Metrics That Matter to Your Online Marketing Campaigns
How do you gauge if you a have successful website or social media campaign? You are consistently doing a daily post and updating your website regularly but how do you measure success? How will you know if your online marketing strategy is on the right track? Pay attention to your consultant’s updates on task status, but don’t stop there. Ask questions, seek to fully understand, and delve into the crucial data.
Start with a goal and strategy in mind. What do you aim to achieve and how will you make it happen on a day-to-day basis? Lay down the metrics that will define your efforts.
Take a moment to identify your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) so you don’t get lost in limbo with your digital marketing efforts. KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a business is achieving its objectives. It is used to evaluate success at reaching targets.
Perhaps increase in the following areas for your social media stats:
- Number of fans/followers
- Number of impressions and reach
- Engagement rate/number of shares, reactions, and comments
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Number of social media inquiries
- Number of clicks sent to the website (c/o Google Analytics)
Facebook has a “focused with your objective” paid advertising capability and good to run it with proper targeting (age bracket, locations, interest, demographics, etc.) to align with your set goals (brand awareness, event attendance, foot traffic, send message).
Take advantage of the “send message” feature when posting on Facebook, this has an opportunity to give you a lot of hits if properly implemented. If one of your goals is to get social media inquiries via messenger then boosting this post has a good possibility to deliver a result. Understand the insights it generates and improve from there.
While your website is a major gateway for conversations and conversions, its creation should align with your overall goals. Your website needs to generate quality leads through your contact forms and sales page.
Take a look at these factors:
- Monthly site visitors
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate – the percentage of visitors who navigate away after viewing single page.
- Traffic source – find out where you get the traffic (Google, social media, referrals, direct, etc.)
- Behavior – learn how visitors navigate through the site (what are the pages visited the most?)
- Number of relevant inquiries
- Number of people who subscribed to the form
You can monitor all these items and even add more reports to study depending on your set criteria via Google Analytics or gather auto-generated insight from your Content Management Software like Wix. Google Analytics is a free platform and generates site activities to help marketers improve their website.
This may sound like jargon at first, but you’ll definitely get used to it as you learn from your actual data and improve your strategy backed by insights. The initiative has the potential to enhance results.
If you have any questions about evaluating and improving your metrics, and you have the desire to learn along the way, feel free to send me an email.
Digital Marketing and Your Business
What validates the real success of a digital marketing campaign? Your online marketing consultant gave you an update that your top keywords are now on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) position #1 and #2 and that your Facebook advertisement got 30 messages for a small budget of Php1000. This is good news and your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is achieved!
Yes, that phase of work is well done but that’s not the end of the task; you need to align these milestones to your business goals.
Being number #1 on SERP means a lot for your SEO team! Months of optimizing your website and sifting through the net for quality backlinks have paid off! Google and other search engines crawled your page and found it relevant to be ranked as #1 among hundred of sites vying for the same keywords. This will result to more organic visits and you can see the data as it happens in real-time for free through Google Analytics. More people will go to you—check your contents, read your company information, and take action (call, request a demo, subscribe to your newsletter, and/or send a message). You should have some promising leads!
What if you have more visits but got higher bounce rate (it is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave without going to other pages)? Your Digital Marketing team can say we are #1 on SERP but what you must ask next is, how does it improve our business?
If you are #1 on SERP with keywords not being used by your target audience and if you are getting a lot of visits but no one is doing your desired action then you are not maximizing the effort.
Same goes to your Facebook campaign. Receiving an increase number of “quality” messages must be your advertising goal. What is 30 inquiries if you did not convert or if they are only spammy? You should drive more leads then translate it to higher sales and not more messages with no conversion.
Online marketing and sales department must work hand-in-hand to reach the business goals. It is like a choreographed dance and every step must be synced with each other.
How do you plan to execute your online marketing campaign? What signals its effectivity in relation to your company’s target? Let’s talk.