KPIs in Digital Marketing
Published 7th January, 2022
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Digital platforms are excellent tools for businesses to increase sales and spread brand awareness. Since the first clickable advertisement on the internet was created in 1994, digital marketing has constantly evolved to establish a strong presence for itself in society.
Undoubtedly, almost all businesses can benefit greatly by learning how to use these tools to their advantage. As consumers, it is also worth understanding more about this phenomenon that has a major influence over our spending patterns.
When conducting digital marketing, gathering and evaluating data is extremely important in determining whether current strategies are effective, or deciding which directions to move next. Since there are so many ways to do digital marketing, there are a lot of metrics and measurements involved too.
One of the main goals of businesses is to increase or maximise profits. This overarching goal can be broken down into smaller, more specific goals such as increasing brand awareness or promoting sales of a specific product. After deciding on the goal, there are a ton of different key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing strategies and plan for the future.
Blogs and Websites
One of the main things that digital marketers track is the number of visitors on a website or webpage, also known as traffic. Traffic can be tracked based on different time periods (hourly, monthly, all-time etc.), different regions around the world, which websites they were directed from and so on. One popular metric is organic search traffic, which refers to visitors that are directed to the website from search engine results.
How much time the average visitor spends on the page is also a good reflection of the performance of a digital marketing strategy. If a business uses email newsletters or promotions, email open rates can show how many of those who received the email actually opened them. This can tell a company if their content marketing and outreach is effective, or if they perhaps need to improve on these factors.
However, these benchmarks do not necessarily translate into increased profits. For this, looking at conversion rates might be more useful. Conversion rate is the percentage of total visitors who take action on a website, for example, clicking an advertisement or buying a product. Because of this, conversion rate optimisation specialists are very sought-after in digital marketing.
Advertisements
Businesses can pay to place their advertisements online and track how well they are doing through several metrics. These are usually small banners or links that appear on popular sites that lead to the advertiser’s page.
Many websites offer advertising services including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and they provide similar reports on ad performance. Number of views, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, audience demographics and so on allow the advertiser to see how effective their ads are and optimise them accordingly.
Social Media
The KPIs for digital marketing in social media might be more familiar to most of us. They differ slightly from platform to platform, but most of the metrics given to users are similar. For a start, there are three numbers all social media users are familiar with: likes, shares, and follows; or similar variations to the same effect. These give an overall idea of how well pages or posts are doing.
Business user accounts on major social media platforms usually come with more detailed reports that can help better reach marketing goals. These include the number of times posts appear on someone’s newsfeed, audience growth rate, how many followers actually saw a post and so on.
As with blogs and websites, conversion rates can also be monitored for social media pages, as in the number of direct purchases or visits made to your main website via the platform, depending on the set goal.
Benchmarks
These KPIs can be compared against benchmarks to judge the effectiveness of strategies. The benchmarks for these KPIs will vary depending on many different factors such as industry, region, target audience and so on. For example, according to a conversion benchmark report, the catering and restaurants industry had a higher average conversion rate of 18.2% as compared to the travel industry with an average conversion rate of 11.9% in 2021.
In professional digital marketing, there are a myriad of tools and skills available to track and monitor these KPI. While it might sound like a simple task for a smaller company with more manageable goals, say, to increase their number of followers, larger corporations run multiple methods of digital marketing at the same time, making it very difficult to monitor each individual figure.
Digital marketers are equipped with skills to not only help select suitable methods according to the company’s needs, but also collect and analyse the data involved and figure out what to do next. In fact, there are many different specialists who focus on different aspects of digital marketing, and large companies usually have a team of digital marketers working together to reach their target.