many submissions were received on a “Request A Quote” form within this WordPress website.
7. Qualified Leads Rate
Not all the leads (completed form submissions) you receive will be ‘qualified’. Some will be spam, and others will be from people who enquired about something you don’t actually offer. The goal is to increase the number of qualified leads (the leads that have a high chance of becoming a customer one day). We can determine the rate between qualified and unqualified leads by using the formula below. You can use this marketing metric by knowing the higher the percentage, the more likely you are to convert more customers from the total leads you received.
Count the number of leads which you or your sales team have deemed to be worthy (qualified) leads. Now divide that number into the total number of leads you received for that same time period. Here we can see that 44% of all the leads received were in fact qualified leads. The higher the rate, the less time you waste on leads that probably will not result in a sale.
(Qualified Leads / Total Leads) x 100 = Qualified Leads Rate
(350 / 792) x 100 = 44%
8. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
A successful business doesn’t just focus on making sales. To survive it needs to make a PROFIT. If you don’t already know, profit is the money that’s leftover from all your sales after paying all your costs. To increase profit, we need to grow our sales and at the same time, reduce our costs. But how much does it cost us to acquire a new customer? We can calculate that quite easily.
Sum up all your marketing costs (ads, marketing salaries, freelance photographers and other marketing-related expenses) for a given period. Next, divide that by the number of new customers you received within that same period. Here we see that it costs this business € 333 to acquire each new customer. Over time we want to see this number decrease. That will mean that we are spending less to get each additional new customer. That’s good!
Marketing Costs (Feb 2021) / Number of new customers (in Feb 2021) = CAC
€ 2,000 / 6 = € 333
9. Marketing Return on Investment (M.ROI)
Since the point of investing in marketing is to see an increase in sales, this marketing metric is therefore, important to calculate exactly how much benefit marketing provides the business in terms of new revenue. Start by calculating the sales growth from one period to the next. In this example sales were € 6,000 this month and € 2,500 last month. That’s a growth of € 3,500 over one month. Now compare that to your monthly marketing costs as seen below.
[ (Sales Growth – Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs ] x 100 = M.ROI
[ (€3,500 – €2,000) / €2,000 ] x 100
= [€1,500 / €2,000] x 100
= 75%
10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score marketing metric determines the likelihood of customers recommending your company to others. If they love you, they will speak about you in a positive way and you could have a life-long customer. If not, those customers could destroy you by recommending others against using you in the future.
You want to maintain a score of between 9 and 10 for this one. To calculate your NPS, simply survey your customers by sending them an online survey using Forminator on your WordPress website (or using your favourite form building app like Google or Microsoft Forms). In the survey, ask your customers one simple question. “How likely are you to recommend us from a scale of 0 to 10?” 0 being ‘not at all and 10 being ‘very likely’. Your average score will determine your NPS.
If you score between:
- 9 and 10, you are doing extremely well. Congratulations! Your customers are spreading the word about you positively and are likely to stay with you for a long time.
- 7 and 8, you are not making any serious impact on your customer’s lives. They are happy but not raving customers and probably won’t be bragging about you any time soon.
- 0 and 6, your customers are not satisfied with you at all. Don’t expect them to speak highly of you in the near future. If they do speak about you, they are more than likely going to tell others to stay away from you. And that’s not good at all!
What is happening when you track the numbers?
You take control of your destiny by making better decisions. Often, newcomers to the online world think that if they build a new website and have all their social media platforms set up that they will automatically generate loads of new sales and customers will be flocking to their inboxes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Digital marketing is a process, and it takes strategy and commitment to see results.
The reason why we believe so much in using these top 10 marketing metrics to track the numbers is that this way you can see what’s working and what’s not. Where to pivot, change strategies and even find new opportunities to invest in. The worst thing you can do is run a website blindly. Having a website that is badly maintained, no SEO management, old photos, incorrect text, no analytics or tracking installed, is all going to result in frustration and disappointment.
With a well-designed website, good social media strategy, commitment from the team to implement what’s required and analytics to track performance and progress, you can be on the road to a successful and profitable stream of business from all your online efforts.
Here at DIGIPIV, we empower you to pivot your business so you can succeed online and not get left behind. We are passionate about helping you win and grow a profitable business by leveraging the power of digital marketing.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this article. I hope that it has helped you and provided some interesting insight into your business and what’s possible online. After all, as my father likes to say, “you cannot control what you do not measure”.
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