You’re Losing Money by Not Using These 3 Digital Marketing Tracking Metrics

There are hundreds of different marketing metrics you can track today. With the right tools, you can easily track your marketing activities online. You can get very granular if you have the right tracking system set up. Are you tracking your digital marketing efforts? But more importantly, are you tracking the right metrics?

The Marketing Garage is a marketing agency with 10+ years of experience in measuring digital marketing success. Below we have outlined the mistakes you are likely making when tracking your digital marketing efforts. Then we’ll list 3 key metrics you should be tracking.

The Metric Tracking Mistakes You Are Probably Making

There are a lot of metrics you can track. Some hold more importance than others. Some are superficial or ego boosting but do not really tell you the real story. They look nice but they fail to connect your marketing activities to real business outcomes. These metrics include:

• Reach
• Likes/shares/followers
• Site visits, pageviews
• Cost-per-click
• Email open rates

These are not a leading indicator of marketing success like other metrics. They don’t tell you if your efforts lead to a sale, conversion or other defined business goal. You need to look at the big picture including these metrics and make sense of them. Another mistake is that many fall into the premature testing dilemma and don’t wait long enough to have statistically significant information.

Dr. Augustine Fou explains the problem on Forbes:

“….too many marketers have relied on, and still report on, easy to measure quantity metrics like numbers of impressions and number of clicks (see above survey results from the ANA). They lost sight of real measures of business outcomes. Even though marketers know ‘conversions’ are the most important KPI, the most used KPIs are vanity metrics — CPM (‘cost per thousand’), CPC (‘cost-per-click’), reach, and site visits.”

The 3 Key Digital Marketing Metrics to Track

I’ve worked at this digital marketing agency long enough to know which metrics matter the most. Here are the 3 most important digital marketing tracking metrics that should be the focal point of your analytics:

1. Conversion Rates

Are your marketing activities leading to the desired actions you want your customers to take when they visit your website or social channels? Tracking your conversion rates will tell you if what you are doing is working. 

A conversion can mean different things for different companies. It is a desired action you want a customer to take, so it’s up to you to define and determine how you track it. Examples of a conversion rate can be:

• A sale
• A phone call
• A form submission
• Subscribing to your company newsletter
• Downloading a whitepaper
• etc.

You can define conversion goals for a variety of digital touchpoints. The most common are landing pages, entry pages, mobile conversions, and social media conversions. 

2. Money Landing Pages

It’s very important to know the top pages on your website that drive the most organic traffic, have the most visitors, have the highest conversions, generate leads and ultimately lead to sales. These are the pages where you should be focusing your efforts. It’s important to keep these pages fresh and update them regularly to maximize their effectiveness as a revenue driver for your website. The image below is an example of how our marketing agency can measure which pages have the best SEO.

These top pages are tied directly to your SEO efforts. Use Google Analytics, Search Consoles and other SEO tracking tools and track:

• Keywords for which your page is ranking 
• Website traffic and repeat visitors
• Time on site, pages per session and bounce rate
• Which keywords are bringing the most visitors to your website and leading to conversions

Use this information to update your content, adjust your calls to action, and refine your webpages.

3. Digital Marketing Return On Investment

All companies need to know if they are getting a return on their investment in digital marketing. It’s not feasible to continue to fork out money unless you know it makes financial sense. Knowing which marketing channels are profitable and driving revenue, and others that are not, is essential to refining your marketing focus. It will also help you determine actions you should stop doing so you can re-allocate your budget and focus on what is bringing in more money. 

A simple formula you can use is:

Digital Marketing ROI = Sales Increases – Digital Marketing Investment / Marketing ROI

Are you looking to only create attractive reports or achieve real marketing outcomes? The more you focus on the outcomes of your marketing efforts, the better positioned you will be to refine your digital strategy to achieve your desired business goals.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency. Our data-driven approach combines traditional proven ad development techniques with the test & learn capabilities of today’s online marketing.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing company that has extensive experience in cultivating effective digital marketing strategies. We help businesses in many different sectors across North America fix their online marketing and branding. Our data-driven mix of SEO and digital marketing process is like no other.