The Best Data to Track Your Digital Marketing Success
Every marketing strategy needs to include how and what data to use to measure and evaluate success. The key to success is to evaluate your marketing strategies regularly and determine if they are still delivering the desired results. This way, you can see if you need to make changes or keep doing things the same way. But what data should you collect to track your digital marketing success?
The wrong data can misguide you. You could find yourself wasting time on things that don’t work, or worse, in a cycle of always chasing what’s currently popular without ever really moving forward. What you should be doing is tracking data from multiple sources to better understand the effect your digital marketing efforts have on your business. What you need is a comprehensive approach to tracking your digital marketing success.
Track and Test Your Marketing Efforts to Increase Sales
The more you track and test your marketing efforts, the better you’ll get at converting people into leads and leads into sales. You may be thinking, “But how do I even know what to track and how is it important?” You will need online data tracking tools like Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free. It allows you to track the success of your digital marketing efforts. It will help you understand how customers interact with your website, app, or other online properties, including how they engage with ads and other marketing elements. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, you can sign up for Google Analytics here to begin getting insight into your customer’s behavior and preferences and make informed decisions about how to optimize your digital marketing efforts for maximum impact!
Key Website Metrics to Track
To get started, you’ll want to track the number of visitors to your website. But you can also measure the actions people take on your website. If you are using Google Analytics, this will be easy for you as it provides all this information for free!
Website Traffic and Page Views
Website traffic and page view are useful metrics that enable you to keep an eye on how many people are visiting your site and how many pages they visit; you’ll be able to tell if your website is generating traffic that leads somewhere else or simply attracting visitors who leave after quickly browsing a few pages. By tracking repeat visits (which means someone has returned more than once), you can make informed decisions and see if users are finding what they need or if there are any parts of your website that could be improved.
The quality of traffic that comes to your website is just as important as the quantity. You could be getting tons of visits, but if they’re not converting and becoming leads, then all those views aren’t doing you any good.
Monitoring website traffic and page views can yield a variety of data, including time spent on particular pages and bounce rates. Those figures can translate into invaluable insights into your customers’ preferences and actions your business can take to improve performance.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important metrics to track in digital marketing. It’s a key indicator of how visitors are engaging with your website, and it can tell you if you need to make changes to improve user experience.
The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your site without any action. This is when someone visits just one page on your website, then leaves without clicking anything else or interacting further with content on the page. If users are only visiting one page before leaving, they are not seeing other parts of your site or getting exposed to other content that could keep them engaged and help with their decision-making process — which means you’re losing out on potential future sales. HubSpot reports that the average bounce rate is somewhere between 26% and 70%, with an optimal range of 26%-40%. In other words: The lower your bounce rate, the better off you’ll be!
Click Map
Click maps are a visual representation of where your visitors are clicking on your website. The click map is a great way to identify what pages or elements on the page they’re interacting with and where they’re spending most of their time. This can help you identify areas that need more attention and where you should focus your efforts, or if there are any areas that need to be removed or changed entirely.
Click maps also allow you to see which calls-to-action (CTAs) people are responding to—this allows for better optimization than just looking at metrics like bounce rate alone because it shows how well each element is working together as a whole.
Click-through Rate
Click-through rate is the ratio of the number of people who click a link to a webpage, email, or advertisement to the total number of people who view that content. It’s used to measure the success of paid ads and the effectiveness of email campaigns. You can think of it as the percentage of your ads that users notice and click on. When someone clicks on a link in an ad, it’s considered a conversion, and when they don’t, you’ve lost a potential customer.
Clicks are not only important for increasing revenue—they’re also useful for tracking the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. Advertisers can use analytics tools like Google Analytics to track their click-through rates over time so that they know which ads are working best for them based on factors like search keywords or social media networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.
ROI
- ROI: Return on investment. The ratio of your return to your investment.
- Remember, ROI isn’t the only metric you should be using to measure success; it’s just a helpful way to compare different marketing channels.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site, such as buying a product or scheduling a service appointment.
To calculate your conversion rate, take the number of conversions and divide it by the total number of visits. For example, if 50 people purchase your product or service in a month and 500 people visit your store during that same period, then you have a 5% conversion rate (50/500 = 5%).
