Marketing Metrics: Essential Digital Marketing KPIs

When it comes to KPIs with your digital marketing, it is crucial that you get an understanding about what’s working and what’s not. And it’s going to help you achieve success at the end of the day. Now, these key performance indicators give us measurable results and value, and tell us whether some of our vital marketing objectives are actually being met or not. But the issue we see is that there are so many KPIs that you could choose from, and it can actually get really overwhelming. That’s why today what I’ve done is I’ve compiled a list of what I believe would be some of the most critical marketing KPI examples that you and your business need to consider today.

Hi, my name is Jordan, from the Marketing Mindset podcast, brought to you by donebynine.com. With this podcast, what we do is we challenge you to become the smartest marketer in the room, where we talk about ways to move away from random acts of marketing and start helping you build a more long-term marketing strategy. And today we’re going to be talking all around marketing KPIs, and in particular digital marketing KPIs.

Firstly, though, answering that question of why do we even need these in the first place. It’s pretty obvious. A KPI is that key performance indicator. It’s really going to help us determine what’s working, what’s not. It’s going to help us really be able to show where the value is in our marketing. It’s going to help with direction in the future. It’s going to help us decide where our budget should go. Should they go into our performance-based marketing campaigns versus our brand-building campaigns? It’s going to show all those different things. And essentially, it’s just going to show you where the hell you need to be heading, which is really important at the end of the day.

So I want to break these down for you today, and give you a few examples of some of the most critical ones that we find a lot of businesses will focus on, and ones that you should be at least considering. And if you’re not tracking or reporting on your KPIs right now, firstly, that’s the first thing you need to do, because it is so important. If we don’t test and learn and adapt, and if we don’t actually have any data to make those decisions on, then it gets really difficult.

And the other thing that I want you to consider as we’re going through these KPIs is thinking about how you can actually report some of these successes and some of these results to your team. You need to be able to show that things that you’re doing, or your ideas, are actually working. And as a business owner, you need to have that sense that that investment that you’re making into marketing is actually doing stuff towards your overall marketing goals.

So let’s go through them. The first lot is, I’m kind of breaking it down to lead-based KPIs. And this is kind of like your performance marketing, the ones that are going to help the business in the short term, the right-here-and-now type marketing ones. The first one you need to have is obviously your site traffic. This is how much traffic your website is actually getting at any one time. This is a given. And this is probably the one that you’re doing now anyway. It’s having a look at the amount of people coming, whether they’re new versus returning users, and we’ll talk more about that shortly.

Where are they coming from? Are they based within the target countries that you actually work in? Or are they spam, and they’re all over the place around the world? So actually understanding your site traffic, and being able to measure on your site traffic, is really important. There’s a couple of things to think about. We would have a look at immediate growth by looking at month-on-month reports. But it’s also really interesting to compare that data. You can do this in Analytics, obviously, and actually compare the data year-on-year. How were you looking this time last year versus where you are now? Just when you do year-on-year traffic, just make sure that you keep in mind weekends, and making sure that the dates still remain the same. And it just makes the traffic a little bit more accurate, I guess you could say.

So the second one I want you to think about is your site traffic-to-lead ratio. So that’s actually going to help us determine what’s working and what’s not. Because it’s all good that we’re getting some traffic to the site and people are going to the site. But are they actually generating leads? And are they generating leads that you actually want? So using this metric can actually help you determine whether the content that you’re using in your ad campaigns to get people to your website in the first place is actually working. Or the content that you’ve got in your website: is that actually helping convince the user that the product or service that you offer is actually going to help solve their problems, and is something that they actually need as well?

So that’s just something really to consider: yeah, cool, we’re getting some site traffic. People are coming to the site. Awesome. But are they then actually performing the actions we need them to take to actually become a customer? Are they performing anything to become that lead, that first stage to becoming a customer? So helping determine your content, and working out that ratio, is really key.

