Spend some time measuring your digital marketing success and the investment you make in customer engagement will not be in vain. Measure your digital marketing campaign the easy way and you’ll have a cost-effective means of determining whether the campaign is succeeding or needs modification. Here’s how to do it.
Focus on the Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important KPIs in digital marketing. Digital marketing campaigns aim to steer online traffic to your website, social media pages, blog, and other parts of your overarching online footprint. The more frequently that prospects bounce away from your site, the fewer sales you’ll generate. Ideally, those who are exposed to your digital marketing campaign will engage with your brand through a visit to the homepage or blog, spending at least a couple of minutes reading or skimming through the content.
A quick bounce away from the homepage or a high frequency of bouncing away from your online content after exposure to digital marketing is a sign that the content is not engaging as intended. A high bounce rate also indicates there is a disconnect between your digital marketing content and the information presented on your website. Furthermore, Google and other search engines view sites with elevated bounce rates as inferior quality, for most search queries.
In some cases, search engines consider sites with high bounce rates to be spam, ultimately triggering a potentially crushing algorithmic demotion in the context of search engine optimization (SEO). Tinker with your digital marketing and online content until your bounce rate improves and continue to make alterations as necessary moving forward.
Keep It Simple: Website Visits
Review your digital marketing campaign to understand the specific ads, promotions, and forms of inbound marketing that generate interest. Though tallying the aggregate number of online visits to your homepage or other pages is a superficial metric, it holds importance.
Counting online visits in accordance with specific marketing channels is especially helpful in the context of inbound marketing analytics. As an example, gauging online traffic from organic searches spurred by SEO gives you an idea as to whether your SEO push is effective.
Engagement Through Time Investment
TV-watching trends make it clear that attention spans are shrinking. As a result, the measurement of digital marketing success partially centers on target engagement. Connecting with target prospects through digital marketing channels is only half the battle. The other half is engaging those prospects to the point that they spend time on your website. Though a target customer who spends a significant amount of time on your site is not guaranteed to translate to sales, those who spend a considerable amount of time on the site are that much more inclined to follow through with a purchase.
Tweak your digital marketing and website content accordingly. Continue to tabulate the time spent on website metrics and actively monitor this important metric moving forward.
Pay Attention to the Cost Per Conversion
Conversions stemming from digital marketing campaigns are important yet they hold less importance if they are egregiously expensive. An exorbitantly high cost per lead is to the detriment of your business’s bottom line.
Continue to analyze the cost per conversion to get a sense of whether the digital marketing investment is worth the return. Alter your marketing budget accordingly and you’ll reap the rewards in the form of heightened conversions characterized by economic efficiency.
Page Views During Online Visits
Visits to your website, blog, and social media pages are critically important in the context of digital marketing success. However, someone who clicks a link to surf the web over to your homepage does not indicate that he or she is fully engaged with the value offering or the business itself. It is possible that those who visit your site will not spend much time on it. It is also possible that those visitors will digress to product pages, service pages, blog posts, etc.
Take full advantage of Google Analytics to get a sense of how visitors click through the website. Google Analytics also provides an inside look at the average number of online visitor page views during website visits. In particular, it is in your interest to zero in on the pages that customers visit at the highest frequency.
Analyze the pages that visitors express the most interest in, then reflect on how to incorporate the merits of those pages throughout the rest of your online content. By doin this you’ll succeed in maximizing engagement. Heightened engagement ultimately leads to revenue-driving conversions at the bottom of the sales funnel.
