Five Important Digital Marketing KPIs to Track

This article was originally published on Forbes and written by Noblestream Marketing CEO, Ashlee Piga.

Implementing your marketing strategy is only as good as the time you take to verify its effectiveness. Having the ability to identify if the goals you set have been reached or not lets you determine what needs to be used more and what needs to be optimized. Key performance indicators or ‘KPIs’ are numerical values that reflect the efforts of your marketing strategy. They also give you all the information you need to make decisions that will help you make pivots when things aren’t going as well and help you celebrate all of the digital wins you’ll realize from your optimization efforts. Many insights can be revealed through tracking these digital marketing KPIs over time that will help streamline your way to success, understanding your audience better and the digital experiences that drive them to action. 

Digital Engagement

We’re all aware of the power that social holds and understanding if you’re producing content that’s worthwhile and valuable is crucial. Why spend more resources on developing images for a carousel on Instagram when the reel you posted last week is still gaining traction? 

We firmly believe in putting efforts forth into what drives the most engagement which is why this is an important KPI that could allow your brand to have all the reach you desire. One of the biggest challenges brands face is staying relevant in the everchanging digital landscape so it’s important to always understand your audience and what content is driving the most visibility, action and engagement. While you want all of your content to be engaging, setting realistic expectations for digital content and engagement goals is important. You should aim for at least 75% of your content to produce a 1-5% engagement rate. 

Click-Through Rate

This commonly tracked KPI is the percentage of clicks on your link that generated impressions. Also known as CTR, click-through rates are not only important to understand how many people are seeing your message, but how many people are taking action and expanding their digital experience.

This metric provides insight into a variety of marketing tactics and helps you understand how your content is resonating and evoking action among your audience. Generally speaking, a CTR over 1% is healthy. Of course, optimal CTR depends on other factors like audience, content and call-to-action. If you’re not impressed with what this metric reveals, reviewing historical campaign CTR gives you the opportunity to understand what is not working and implement a new strategy until you’ve reached success in this area.

Conversion Rate

The conversion. The action. The completion! This is an insight into whether your funnel is successful or not – it can be applied to most any industry and any digital marketing tactic. If you have provided a top-notch customer journey, this KPI will most always be met. It’s not only getting the user to flow through your journey, but complete it. 

It’s essentially the number of people who performed the action you presented to them divided by the total users who took the first action. This KPI is the result of how many leads were converted. Conversion rate is a broad value that reflects how successful your marketing efforts are overall as the following ones are more specific to different aspects of your campaign.

The holy grail of marketing. Always be measuring, refining and repeating. 

Keyword Ranking

Keywords are still so, so relevant because they help represent a digital context and search engines are designed to favor groups of relevant content – it’s why ranking is so important. The more that you replicate content around core keywords and phrasing, the more likely you are to return organically and in a favorable position. 

It’s also an important KPI because this is how you are initially seen by users that are in the market for the product or service you’re offering. Determining if your web page is in the position you want it to be or not allows you to be seen by more potential customers by optimizing your keywords, page content, H tags, etc. Staying relevant is critical, especially around content created for specific verticals, channels and industries. Always make sure to do this research up front to save additional content development time later on. 

Customer Acquisition Cost

Another helpful metric to track during the digital journey is one that is very end-of-funnel centric. This KPI determines the cost of the total amount it took to turn a user into a customer and its oftentimes a metric that is used in paid advertising analysis. Quite simply, it’s calculated by dividing the total marketing investment by the number of customers acquired. 

This digital marketing metric is widely used across eCommerce, retail and B2B organizations, and it’s oftentimes the single most important stat when deciding how effecitve a campaign is at returning revenue generating customer acquisition. Obtaining this percentage is essential to budget more efficiently in the future, and lets you see where you should heighten or lessen your resources. By tracking CAC across your digital marketing campaigns can help you determine the scale of your advertising efforts compared to the customers you’re acquiring.

Ultimately, setting clear business objectives and measuring and adjusting progress towards them along the way will put your brand in the exact space you want it. These five important digital marketing metrics to track will keep you on the right track to sustainable content development and publishing. Consistently measuring your digital progress is a realistic way to eventually meet each goal you set for your business. Intervening when necessary to achieve your ideal KPIs is a reassuring way to optimize your marketing strategy to stay current and deliver the content and experiences your audiences are looking for. And while it’s important to set goals and create benchmarks, don’t forget to have fun with your content.