The next one then is looking at your cost per lead. Really similar to what we’ve just discussed. But what we’re looking at here more is making sure that advertising that you’re doing, and the advertising that you’re spending, and the cash you’re spending on Facebook, is actually doing something. Because a lot of the times we’ll see that businesses will allocate budgets towards their performance marketing. But essentially what they’re doing is literally just donating funds to the Facebook Christmas party at the end of the day. Because if you’re not tracking what the cost per lead actually is, then you don’t really have any goals to be able to help condense that, make that better, or find that sweet spot at the end of the day.

And what that does is it helps you really determine about the content that you’re actually sharing, and making sure that content that you’re advertising is then targeted to the right audience, and that audience is then going to your website, seeing what they actually need to see, and become a lead from there. So that’s really a good indication that everything is working.

Then the other thing I want you to think about is that marketing mix. And this comes down to not only the mix between whether you’re doing performance-based marketing versus your overall brand awareness, but then also your channel mix, about where that traffic’s actually coming down from. It’s really crucial for us to ensure we’re not solely relying on low-cost channels, but what we’re doing is we’re striving to find high-value customers, if you know what I mean. So having a look at your marketing mix, and where that actual traffic’s coming from, is really important to understand, because, hey, you may be getting a lot of traffic on your SEO campaigns or from your blogs or anything, but if they’re not converting to the type of customers that you need, you’ve got a problem.

Whether that problem is the content that you’re sharing is not talking to your ideal, whether the content’s just not working for you in general, then having a look at the marketing mix of your paid campaigns. Let’s say you had a Facebook campaign, a LinkedIn campaign and a Google Ads campaign: really having a look at the different mix that you’ve got, and seeing what is actually, A, talking best to your target customer, but, B, actually turning them into leads or a customer at the end of the day as well. And then setting some goals around that as well. For instance, you may want to increase your inbound sales by 5%, or you might want to boost your outbound sales by 15% on any particular month. So it means that you can actually set some targets based on that marketing mix, and just making sure that marketing mix is actually doing something for your marketing strategy in general.

Now, the next lot of KPIs I want to talk about can sometimes be overlooked. The first lot was obviously based around performance-based marketing: trying to get people to leave contact details, lead customers, sales. That’s what we’re trying to look at there. This one here is more looking at your brand relevance, and setting some KPIs around that. And I think it’s really important to set KPIs around this, especially if you do have some money put towards these campaigns. Because that’s going to be a big question that’s going to be asked from yourself, obviously, if you’re the founder or the business owner, or your accountant, or the leaders within a business as well. They’re actually going to want to see that their return on investment is looking good, and it’s harder to show that with brand-based campaigns.

So some of the KPIs that I want you to track with your brand relevance are things like your social media mentions. Are people actually talking about you on social? Are they leaving reviews? What type of activities are you being spoken about? Are people actually engaging with your content? Think about all those type of engagements, and build some KPIs around that to really show that brand relevance. And then you can show your reports that, hey, things are working. We’re actually getting in front of our target customer. They’re liking the stuff that we actually put on, and everything’s working really well.

Then the other one is thinking around your NPS. And this isn’t necessarily an external marketing tactic, but obviously tracking your NPS is really important. And you’ll probably get this feedback from your sales team anyway once a customer comes through. But tracking an NPS for your marketing, it really means that you get a much better picture on whether the marketing activities, and the marketing that you’re doing currently, is actually turning into customers that are the ideal customer for your business, that have got the exact pain points that you solve, and that really need help from you and your business. So that’s why tracking NPS and having NPS is like a side KPI of your marketing strategy. It’s just so important, because it does: it helps dictate that top of funnel, where people are actually coming in.

