Just about as long as marketing has been around, CEOs and marketers have debated how to measure success, which tools are the best, and which proportion of marketing actually works.
With digital marketing, EVERYTHING can be measured.
Here are the 4 most important metrics to understand and have a look at first when reading a digital marketing report.
- CONVERSIONS
Probably the most important metric to glance at first. A conversion can be many things such as filling out a form or making a purchase. For a car manufacturer, it might be the number of tests drives, for a shop, it might be the number of purchases made and an accounting firm might be the number of inquiries.
Note: If your digital marketing provider doesn’t talk about conversions, this is a red flag right there.
You can see how many conversions you received from:
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email campaigns, and any other digital marketing channel.
If you are running traditional media, you can create a separate URL (e.g sandbox.mu/promobillboard) and measure the conversions and the traffic going to that specific page.
- COST PER CONVERSIONS
Equally as important as the number of conversions. This is very important because if you are selling a product at $100 and your CPA (cost per conversion also known as cost of acquisition) is $100 then arguably you are losing money. This is another metric that your digital marketing company needs to provide on all reports.
You can see your CPA per channel as well.
You can then decide if it makes sense for you to continue a specific campaign or not.
- CLICK THROUGH RATE
Click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on the link of your ad. You will get a % for every 100 person that clicks on the ad itself. This is an important metric because it tells us if your ad is working or not. If we expect an average of 2% CTR (click-through rate ) in your industry and your ad is getting 0.8% CTR, it would seem that there is room for improvement in terms of either the ad or the targeting.
- BOUNCE RATE
The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave right away without performing any meaningful action. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing: Poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.
If you have a website, always check the bounce rate 1) per device and 2) per channel. Having a higher bounce rate on mobiles for example might mean that your website isn’t optimized for mobiles.