When analysing your digital marketing campaign, it can get quite complicated trying to make sense of all the data. There are just so many things to track! So how do you define which are the digital marketing metrics that matter to your business?

In other words, how do you know which data is important to your business? Which data points can actually help you achieve your business goals? 

When analysing your digital marketing campaigns, it is important to be able to distinguish between important and unimportant metrics. Most often, businesses get hung up on vanity metrics so much that they start losing grip on their true business goals. 

A vanity metric is a piece of data that looks good but does not necessarily affect your business goals in an impactful way. Vanity metrics can be deceiving as it shows you impressive numbers that makes you think that you have achieved success in your marketing efforts. For example, it is exciting to see your follower count rise steadily. While this may indicate increasing interest for your product, a true indicator of sales performance is the sales numbers itself. 

In a separate article, we have shed light over the truth about vanity metrics. In this article, we will share with you the truth about metrics that matter:

1. Engagement Rate

Most likely, you will be running your campaign on a social media platform. In such cases, more than just getting your brand name out there, you will definitely want to keep tabs on how users are interacting with your ads. This means looking at how many people are hitting the like or share button, and how many are commenting on your ad. Your engagement rate informs you of the interest level that your ad is generating.

While it is always reassuring to take note of the positive data, you should also take extra notice of the negative data that is coming in. 

For example, while it is all good vibes seeing the love or like reaction button, take the time to look at the sad and angry button too. Do the same for your post comments. Crunch the numbers and see if it contributes a significant amount. Analyse your content to see what might drive these users to react the way they did. Next to the content, perhaps look into your targeting options to see if it could be optimised further. 

Essentially what you are doing is keeping track of your social media engagement with the objective of beefing it up further in order to drive more positive engagements. 

2. Click Through Rate (CTR)

Levelling up from the engagement rate, the next metric that matters is the CTR. While the engagement rate is an important metric to gauge interest levels, the CTR measures relevancy levels. This means that users have gone beyond just expressing their emotions, they are actually clicking on your ad to either visit your landing page, or even to fill our a lead generation form. 

This is big! This means that they have provided you with a leg in for you to further entice them with your product or service offerings. In other words, your audience wants to feel like you understand them and are addressing their needs and wants. 

Taking note of your CTR will help you to understand if your campaign is performing well or not. A low CTR could be indicative of a few things, such as:

• Audience targeting is too broad
• Landing page is not captivating
• Campaign offerings are not strong enough  

A good way to  properly identify improvement points for your campaign is by conducting split testing. If possible conduct split tests on all your campaigns. This will help in your optimisation work as you figure out what works best for your target audience. 

3.Traffic

Moving on from the metrics on the social media platforms, you will also need to look at the data on your website. The very first thing to note is always the traffic. Running a campaign will always get your overall number up. So, it is important to segment your traffic by source. This means you will be able to determine how your visitors are coming in from (below).  

Source: Google Analytics

Google Analytics has divided up the traffic source into 5 categories:

1. Organic
2. Direct
3. Referral
4. Social
5. Paid

These categorisations will help you to identify which channel sources are the best for you. Next would be diving deeper in your data and actually seeing how your visitors are interacting with your website. Some metrics that would be useful are :

• New Users
• Time spent on site
• Pages/Session
• Path Analysis (For GA4) / Behaviour Flow

Essentially, you are trying to determine several things, such as :

• which pages have received the highest traffic, and engagements
• at which points are your visitors dropping off
• how many pages are they visiting on average
• What areas of improvements could be done on the website

Analysing your data in such a way will help you to understand your user behaviour and thus redirect your marketing strategy in that fashion. 

4. Conversion

Naturally, after analysing your website data, another important metric to analyse is your conversion metric. These refer to any type of actions that you want your visitors to do while on your website. Your goal is to establish a point of contact with your visitor into your system. Thus, even small conversions such as filling out a form or downloading an e-book or product specifications are important. 

By tracking these conversion metrics closely, you will uncover delightful discoveries that will help you achieve success in your customer journey. For instance, you might notice that the average customer behaviour is that they will visit 5 pages on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Then, they will receive 2 more emails before making a purchase. Understanding this pattern can help you optimise this customer journey and perhaps even shorten it. 

5. Site Load Speed

This is especially helpful if you discover that your traffic numbers are not improving satisfactorily. Most businesses are so focused on creating great campaigns and building beautiful websites that this critical factor is often overlooked. 

How many times have you been directed to a site, and actually patiently waited for the site to load? Chances are, you will just give up waiting and move on to a competitor’s website that loads faster. You wouldn’t want this happening to your business, would you?

We recommend using Google PageSpeed Insights to help you out with this. While you may not be able to score perfect marks all the time, the goal is to maintain your website within the green zone. Google’s recommendation is that websites should take no longer than 3 seconds to load. We also have a separate article sharing with you tips on improving your page speed score. 

Conclusion

Stay focused on the things that matter and don’t let the unimportant data sway you away from your business goals. It is important to begin a campaign with an end in mind. Determine your key objectives so you can identify which metrics to track closely. Then come up with an action plan to optimise your campaigns on the go. 

To get detailed analysis on the metrics that matter to your campaigns and your business, simply hit us up. Get in touch with us for a comprehensive discussion on how to achieve success for your business through digital marketing.