Other KPIs I want to talk about are website-based KPIs. Kind of going back to what we were saying before as well, not just around traffic to the site, but thinking around things like your conversion rates. You need to be tracking: are people converting? And I don’t just mean converting on a lead form or a contact form. Set some conversion rates, some micro conversions as well, based on some other things. You might have videos on your website, or you might have other pieces of content. And you might want to actually set some KPIs based on: I want this video on this page to be viewed this amount of times, or to have the average watch time at 45 seconds of a one-minute video.

To you, obviously, depending on your business and your strategy, people watching that video could be one of the massive hand-raisers that your business needs, that you know that people who watch that video will then turn into an ideal customer, or they’re more likely to actually convert. So setting some of those micro conversions, and actually tracking that conversion rate, can also be really beneficial to you in the marketing team, and as a business owner.

And then that goes nicely on to time on site. That’s obviously another big one that we want to have a look at. Now, in Google Analytics 4, it’s not really time on site anymore. You’re actually now looking at engagement time. So it’s the amount of engagements they have on a page. Are they scrolling? Are they clicking? Are they doing things? Are they going to another page? Are they going back? What is that engagement time? We want people to be engaged, and click and do stuff on our website as much as possible. So set some goals around where you’re at currently, and try to set some goals on trying to increase that engagement time by improving your content.

If you’ve got a low engagement time, it means that literally the site content isn’t really resonating or talking to your ideal customer. And that’s a problem. It’s a problem that you need to fix with the on-site copy, or adding videos, or the way that you’re portraying everything. So having a look at the time on site and the engagement in Google Analytics 4 is really important for you to actually determine what is working well.

And another idea which is similar to that, but really taking a look at your new users versus your returning user rate as well. This is broken down in Google Analytics, and it’s probably worth having a bit of a play and kind of working out where you can see that. But new users are obviously people that have never come to your website before. And that’s great to be able to see: is some of that top-of-funnel cold ads working? Are they bringing new users to your site? And that’s awesome. But we also need to be focusing on the returning user as well.

Returning user is most likely where you’re going to be seeing your conversions at the end of the day. So you’ve got to focus on the returning user, and make sure that when they are coming back to your site, they’re seeing more trustworthy content, to actually help build up your authority, to the point that returning user then becomes either a lead, or eventually helps to become a customer as well. So it’s all about that full customer journey: thinking about them as a new user, and then looking at the data and seeing what page do they come back to as a returning user? Did they come back as a returning user based on one of our campaigns that we had as well?

So really setting some KPIs. And what this is going to do is it’s going to help you get some clarity about that time to conversion. So how long does it actually take from someone who first goes to your website to actually leaving the contact on a lead form, or contacting you via the contact page, or performing a certain action? So what is that lead time? You’ll be able to work all of those details out at the same time by looking at the new user versus returning user data.

So those are just a few of those critical ones that you need to be looking at. And obviously there’s a lot more, depending on your business, on your industry, and it all changes. And so I think it’s about yourself, and thinking around how you can literally get better and create more goals and more KPIs around your marketing. That’s actually going to be crucial to actually achieving the overall business goals that you actually need. And measuring these KPIs is going to allow you to measure your progress. It’s going to make sure you understand your audience, which is obviously critical. And it’s going to make you ensure that you make so many more informed decisions about the direction of your business at the end of the day.

Now, if you do need a hand with us, obviously, Done By Nine, we’re marketing strategy experts: building digital strategies, literally what we do. So if you do need assistance with actually deciphering your existing plan (because a lot of businesses that come to us have actually got an existing plan, but they just need help with focusing on those key KPIs that are actually going to help move the needle), or you just need to actually start building your new strategy from scratch, you can go along to our website and chat to a member of the team, donebynine.com. And you’ll be able to chat with a member of the team, and we’re more than happy to give you a bit of direction in terms of your strategy, and where you should be setting some of these goals and KPIs.

And of course, you can find all our other podcasts and resources on our website as well, donebynine.com. But I’m hoping that this has given you a few ideas on some of those essential digital marketing KPIs that you need to be focusing on. And we will see you at the next episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast.