How to Use Digital Marketing Metrics to Adapt Your Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing Metrics

One of the best things about digital marketing is that it’s electronic, so it is quantifiable. Digital marketing metrics allow you to determine which mechanisms in your digital strategy are functioning properly and which are not. If one of your marketing KPIs is ailing, you can investigate your digital marketing metrics to determine where and how you should adapt your strategy. You can measure all sorts of digital marketing metrics, but these are some of the most important:

Website Traffic

You can track your website traffic as a whole or you can segment this metric. There are many segmentation options, like new visitors, contacts, and leads. Tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics can help you see many visitors are returning to your website.

If the overall website traffic number is low, it could be an indication that your SEO needs improvement. Maybe you need to improve your social media posting to help drive in more traffic. You can also separate this metric into organic traffic and inorganic or promotional traffic.

Organic metrics tell you how well you rank in web searchings. Meanwhile, inorganic traffic indicates the successfulness of your ads or other dollars spent on website traffic.

Lead Generation

Your rate of lead generation tracks the number of leads you’ve attained through your website. People usually become leads by filling out a form or by contacting you directly. There are many factors that contribute to your overall lead generation, like conversion and traffic rates.

Additionally, you should analyze your CTAs, forms, landing pages, content offers, and the functionality of your website. You should make sure that if you are using paid advertising that you have installed tracking codes in order to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. As well as installed tracking for tools such as heat maps like Hotjar, Google Analytics tracking, or HubSpot tracking codes. These can help paint a 360 degree view of how healthy your lead generation is to date.

Social Media Engagement

This metric tells you how many people are following you on social media and how many are actually liking or sharing your posts. You can also tie this into your website metrics to see how many visitors you are receiving via social media. If this number is low, it could indicate that the posts you are sharing aren’t interesting to your followers or that you need to promote yourself to attain more followers.

You can also use tools such as HubSpot or Hootsuite to help run reports and metrics on the health of your social media campaigns and then take these into consideration for future modifications.

Email Engagement

One of the most lauded digital marketing metrics in an email campaign is the open rate, but it shouldn’t be the only metric you focus on. A high open rate indicates that the recipients of your emails trust your company and were enticed by your email’s subject line. The body of the email, however, is going to determine whether or not they fully engage.

As a metric, email engagement measures the number of people who opened your email and interacted with it by filling out a form, clicking on a link, emailing you back, etc. You can compare your engagement rate with your open rate to see if your email campaign was effective overall.

You can also use tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact and  HubSpot to help gage the open rates, bounce rates, downloads, form submissions and much more. By reviewing these and conducting a/b testing on your messaging, you can help capture more of your captive audience and work them further down your sales pipeline.

Other Metrics

There are tons of other metrics you can measure. Your blogging performance can teach you which posts are working and which aren’t so you can choose the best subject matter and writing styles. Your CTA click rate can tell you which CTAs are most effective and can help you make design decisions. You can even track keyword performance to see which ones you rank for and which ones get the most searches.

If you want to use digital marketing metrics to adapt your marketing strategy, you should determine which metrics are the most useful to your company, check them regularly, and make changes based on what they indicate.