Digital Marketing Metrics That Will Uncover Big Growth Opportunities

The average digital marketing spend for businesses predicted to reach $118 billion by 2021. But simply knowing the potential value of digital marketing isn’t enough—you must measure marketing metrics and analytical data to determine you’re your marketing ROI.

New vs Returning Visitors

While you’re running digital marketing campaigns, ensure you are measuring the volume of returning customers to identify if your audience is continually engaging with your brand. For example, if you have a high percentage of returning customers compared to a previous month, it’s an indication your marketing content is driving traffic. However, a decrease in new visitors would show that your website doesn’t meet the requirements of these new visitors.

Returning visitors can be compared with new visitors on Google Analytics under ‘Audience’, ‘Behavior’, ‘new vs returning’.

The Telephone

With 75% of consumers considering phone calls to be the fastest way to receive a response from a business, ignoring the significance of the telephone could deprive you of valuable insights and data into your customers’ sales journey from different touchpoints.

Call tracking joins the loop between sales calls and digital advertising spend, meaning spend can be tracked to calls and, ultimately, sales. With visitor level call tracking in place, you allocate unique, dynamic numbers to your marketing campaigns to determine the specific channels or ads that are producing phone call conversions to your business. This information can be collated and will provide data that can be used to create a comprehensive report on the ROI for each individual marketing channel.

For example, let’s say someone needed to source a decorator in their local area and typed the search term “decorators in Bedfordshire” into Google, which brought up the company First Decorating Services. However, because the company have included a phone number in their pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, they were able to call their business without needing to click the ad. Without call tracking First Decorating Services would have no way of pinpointing the online marketing method responsible for this offline conversion and therefore could believe their AdWords campaigns aren’t generating a sufficient ROI.

With call tracking, each user who lands on a website from a PPC campaign is be assigned a unique phone number on the landing page that replaces the old static phone number; the JavaScript code on their site will then capture which keyword triggered the ad. This helps produce a complete overview of their PPC performance.

User Exit Rate

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site from a specific page. This is beyond the home or landing page as they may have viewed more than one page in a session; they have not landed on the page directly, but have reached it through site navigation. This differs from a bounce rate, which is when a user leaves your site without navigating beyond the landing page in a single page session.

Remember, a high exit rate isn’t always negative. For example, users might be driven to an online news publication to read a specific article—they find the page they need, read the article and then leave. However, for a site that’s designed to generate sales, a high exit rate on specific pages can be a red flag. If you have a product tour page that explains the advantages of what you’re selling, and it has one of the highest exit rates, then it’s possible you’re not showcasing the full value of your product to your visitors.

Once you identify your key sales pages with high exit rates, solutions to fix this and optimise user experience (UX) can be implemented. Typically, some of the best solutions for optimising a checkout process include:

• List shipping costs ASAP – Make sure the different shipping rates are clear at the beginning of the checkout process to avoid unexpected, off-putting costs further down the sales funnel
• Clearly label quantities and prices – Make sure prices for different products and quantities are labelled. Including individual prices on an inventory page will prevent the customer being surprised by the costs later on in the process
• Visible ‘continue’ button – Make it obvious to users how they can reach the next step by using a highly visible, easy-to-click ‘continue’ button to prevent confusion
• Include a progress tracker – Label each step of the checkout process, e.g. step 1 – shipping address, step 2 – delivery method, step 3 – billing address, step 4 – payment details, to avoid seemingly lengthy checkout processes 

You can check your exit rate now in Google Analytics by visting Site Behavior > Exit Pages.

Social Media for Brand Awareness

The constantly increasing popularity of social media is undeniable—71% of consumers are likely to purchase a product based on social media referrals. Acknowledging social media’s popularity is one thing, but knowing exactly how to interpret the data generated from your campaigns will uncover how you can revolutionize your social media marketing to generate more conversions, promote engagement and ultimately, increase sales.

Social listening enables you to evaluate online organic conversations across social media and the web, this can be used to determine which social strategies are/are not working and whether more need to be created.

For example, if your business has a Facebook page, one essential metric to track is how your page likes have altered before and after launching a Facebook ad. A growth in page likes would signify the success rate of the campaign and therefore an increase in brand awareness – more likes equals stronger brand engagement. However, if these figures don’t achieve the desired volume of engagement or conversions, then you can work towards redesigning your ads.

A gradual increase in page likes over time would mean that your business is connecting with the correct audience, promoting your social media and sustaining your audience’s interest. Facebook Insights allows you to collate metrics on how many people are viewing your posts and how many organic or paid likes you have obtained within a specific date range.

In the example above from Facebook Insights, although the post reach has risen, the overall engagement has decreased. Reach represents how efficiently your brand or product is appearing on multiple users’ news feeds; while engagement signifies clicks, likes, comments and shares.

However, it is important to remember that reach isn’t always enough, as it doesn’t equate to high engagement. If someone has seen your ad on their newsfeed, this doesn’t signpost purchase intent, a customer relationship or brand awareness. Posts that receive engaged users are more likely to represent awareness, for users are taking the time to share their connection with your product or business instead.

Natalia Selby is marketing coordinator at Mediahawk.