Why is tracking this metric important? Because it gives you insight into what needs to be done to increase sales or engagement. You can use this data to learn where users are dropping off in their journey through the buying process so that you can fix any issues on your website or marketing campaign before they become major problems.
Conversion rates vary widely depending on industry type and business model but tend toward around 2% for most companies; however, some industries have reported much higher rates—such as ecommerce websites with conversion rates between 3%–5%.
Cost Per Click
The cost per click is the amount you pay to get someone to click on your ad. You can use it to compare different ads and landing pages. If your cost per click is higher than everyone else’s, you should change your ad or landing page.
Cost Per Conversion
When you’re thinking about your marketing strategy, cost per conversion is a good indicator of how much each conversion costs you. A lower cost per conversion means that your ads are performing well and converting at a high rate.
A higher cost per conversion can indicate several things:
- The market for the product or service in question is competitive, so it takes more money to win over potential customers than it would in other markets.
- The ad or campaign had low click rates and therefore struggled to reach enough people to get any conversions from them (i.e., people didn’t see the ad).
- You need more traffic or engagement from current campaigns before they start producing results (i.e., less-than-stellar targeting).
Other Important Metrics to Know
Organic Visitors
Another way to measure your digital marketing success is by tracking your organic traffic. Organic visitors are those who find you from search engines and other sources, such as links from other websites, social media, blogs, etc. This type of traffic is free, so keeping track of it can help you determine whether or not your efforts are working.
If you want to know how many organic visitors visit your site each month and/or year, take note of the number at the end of a given period (like day, week, or month) in Google Analytics. You can also use HubSpot’s free analytics tool.
Leads Per Channel (organic search, paid search, social media, email, etc.)
- Using Google Analytics, you can track leads generated from each channel. For example, you could look at how many people came from organic search versus paid search campaigns to your website.
- Next, calculate the number of leads that each channel generated by dividing the number of leads by your total visits:
- Organic search (1/5) = 20%
- Paid search (2/5) = 40%
- Social media (3/5) = 60%
- Finally, compare these numbers to determine which channels are performing best. If social media performs better than organic search and paid advertising combined, you can focus resources on building up your social media presence or raising bids on paid advertisements, so they get more exposure.
Leads Per Source (website, landing page, form fill, etc.)
A lead is a person who has interacted with your brand. It could be someone who filled out a web form, visited your website or landing page, or even downloaded an ebook.
When you have more leads coming in, it means that more people are interested in what you have to offer. When you track the number of leads per source on a regular basis and compare those numbers over time, this can help inform your decision-making process about where to focus your marketing efforts.
If you find specific sources that generate better quality leads for you (meaning they convert at higher rates), then those should receive more of your attention and an increased budget than others. If there are sources that aren’t performing well (with low conversion rates), analyze to ensure that they are well optimized. If they are optimized and not effective, then consider spending less of your time and reducing the budget.
Referral Traffic Sources
It’s possible to track referral traffic in Google Analytics, but there are other tools that can help as well. The first thing to note is that referral traffic sources aren’t just limited to websites. They can also include email campaigns or social media posts.
So, what is referral traffic? Referral traffic is when a visitor comes from another website (or one of your own) rather than directly from a search engine result or an ad click on your site. Why does this matter? Because it indicates that the visitor found something appealing enough elsewhere on the internet to take action and eventually end up at your site—and because those visitors tend to stick around longer than others, they have more potential for becoming loyal customers or repeat buyers too!
Traffic Source Quality
Traffic source quality is a metric that measures the quality of your traffic by comparing the number of visitors from each traffic source to their share of total visits.
- A higher traffic source quality percentage means that more users visiting your site are interested in what they’re seeing and are more likely to stick around longer than those who arrive via less-targeted channels, increasing time spent per session.
- Visitors coming from high-quality sources are more likely to convert, which means fewer wasted impressions on unqualified leads or prospects who aren’t ready to buy right now—and better ROI for every ad dollar spent!
Conclusion
Tracking key data will give you a deeper understanding of how well your marketing is performing, so you can make smarter decisions about where to spend your money and time. Once you build a system for tracking these stats, it won’t take long before you start seeing patterns emerge from the data—giving you valuable insight into which tactics are working best at converting visitors into customers.
And if you don’t have the time or the resources to do it yourself, you can always get in touch with a marketing agency like DaDigitalSense Marketing