How to Use Digital Marketing Analytics to Determine Success

Whether you’re running social media ads, doing SEO, or conducting an email marketing campaign, without collecting and measuring digital marketing analytics, you’re flying blind. You need these metrics to guide you and to prevent losing money on ineffective marketing strategies. Knowing how to choose and apply appropriate analytics to assess the performance of digital marketing campaigns is a must. This is because analytics provide useful insights, keep you focused on the most important goal, and ensure goal alignment. To be able to take advantage of these benefits, you need to learn how to use them properly. In this blog post, let’s go over these common digital marketing performance metrics:

• Conversion Rate (CR)
• Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Bounce Rate
• Overall Website Traffic
• Google Keyword Ranking
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Return on Investment (ROI).

By the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll know how to apply digital marketing analytics. Also, you will know how to use this information to improve your digital marketing campaigns. So, let’s start off with conversion analytics.

Conversion Analytics

This group of analytics measures how effective your campaigns are at converting your online audience into leads and paying customers. According to surveys, 81 percent of B2C marketers use them to measure the performance of content marketing. Read the different types of analytics associated with conversions below.

1. Conversion Rate (CR)

This digital marketing analytic can be defined in many ways. For example, you can measure the conversion rate by calculating how many people have registered for your webinar. Your competitor, on the other hand, could see it as the number of leads that already watched the webinar and contacted them for an additional consultation. Regardless of the conversion you’re tracking, your conversion rate can be measured simply. Divide the total number of people who interacted with the campaign by the number of people who did what you needed.

Let’s say you’d like to measure how many people converted into leads on a new landing page.  According to analytics, 100 people visited the page, but only 10 of them have clicked the CTA and provided emails. If we apply the formula and divide the total number of visits – 100 – by the number of those converted – 10 – we calculate that the conversion rate is 10 percent.

Joshua Lyons Marketing has an entire blog post on conversion rate optimization to increase your conversion rate. So, be sure to read up on it for more information on this concept.

2. Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)

This important conversion metric defines the success of a campaign by comparing its cost with the number of leads it generated. In other words, it’s the cost of one lead for the company. For a business owner or marketer, CPL is a critically important analytic because it gives a very good indication of how effective, or ineffective, a certain campaign or tactic is.

What is a Good CPL?

A good CPL is as low as possible. However, take into account how much a lead spends after their conversion. For example, if your CPL is around $30, but the average amount the lead spent was $55, then the CPL is probably good. After evaluating the CPLs of your campaigns, you need to focus on making them as low as possible, to increase your return on investment.

3. Bounce Rate

Google defines bounce as “a single-page session on your site.” Simply put, that’s a person visiting only one page and then leaving. A high bounce rate means that your campaign did not engage potential leads, so they chose to abandon your website.

Calculating the bounce rate shows you how effective your website’s content is in helping you to achieve a campaign’s goals. It also tells Google about the quality of your content, so having a high bounce rate carries a risk of a poor website ranking. This is why the bounce rate is a digital marketing analytic to watch in Google Analytics. Improving the content you use on your website, and in other campaigns, is the best way to reduce the bounce rate. Start with ensuring the clarity and a lack of errors in content. Using tools like Studyker, Grammarly, and ClassyEssay, for example, is a good idea to automate this process.

Traffic Analytics

Some other important digital marketing analytics to track revolve around your traffic. These metrics could include how many users go to your website and view your content. As you can guess, having users on your site is very important, as you are putting time and money into your website. With that being said, let’s talk about some traffic-related analytics.

1. Overall Website Traffic

Your website traffic matters for the growth of your business because it determines how popular your website is. If the overall website traffic is low, then it means your marketing isn’t bringing potential leads and customers in from your website. When there’s no contact between you and customers, there are no sales. That’s why this metric is critical to measure the performance of all digital marketing channels you’re using. Check your website’s traffic regularly to see how your marketing plan is doing.

2. Google Keyword Ranking

Google plays a critical role in the performance of your marketing. It ranks your website for a range of specific keywords, thus giving you a chance to rank highly for them (and attract potential customers this way).

“To know the keywords that Google ranks your website for, you need to use an SEO research tool like SEMRush,” advises Marieka Hightower, the head of marketing at Subjecto. “Once you know them, you can start optimizing your content production and SEO campaigns.” This means using these keywords in your marketing materials: blog articles, landing pages, etc. Brex has an extensive article mentioning SEO tools (including SEMRush) and other website marketing resources. SEO tools will help you improve your keyword rankings and get more website traffic.

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Measuring your CTR means monitoring how many people reach a campaign’s landing page after clicking on an ad. You should use this metric to evaluate the performance of your ads and keywords. Each advertisement platform that generates traffic to your website should be tracked. This way, you can see how effective your advertisement on each platform was.

To make someone who land on your website from an ad an even more qualified lead, you can automate their user experience. For example, you can set up an automation that makes customizes their future website visit experience, or the ads they will see in the future. If you’re not using marketing automation tools already, we highly recommend doing so.

Revenue Analytics

The next set of digital marketing analytics we are covering is revenue-related. This is a very important topic to discuss, as you want to have high revenue as a business owner. By keeping track of these analytics, you can generate more revenue.

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1. Return on Investment (ROI)

While there are a couple ways to define this important metric, you can start by measuring how much you spent versus how much you gained in new sales. This is to ensure your marketing efforts were effective and generated income for your business.

How to Use ROI to Improve Your Business

Use the ROI to define the best-performing areas of your digital marketing campaigns. For example, if you identify a significant portion of traffic to your landing pages comes from your blog, chances are that your content marketing is engaging and working well. Although this does not directly create revenue, the time you invested has a high return.

Let’s say that you need to calculate the ROI for video marketing, one of the areas of content strategy. To do so, we need to take the revenue generated by the video campaign and divide by all costs that went into the production of the videos. If you got 100 paying customers who spent $60 each ($6,000 total), and the production cost $500, then the ROI is 1,100%. That’s $5,500 ($6,000 revenue – $500 investment cost) divided by $6,000 (total revenue). If you have a 100% ROI, then you’re breaking even. But, if you have less than 100%, then you’re losing money. And if you make more than 100% ROI, then you did more than just breaking even.

Pay attention to the performance of each of your marketing channels. If you find some to perform better than others, try to invest more in those channels.

Digital Marketing Analytics: Conclusion

Collecting and analyzing these metrics is an absolute must for any business doing digital marketing. Keep these analytics in mind the next time you create a marketing campaign. They will help you achieve the best possible results in the future. The great news is that you don’t have to be an expert to try to use these key metrics to improve your marketing. But when you do use these metrics, you’ll definitely appear to be an expert, through your success.

And if you need help with your marketing, you can contact Joshua Lyons Marketing through the form below.

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AUTHOR BIO

Angela Baker is a professional writer, a blogger at WriteScout, and a contributing editor at TopEssayWriting. She also has her own blog, where she writes about innovations in technology and their impact on digital marketing.