The Complete Digital Metrics Rundown
With digital marketing, everything is measurable. You can track a customer’s journey from how they first arrived at your website, what they did once they got there, each subsequent visit and every interaction with your sales team— all the way through to purchase.
As marketers, we have so many tools, tricks and tactics to identify where we’re seeing success and what needs to be improved. But too often, we spend our time tracking and measuring metrics that don’t actually help the business grow.
No more! Here’s a breakdown of some of the most important digital marketing metrics, what they mean and most importantly, what they can do for your business.
Website
In analyzing website performance, we typically think in terms of traffic and engagement.
TRAFFIC
Session: a visit to your website consisting of one or more events
User: an individual who interacts with your website or app
Source/Medium: Source is where the message was seen. Medium is how the message was communicated.
A source of ‘Google’ and a medium of ‘organic’ would be reported for visitors who came to the site after clicking on an organic listing on the search results page.
ENGAGEMENT
Events: a distinct user action taken on an app or website
Engaged Sessions: number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, resulted in a conversion, or had 2 or more screen or page views
Pageviews: number of times a page on your website is seen by a visitor
Conversions: an event that is tracked and recorded when a campaign goal is completed
Bounce Rate: percentage of single-page sessions, meaning a user visits a page and then leaves your website without visiting another page
Exit Rate: percentage of pageviews that were the last in the session, meaning a user left your website from a specific page
For analyzing traffic, we tend to focus on sessions and users, then break each metric down by source/medium. The sources we usually focus on are organic (non-paid search traffic), email, social media, referral and paid (if you’re running digital ads).
With digital metrics, engagement is (and will be) king
Understanding how many people visited your website and where they came from are important parts of evaluating your digital marketing strategy, but they don’t tell the whole story. We prefer to spend more time on engagement metrics, because they help us understand whether you’re getting the right traffic to your website.
One of the most important tools we use to track website performance is currently undergoing a major change. As Google transitions from Universal Analytics to GA4, shifting from a system based on cookies to one based on events, tracking and analyzing on-page engagements are going to become even more important than ever before.
With engagement, we start looking at events like pageviews, scrolls, clicks, etc. These tell us the kinds of actions people are taking on your website and how certain pieces of content are performing. The most important engagement metric is conversions. These could be purchases, contact form submissions, newsletter signups or just about anything else you’ve deemed to be an important goal to track.
Traffic and site visits are nice, but only so far as they’re helping your business grow. If you have 10,000 site visits but none of them convert, that big traffic number didn’t really help you. Engagement and conversions are the most important website metrics to track because they will help focus your marketing efforts on the types of actions that most directly impact the bottom line.
Digital Ads (Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn and more)
Here are some of the key metrics we use for understanding how your digital ad campaigns are performing.
AD PERFORMANCE
Clicks: number of specific actions that users take on your ad or your website
Impressions: the number of times people saw your ads
Click Through Rate (CTR): ratio of clicks out of the total number of times the ad was shown
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): the amount you pay every time a user clicks your ad.
Quality Score: Google Ads’ rating of the quality and relevance of your campaign’s keywords, ad copy and landing page. It is used to determine your ad’s rank and cost per click.
CONVERSIONS
Conversions: an event that is tracked and recorded when a campaign goal is completed
Conversion Rate: percentage of users who complete a desired action
Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): the amount you’ve been charged for a conversion from your ad
COMPETITIVE METRICS
Search Impression Share: percentage of impressions you received out of the estimated total number of impressions you were eligible to receive
Search Lost Impression Share (Rank): percentage of search impression share lost out on due to ad rank
Which digital metrics are the most important?
Choosing the best digital metrics to track for marketing campaigns depends on your campaign’s goals. If you’re focused on brand awareness, then you’ll want to focus on impressions, clicks and search impression share. These metrics help you understand your campaign’s reach and how often your ads are appearing in front of potential customers.
