Data is at the heart of a robust and comprehensive digital marketing strategy. By making data-driven decisions, your marketing efforts can scale, adjust, and focus better on getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Over the last couple of decades, technology in the marketing space has advanced substantially, allowing companies to not only understand their target audiences better, but to refine messaging and see where a particular customer is in the marketing funnel — awareness, consideration, or decision — and create content accordingly.
But if your data isn’t translating into action — or you’re suffering from what we call death-by-data — your digital marketing metrics might be a waste of time.
The Death-by-Data Problem
Getting feedback in the form of data about your digital marketing campaign is no doubt a critical component of your marketing strategy. After all, if you don’t have the data to allow you to see which parts of a marketing campaign worked and which didn’t, how can you expect to learn and develop a digital marketing strategy that scales?
But while data is important, too much of it can create a ton of distraction, noise, and what we call analysis paralysis, which is essentially data overload. The benefit of well-defined and valuable data is that it can be actionable, but too much of it can actually harm your decision-making process. That’s where advanced marketing software that measures digital marketing metrics comes in. It allows you to clarify and filter data into meaningful, visible, and actionable steps.
The 5 Most Important Digital Marketing Metrics
The goal of digital marketing metrics is to track and decipher the way consumers engage with your brand online through websites and social media platforms. And a partner that can leverage game-changing marketing software like Google Analytics will change not only the way you see data but how you use it to make better-informed decisions.
New and Returning Visitors
Being excited about new visitors is great, but they might not be ready to buy yet. Returning visitors, however, should get you excited, as they may be approaching conversion or a purchase. This metric is important because you can use technology like HubSpot to place cookies and tracking code on users’ computers to see where they are in the sales funnel.
Client Lifetime Value (CLV)
How long will your client stay with you and what is the maximum profit you can get from that client? Knowing this key metric, not just on a purchase-by-purchase basis but across the whole relationship, is important. CLV underscores that customer acquisition cost is high for new customers, so increasing the value of your existing customers is a great way to drive growth.
Visitor / Leads / Sales Ratio (or Lead Conversion Rate)
If you know how many visitors it takes to get a lead, and then how many leads it takes to get a sale, you can calculate how many visitors it takes to get a sale. You take the number of leads divided by the total number of website visitors and then multiply it by 100%.
For example, if you have 400 visitors to a site which results in eight leads, then you divide 8 by 400 (which is 0.02) and multiply it by 100%, for a lead conversion rate of 2%.
Decision-level Form Submissions
As opposed to downloading an eBook or whitepaper, which are top of the funnel offers, these form submissions — like ‘contact us’ or ‘schedule an appointment’ — are for those customers ready to make a decision right then and there. Knowing who those customers are as well as how many there are is an important gauge to establish the success of future campaigns.
TouchPoints to Get to Your Ideal Sale
Seven touches was the average number of times a potential customer would have to engage with your content before purchasing a product or service. This was back before visitors had tons of information at their fingertips. The reason you may not be getting enough conversions is that some customers need more nurturing or more touches. You can use software to measure every customer engagement, lead-score them, and prioritize them for email marketing drips.
The Top 5 Tools For Digital Marketing Metrics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an incredible macro tool that provides all sorts of information about the global health of your website traffic. You can track the performance of your initiatives by gathering data about things like page views, number of visitors, returning visitors, traffic sources, exit rate, bounce rate, click through rate (CTR), and keywords. Major macro benefits to using Google Analytics include:
- Improving the bounce rate of your website
- Optimizing your website ranking
- Learning more about your prospective clients
- Segmenting your visitors effectively
- Planning future goals
- Providing data visualization
HubSpot
HubSpot is an essential tool for your digital marketing efforts because it eliminates much of the death-by-data we see companies struggling with. It allows you to find out how many visitors, leads, and clients you were able to get compared to your goals. And knowing where your customer is in the sales funnel is something HubSpot has perfected, down to the individual person’s name.
You can find out — through tracking code and cookies — how certain individuals engaged with your company (direct mail, email, landing page, SEO, social media platforms, etc.). You can then lead score them based upon their engagement level and prioritize them. HubSpot is great for:
- Integrating your social media
- Integrating your website
- Tracking communications and leads
- Customization and real-time updates
SEMRush
SEMRush works more on a micro level, providing intelligent and narrowly focused data that fill in the gaps between Google Analytics and HubSpot. The platform is extremely easy to use, but behind the simplicity is data with a level of depth that you wouldn’t be able to get from HubSpot. Some of the best features for your digital marketing strategy on SEMRush include:
- Simplified reports
- Easy to use, SEO-friendly content briefs/templates
- Analyzing the effectiveness of social media
- Domain authority overview
- Position tracker
- Traffic analysis
- Keyword research
Wistia
Video development is an ever-growing part of successful digital marketing campaigns. Wistia is a video analytics tool that helps you figure out who is watching your videos, when people are rewinding, and drop-off points at which people are abandoning. There’s a call-to-action called a Turnstile that’s built right into the video that allows viewers to enter their name and email address so you can track them on HubSpot and drip market to them about the parts of the video they missed.
TubeBuddy
This is a tool used specifically in conjunction with YouTube. With its large reach, YouTube should be part of the basket of social media your company uses to post informative and visually-appealing videos for your target audience. Tools for how to manage your channel is where TubeBuddy comes in, including:
- Increased productivity
- Bulk tools for annotations, cards, thumbnails, and more
- Quick optimization for your video’s tags
- Other useful data
Start Making Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
If you’re able to successfully manage these five metrics, you’ll be able to radically transform your digital marketing strategy by making data-driven decisions that increase your conversion rate. Be sure to check out our Digital Marketing Masterclass on this topic from CEO Chris Carr.
And if you have any questions about putting together a comprehensive marketing system, contact us today with any questions or learn more about our unique approach.
