How to Measure Digital Marketing

Digital marketing allows you to reach a variety of demographics. Advertising your business depends upon reaching your target audience, and digital marketing is a cost-effective way for small businesses to not only make consumers aware of your brand but to keep it top of mind. It allows your audience to experience your message where they spend their time. Digital also pairs well with other mediums, such as radio.  

Many new business owners ask how they can tell if their digital marketing efforts are effective. Metrics are a critical component of your marketing strategy, as they give you measurable, actionable insight into how well your ads or content are performing. One example is using a proxy metric for radio that lets you track your website traffic using a special URL, phone number, or discount code so that you can identify exactly what prompted the increased visits. Having a better understanding of how you can use these metrics and pair them with other forms of advertising gives you the key to amplifying your digital marketing impact.  

Digital Marketing: An Overview  

More than half the people in the world use the internet. To be exact, in January 2021, there were 59.5% or 4.66 billion active users globally. A staggering 4.32 billion people access the web on mobile devices. Those statistics should be enough to explain the proliferation of digital marketing. Any advertising effort that uses the internet or an electronic device is considered digital marketing.  

This vast category includes SEO, SEM, social media, your website, and email marketing. Digital marketing gives businesses a wide range of opportunities to reach their target audiences from both free and paid channels. The goals of your campaign will help guide you to the right channels and tactics to meet them. Each will have slight variations in how you measure the efficacy.  

Check Your Web Traffic  

Your official website is the face of your business, and the more hits to it, the more people are thinking of your brand. Metrics can tell you critical details about the traffic, such as the average session duration. Typically, the more time someone spends on your site, the better. However, it really depends upon the type of site. For educational sites or blog sites, longer is better, while eCommerce sites want quick conversions. 

There is a logical reason for the difference. When visitors to an educational or informative site spend more time, the content is relevant and engaging. While eCommerce sites should also be relevant and engaging, the more time spent on your site without a purchase should tell you that you are missing the mark somehow. Whether you have technical issues, a confusing checkout process, or other issues, metrics can tell you what you need to know to be more effective and increase your conversions.  

Find Out Where Your Traffic Is From  

Web traffic comes from various sources, like organic searches, direct visitors, referrals, or social links. Understanding the source of your web traffic tells you a lot about what you are doing right. That’s why it is vital that you track the rate of new visitors and returning visitors. Those metrics tell you about your long-term success, as returning visitors indicate the quality of your content. 

These metrics also indicate a successful SEO/SEM strategy. New and returning visitors could also be an indication of a quality radio campaign. Radio is a powerful lead generator as it allows you to segment your audience to garner the highest engagement. Radio and digital are the ideal pairing for a successful marketing campaign.   

Don’t Forget  the  Standard Metrics  

There are many measures you should be monitoring and analyzing as you execute your campaign. However, there is a standard set of digital marketing metrics that are critical to track and understand, including:  

• Pageviews – Pageviews per session indicates how engaging or sticky your site content is. With the right tools, you can drill down into this metric to see the average pages per session for each channel, source, medium, or referral, giving you insight into which sources introduce the most engaged visitors.  
• Exit rate – The percentage of visits in the last session is the exit rate. It compares the number of visitors to your site that leave after landing on a page to the total number of page views. 
• Bounce rate – Bounce rate is the percentage of all your site sessions where only one page was viewed, calculated by dividing the total of all sessions by the number of single-page sessions. Bounces are only recorded when a user leaves the site from the page they entered. This differs from exit rates that aren’t dependent on prior activity on the site. In other words, every bounce is also an exit, but not every exit is a bounce. 
• Conversion rate – One of the most important metrics, conversion rate simply means the number of conversions in a time period divided by the total number of visits in the same time period.

Digital Marketing Metrics Give You Actionable Insight  

Digital marketing is highly beneficial as part of a multi-platform marketing strategy. When paired with other strategies like radio, you can magnify the impact of your message, increase the frequency, and reach people where they spend their time. You can easily and effectively track the performance of your multi-platform marketing strategy by monitoring a variety of metrics. By understanding what these measures indicate and responding rapidly to negative or stagnant trends, you can meet or exceed your marketing goals.