With a campaign focused on generating sales and leads, we’ll want to pay more attention to conversions, conversion rate and cost-per-acquisition. These will help you to calculate ROI and make adjustments for improvement.
When analyzing the individual components of an ad, click through rate becomes one of the most important metrics. Not only does it help you understand how well the imagery and messaging are resonating with the audience, but it can also help you determine whether or not you’re even targeting the right audience. A high click through rate usually means you’re targeting the right people with a message that appeals to them. A low click through rate means you're targeting the wrong audience, your messaging isn’t connecting with your audience or both.
If you’re running Google Search Ads, one other metric you’re going to want to focus on is quality score. Quality score can get pretty complicated, but it’s essentially a measure of how closely your ads, copy, and landing page all match the term that was searched. This metric is vital because a higher quality score directly leads to better positioning in the search results page, and a lower cost per click to boot.
Social Media
When analyzing social media performance, we want to look at both brand awareness and engagement metrics.
BRAND AWARENESS
Reach: the number of people who see your content
Impressions: the number of times people saw your content
Share of Voice: a measure of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors
Audience Growth Rate: the speed at which your number of followers grows
ENGAGEMENT
Engagements: the number of times people interact with your account
Engagements could include: likes, shares, comments, retweets, clicks, mentions, etc.
Engagement Rate: ratio of engagements to either your impressions or reach
Website Traffic: website visits that originated from a social media post
Social media is a great tool for creating brand awareness and building a connection with your fans and customers.
With analyzing social media, one of the first places to start is measuring reach and impressions. These are both useful metrics that tell you how many people you’ve been able to get in front of on social media. But like with analyzing website traffic, they don’t tell us the whole picture.
It’s nice to have a couple of big numbers to share in reports, but we still need to know whether the social content was seen by the right people. That’s why we tend to focus more on engagements, engagement rate, share of voice and audience growth rates. Those are better indicators of overall performance.
Think about it. If you’re focused on impressions and only 10 people saw a post, that doesn’t seem great. But if four of those people clicked to your website and downloaded a machine brochure or subscribed to your blog, thent that was a good post that created value for your company by reaching the right audience.
Focusing on engagements rather than reach and impressions will help you achieve your overall business goals.
Email Marketing
We’ve already covered a lot of the metrics that are important for email marketing like click through rate and conversion rates, but there are a couple unique things that we care about when digging into the performance of email marketing campaigns.
CONTENT PERFORMANCE
Open Rate: percentage of people who opened the email out of the total number it was sent to
Click Rate: percentage of people who clicked the email out of the total number it was sent to
Response Rate: percentage of people who replied to the email out of the total number it was sent to
DELIVERABILITY
Delivery Rate: percentage of people who were sent the email out of the total number who were supposed to be sent the email
Bounce Rate: number of people who were sent an email, but did not receive it
Unsubscribes: number of people who unsubscribed from your list after receiving an email
Spam Rate: percentage of people who reported your emails as spam
Email List Growth Rate: rate at which your subscribers are increasing
Email marketing success requires a lot more than just regularly sending out emails. When trying to understand how your campaigns are performing, we want to focus on content performance and deliverability.
In looking at content performance, we previously touched on conversions and conversion rate, and those metrics are just as important with email campaigns. But we also want to focus on open rate and click rate.
Open rate tells us a lot about the strength of the subject line and preview text, but it could also clue us in to the best time to send the emails, the familiarity of our From name and From address, and even whether or not the email is getting caught in people’s spam folders.
Click rate has become more important to track in recent years as privacy changes have made it difficult to track email opens in certain email clients. So, we’ll definitely want to focus on how people are engaging with the emails, especially with how they’re driving traffic to your website.
The other big area to pay attention to is deliverability and list performance. Tracking bounce rate, unsubscribes and spam reports help to understand how relevant your list is. These metrics can also help you understand how well your content is resonating with the audience and your cadence is good.
Still need help breaking down and analyzing your digital metrics? Talk to Ivor Andrew today. We live for this stuff.
