What are digital marketing metrics and how do they impact a strategy?

It’s crucial to know what digital marketing metrics are and how they can impact a campaign strategy. In short form, they’re measurable values that show the effectiveness of an element of a business, e.g. brand awareness. In this blog, we’re going to explain why marketing metrics are important to understand and use throughout your marketing strategy.

Why do you need marketing metrics?

Understanding marketing metrics and measuring your marketing activities is a really important part of any marketing strategy. As we move into an ever-more digital world, it’s never been easier to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. Metrics can be used to measure every element of a digital marketing strategy. This means at every stage you can be checking that your activities are going in the direction intended. Metrics also allow you to stop, or change, something if it’s not going well. This is something that you aren’t able to do with traditional media advertising such as printed adverts magazines or on billboards. Even TV adverts can’t give you reliable figures on the size of the audience. A recent report by Venture Beat suggested that businesses are looking to increase investment in marketing analytics by 73-100% over the next three years. As a marketer, or aspiring marketer that means you need to be aware of how metrics can be used.

Setting KPI’s

A KPI or Key Performance Indicator is a measurement to be able to understand how closely aligned your activities are with achieving the business goals. Often, metrics will be used as KPI’s so that you can understand if your marketing activities are working towards the business goals. You may set KPI’s with deadlines at the beginning of the campaign rollout. This is best to do if the campaign is time-sensitive such as the launch of a new product or the countdown to an event. If it’s not performing at the rate you need it to, you know you need to change things.

Metrics for brand awareness

The purpose of a marketing campaign won’t always be to create conversions directly from the campaign. Some campaigns will be run to improve brand awareness and brand positioning but awareness can be difficult to measure. One way is to conduct surveys. You can ask your target audience if they recognise your name or remember your advert. How do you use that information to understand if it’s working well enough to continue to invest in it? A good place to start with brand awareness is to take a look at your website data. Direct traffic – This tells you how many people came to your site by simply typing in the site address. If direct traffic is high then it shows that awareness is strong. Potential customers are certain they can find what they’re looking for with you. You can combine this figure with bounce rate and time spent on page to figure out how invested that website browser was. Over on social media, you can look at the reach and impressions as well as calculate engagement rate. On most social media sites, this data can be accessed via the business account settings. Chances are if your followers are engaging with your posts by clicking links, liking, commenting or sharing your posts they will be aware of the brand, the products or services you provide and a connection with the brand. Engagement rate can be calculated in several ways. This Hootsuite blog post provides a good insight into some of the ways you can find out your engagement rate.

Metrics for advertising

When advertising digitally, it’s essential to ensure you set up a wide variety of tracking and analytics. It’s also necessary to come back to the all-important business goals. With an advertising campaign, you may be looking to create a conversion directly. A good example of this would be a shopping carousel advert on Facebook. These are designed to hook you in and let you shop directly from the ad. The goal with this type of ad is to get a conversion. Some common metrics to measure in digital advertising are;

• CPC- Cost Per Click
• CPI – Cost Per Impression
• CPM – Cost per 1000 impressions
• CPL – Cost per Lead
• CPE – Cost per Engagement
• CPA – Cost per Acquisition
• CR – Conversion Rate

By monitoring the above statistics you can begin to understand if an advert is worth the investment based on how effective it is at creating conversions.

Put it into practice

A really great way to practice using metrics to influence a campaign would be A/B testing. A/B testing is where you display two adverts that are identical with one change and measure the performance to determine which is the better performing ad. Depending on where you advertise, information and some metrics may be provided. Tracking in Google Analytics will give you more information than most platforms. Providing you set it up correctly, it should be accurate and without bias. No matter what the desired outcome of your marketing campaign, the first thing to think of is the business goals and then you work to align with them. Measuring metrics along the journey and not just at the end will ensure your campaign stays on track. Having data to back up your work can also justify additional budget spend or explain why you have chosen to carry out a campaign in a certain way to business managers and is a key skill for any marketer. We hope this blog has helped clear up what digital marketing metrics are and how they impact your marketing strategy! Written by Jen Blair.