Success and high ROI are definitely the objectives of every digital marketing campaign.
However, the ultimate goal of digital marketing campaigns is to increase profits but it can’t be gained directly every time. Some raise awareness and reach about the business which indirectly increases profits and some bring traffic to their website to make conversions. This also contributes to profits.
Now a question arises on how to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns?
How much income did you make? How many loyal clients do you have? What was the ROI of your company? There are some questions whose answers can help you to measure success.
The two most important objectives of digital marketing campaigns are- Traffic and Conversions.
Therefore to make things easy for you we have divided how to measure success in two categories for these two objectives i.e traffic and conversions.
Conversions Matric
Conversions take place when a visitor takes the desired action on your website. Conversions are more linked to sales and income. So some main matrices to measure conversions are-
Online sales and Conversions
Ultimately, the best metric to measure the success of your digital marketing is the number of sales you make.
You can track online sales using google analytics or any other web analytics tool. It is definitely the easiest way to measure online sales.
How can you check sales using google analytics?
All you have to do is to add a small code to your website or page to track its insights and analytics. You can analyze which campaigns are performing best and which are not.
Conversions can be analyzed by checking purchases, downloading material, subscribing to a mail list, filling a conversion form, etc. Many people visit your site but your converted customers are those who perform a specific action like those listed above.
Therefore the more the conversions the more the success
Online-to-store sales
64% of visitors visit your offline store after getting information from your website. This concludes that not everyone who searches your business online purchases online too. Your local customers prefer to visit your offline store to make a purchase.
As these customers come from the online search they are also your online customers.
But how to measure those conversions are a question.
There are some ways to measure online-to-store sales.
For example- when a visitor comes to your site you can ask for some basic information like name, email, or mobile number. This can be compared with information collected during billing or payment.
Or you can add some promo code or offer on online platforms and then if a local visitor asks for that offer or code you can easily analyze that he/she has come from your online marketing campaign.
If not these, a simple and direct way to ask directly from the customers from where they came to know about your business.
Leads from Conversion forms
90% of Websites contain forms that seek information about the visitor. Generally they fill-up the form to request services, book appointments, request callback, subscribe, or to get some information.
You can easily track these activities using google analytics. Along with that you can also analyze which forms bring most engagements and then you can add such forms in other pages too.
Reports show that 45% of people who fill up a form may take your service at a later date.
Therefore to measure accurate success, these customers should also be included while analyzing conversions.
Leads and sales from phone calls
Not everyone can purchase online or can be able to visit your offline store.
Many people just visit your website and get your contact number from there and call you. 78% of people who contact you via mobile can convert soon.
Therefore tracking leads and sales from mobile is also of the essence as it results in increasing conversions of your website or business.
You have to set-up a DNI( dynamic number insertion) that shows visitors some different numbers than your personal one. This number is shown depending on how they arrive at your website like by PPC ad or by social media link.
Then you can check which type of customers are contacting you. This way you can check the performance of your various digital marketing campaigns. This also enables you to check which campaign is performing best.
Email open rate.
One of the prime factors for improving the performance of the website is to increase email open rate. In the case of list building with the website email marketing metrics is of great value. Email open rate counts the number of people who open the email campaign as compared to the overall number of those who received it.
A high open rate depicts that email campaigns have a systematically segmented list. It shows an attractive subject line and spending time too is appropriate. The low open rates tell that either all or some of the above factors are lacking and need attention.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate can act as email marketing metrics. It can also be considered as a paid advertising metric. Clicks on email blasts prove to be the highest conversion drivers across the board.
Since CTR relates to pay per click, it measures the relevant score and affects your cost per click. Cost per click plays a dual role i.e. PPC marketing and a number of social media platforms.
Impressions and clicks
Now if you are running paid advertising campaigns the best way to measure success is to analyze the number of clicks and impressions that have been received.
The number of impressions can give you an idea about how many times your ad has been targeted and viewed to the audience. Thus by comparing it to the number of clicks you can have an idea of the effectiveness of an ad campaign.
Therefore if you have many impressions but clicks are less, you can analyze that your ad is not performing well. Therefore you can change or make updates in a unique selling point.
This helps you to measure the success of your digital marketing ad campaign.
New vs returning traffic
The way a new and returning visitor interacts with your business is completely distinctive. Tracking these types of visitors will provide you useful information about how many customers became your permanent clients. The higher the number of clients the higher is the number of conversions.
More returning customers can indicate that people find your information relevant and valuable.
To measure success accurately, you have to analyze both the new users and returning users. Both have their own importance in determining success.
Traffic matric
Traffic means the total number of visitors to your website from different digital marketing campaigns. It can be from organic search, social media, e-mails, PPC ads, or any other.
