Written by Emily Rogers, Digital Account Executive

In today’s day and age, there are many ways to measure success. Accurately measuring success is something that can make or break a company. Digital marketing has become an essential means for businesses to target their audiences, boost awareness and drive sales. The digital marketing sector offers endless ways to be successful while thinking outside the box, but how do you really know if all your efforts are paying off? This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in.  

KPIs are measurable milestones that indicate the effectiveness of your marketing or business strategies. By tracking these metrics, it’ll be easier to determine whether you are meeting the goals you have worked incredibly hard to brainstorm and achieve. While there are a great deal of digital marketing KPIs that can track the smallest detail you may be interested in, there are a few that reign supreme. Instead of giving you a an exhaustive list, we’ve whittled it down to the most crucial KPIs your business should be tracking while utilizing digital marketing. 

• Website Traffic 

Monitoring the influx of traffic to your website solidifies one major metric: new prospects. Capturing new visitors and therefore, identifying new leads can greatly impact the sales journey of your target customer. Pulling frequent reports from your website or Google Analytics will also help you pinpoint which parts of your website attract the most business and interest, all metrics that assist in strategic planning and adjusting marketing campaigns. 

• Cost Per Lead 

Knowing how much money your business is spending on acquiring a lead, whether you’re selling a product, service, or simply spreading awareness about a topic, is a metric that can assist in your marketing efforts both paid and organically. You will want to evaluate if the amount invested in acquiring new leads is consistent with the effort used to get the lead. Your investment should be parallel to the number of leads obtained.   

• Social Media Impressions and Engagement 

I’m sure almost everyone reading this knows that social media without metrics is almost useless. At a quick glance it’s easy to determine the success of a social media page by the amount of followers or likes it has, but that isn’t always the case. To truly understand which content makes the biggest splash, you need to measure impressions and engagement. Tracking your engagement rate takes into consideration all aspects of your social media account, such as comments, likes, shares, followers, etc. This metric explains your social media success in one snapshot. Impressions measure the number of users who have made contact with your social media content. This includes visitors who may not be your followers and repeat users as well.  

• Email Engagement 

Raise your hand if you spend a lot of time and money on your email campaigns. Okay, you can put your hand down. It’s true many of us spend hours and thousands of dollars perfecting our email campaigns. But are you accurately measuring their success and adjusting accordingly? Gathering data like click-through and open rates from your email results and comparing them with other email campaigns you have sent in the past, can give insight on what your audience is truly interested in. 

By implementing and measuring these KPIs, you can enhance your marketing strategy and take leaps toward your next successful digital marketing campaign.