How to Track and Measure Digital Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing campaigns are often easier to manage that offline campaigns because you have so much data at your fingerprints. On the other hand, there is so much data available to you that it can be hard to make use of. The solution is to track the metrics that matter and know how to use that information to make a difference. Here’s how to track and measure digital marketing campaigns.

Total Site Visits

This metric can be the foundation of all your other metrics. It measures how many people are visiting your website. You should monitor this metric so that you can take action if traffic to the site is dropping. You should also know when people are visiting your site.

This information is important if you’re going to run time-based marketing campaigns. It’s also handy if you want to schedule maintenance work so it doesn’t interfere with the customer experience.

Knowing what percentage of visitors are new visitors versus repeat visitors may be useful. If you don’t have repeat visitors, you probably don’t have repeat customers.

You could encourage them to like and subscribe to your content. On the other hand, it may be more important to move them down the sales funnel and turn them into happy customers so that they come back when they’re ready to buy instead of endlessly searching your listings.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate from visitor to paying customer is arguably the most important metric your digital marketing team could gather. It tells you how successful your website is at turning visitors into buyers. It is also more cost-effective to increase your conversion rate than try to attract more traffic.

Whether you make the checkout process more streamlined or increase customer trust so that they’re willing to give you their payment information, you increase overall sales with relatively little additional effort. Furthermore, these changes don’t alter your site’s SEO or require you to pay for additional advertising.

How do you measure the conversion rate? Determine the number of visitors to your website and the number of purchases that they make. If you have cookies on the site, you can determine not only what percentage of customers at a given time of day or traffic source convert, but you can determine when they drop out of the sales funnel.

That lets you know whether you need to change your homepage design to facilitate sales or make changes to the checkout process. You can always experiment with coupons, deals and personalization to increase customer lifetime value later.

Traffic Sources

Your digital marketing team should know your site’s traffic sources. Where are visitors to your home page or online store coming from? This information allows you to gauge the effectiveness of online ads. After all, it isn’t how many people see the ad that matters but how many act based upon its call to action.

Furthermore, the traffic source data will reveal referrers you may not know are sending you customers. It might be online discussion boards where people praise your product or an influencer who has mentioned your brand. It could be a small blog that has an outsized impact or social media sites you don’t invest much effort in.

You can gather this information by using UTM code. You can use a UTM generator to create a small snippet of code that can be added to the end of a URL to track traffic from that site. It is less intrusive than cookies and works even if cookies are blocked.

UTM is best used to track the organic sharing of links and deliberately dropped links in emails and online conversations. You’ll get data from search engines themselves regarding organic search results.

Your traffic metrics should show not only where customers are coming from by traffic by sources and channels. What percentage of website traffic are direct visitors, and what percentage is referred by social media? And what role do digital ads play?

You may find that digital ads hardly generate traffic to your site. You might need to tweak the ads or cut back on online ads in favor of more engagement on social media.

Interactions per Visit

There are a number of metrics you can use to monitor customer behavior on site. Average time on site tells you how “sticky” your website is. A very low number indicates a high bounce rate, and you need to improve your SEO. On the other hand, a high number isn’t necessarily a good thing.

After all, someone who spends 30 minutes on your site but never buys isn’t much use unless you’re running a blog and paid by the number of viewed ads. See how many people are visiting your home page or job listings relevant to your online store. You might need to alter your marketing campaign or SEO on those pages to get them in front of paying customers.

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