Total Traffic
How do most companies determine the success of their digital marketing campaign?
Simply by measuring overall Traffic.
Total traffic is basically the overall traffic on your website. All of your digital marketing campaigns send traffic to your website whether it is SEO, social media ads, e-mails, or any other.
The individual objectives may be different but the ultimate goal is to send maximum traffic to your website.
By measuring the total traffic from different digital marketing campaigns you can get insights about how your campaigns are approaching purple and whether they are working or not.
Analyzing traffic helps to determine the success of various digital marketing campaigns.
Suppose you want to measure your organic traffic(SEO traffic) then you can measure your SEO traffic by using google analytics. This ensures that your organic performance and visibility are good.
Session Duration
Average session duration is very helpful in estimating the time a visitor devotes to the site entirely. It also gives an idea about the performance of the site from the user’s point of view. It also gives an idea of whether the website is easy to navigate, are the visitors getting what they are trying to find easily and quickly.
It further gives an insight into the contents’ value and its viability to review it at length.
This way the session duration gives you inputs to improve the visitor’s time on the page which is a key element in measuring success.
Bounce rates
A higher bounce rate is a sign of poor website performance. To measure success and performance you should also have to keep an eye on the bounce rate of a page or website.
If your page has a higher bounce rate then it shows more people hitting the back button as soon as they land on the website.
The bounce rate is an important factor in determining the success of a website. A higher bounce rate means more people are disliking your website which is a poor sign for your website and its success.
You can use google analytics to find bounce rate and also have to take measures to reduce it. Therefore you should check the Bounce Rate to determine if your campaign is effective or not.
Most visited pages
The website traffic metric is the most important tool for measuring the growth of the traffic towards the site. The website serves as a flagship of the face of your brand. All the digital marketing efforts are directed towards increasing the traffic there.
Different companies may try different modes like list building or increasing social media reach. The routs may be different but the goal is the same. Measuring traffic metrics always keeps one informed of the number of insights like which and which company is working and when.
It is relevant to know how many pages are visited on your website in a given period. This helps you in finding the shortcomings on the website and correcting the same. It will enable you to observe whether the whole site is competent or only a small portion of the same is.
To find out the most valuable areas of the website these metrics provide the required information. This can also be found in the “Behaviours” section of Google Analytics.
The most visited page metrics provide all the relevant information about where the sites viewers are going and for how long.
Mobile Traffic
Measuring mobile traffic is a very important factor in measuring success. More than 50% of digital traffic comes from mobile or mobile apps. Therefore it is an important metric to understand how many visitors come to your website by mobile.
The more the mobile traffic the more effective your mobile responsiveness is. You can compare mobile and desktop users to find total visitors. You can also use these insights to determine how many people engage with your website using mobile thus can follow measures to make it more effective.
Overall ROI.
As the ultimate goal of your digital marketing campaign is Higher ROI.
To measure this you have to ensure that whether your marketing efforts are profitable and they are providing higher ROI or not.
All the above metrics are elements to measure ROI.
Basically ROI is a ratio between total profit and cost of investment. Calculating ROI of your digital marketing campaign properly will be a key factor in determining the overall success of your digital marketing campaign.
Source of traffic
The Source of traffic determines how users are coming to your website. For which keywords and which sites they are coming.
You can use this to analyze which sources or platforms are best for your
The four main website traffic sources are:
- Organic Search: When users approach your website using a search engine query. This type of traffic is also called organic traffic. This traffic is most beneficial for your website. The more the organic traffic the higher the success.
- Direct Visitors: These visitors directly type your URL in the search bar or may have bookmarked your website for future reference.
- Referrals: These visitors are those who came to your website from referrals or backlinks from other websites.
- Social: These users come to your website from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Analyzing the source of visitors tells you how your digital marketing strategies like backlinks. Social media, SEO, e-mails, etc are performing and what are their results.
Social Engagement
It shows the total number of actions taken by your visitors on your social media posts.
This mean-
- Clicks
- Shares
- Likes
- Retweets
- Comments
- Link clicks
Engagement is the benchmark by which to measure all of your social media success.
Conclusion
The biggest mistake marketers make is not having clear goals. This makes it difficult to measure their digital marketing campaigns’ success.
When they have definite goals they can measure success effectively. Knowing how to measure success is a way to know whether your digital marketing campaigns are successful or not.
If you know how to measure success you have not to worry about if your efforts go in vain. A good digital marketing course never let this thing happen as it will train you from beginning to the end of digital marketing. W3training School is the best digital marketing institute in Gurgaon that can help you to be a master in measuring the digital marketing campaigns and improving your campaigns on business growth directions.
The above metrics are best to measure the success of various digital marketing campaigns