Statistics reveal that digital marketing has helped 75% of marketers to enhance their organisation’s credibility and trust using digital marketing tactics. It is also expected that the global digital marketing and advertising market will reach the figure of $786.2 billion by 2026.

These figures clearly highlight the importance of investing in the digital market. Suffice it to say, a business without an online presence is missing out on a lot of leads and the potential the digital world has for it. And investing in digital marketing is the solution to go about it.

Having said that, the story, or rather struggle, doesn’t end when you have come up with a robust digital marketing strategy. You need to measure its results or performance to know it has proven beneficial for you. That’s where our comprehensive guide on measuring digital marketing effectiveness will come in handy for you.

It entails everything; from key metrics to the right tools to measuring digital marketing effectiveness. But before that, let’s shed light on the importance of having a digital marketing measurement model. Continue reading!

Importance of Measuring Digital Marketing Effectiveness

Performance Evaluation

First things first, measuring a digital marketing campaign will help you know whether it proved effective for you or not. Doing this helps you determine whether your campaigns are achieving their objectives and meeting your predefined goals.

By analysing the data, you can identify what’s working and what’s not, enabling you to make informed decisions and optimise your strategies.

Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis

When you are measuring digital marketing effectiveness, you gain access to key cost-related insights. Using the available data, you can calculate its ROI and assess the cost-effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

In simple words, you can understand how much revenue you’re generating vis-à-vis the resources you’re putting into it. By measuring the ROI, you can allocate your budget more efficiently and focus on the campaigns that deliver the best results.

Audience Insights

A business, whether online or good ol’ brick-and-mortar store, needs to know about its target audience to better ‘target’ it. Running a digital market campaign can make it possible.

Digital marketing analytics provide valuable insights about your target audience. You can gather data on user demographics, behaviour patterns, preferences, and interests. This information allows you to refine your audience targeting, personalise your marketing messages, and create more relevant content.

Suffice it to say, understanding your audience better helps you tailor your campaigns to resonate with them and drive better engagement.

Campaign Optimization

There’s always room for improvement, right? But how do you find this ‘room’ when it comes to digital marketing campaigns? The answer lies in evaluating the performance of the campaign.

By analysing the data at hand, you can identify underperforming elements within campaigns. This may include call-to-action buttons, landing pages, or ad creatives. Once you have them pinpointed, you are in a better position to improve your ad campaigns and get better results in the future, thanks to this data-driven approach.

Decision Making

One of the major benefits of running digital marketing campaigns is that they provide marketers with real-time data, which can be used effectively to make informed decisions.

For example, you no longer have to rely on assumptions or guesswork to make decisions related to marketing. Instead, you’re presented with concrete data points, which can help you with resource allocation or making strategic adjustments to maximise your results.

How to Measure Digital Marketing Performance? Key Metrics You Should Know

Now that you have understood the importance of having a digital marketing measurement model, let’s proceed further and focus on how to measure digital marketing success and performance.

Here are the top key metrics or KPIs you should keep an eye on for measuring digital marketing effectiveness:

1.  Number of Website Visitors

Let’s start with the basics. The more people visit your website, the higher the chances of lead generation. So, if your digital marketing performance shows a decrease in the number of total visitors, it’s time to take action and find the root cause of the drop in the volume of total visits.

2.  Track Traffic by Channels

People may visit your website from different channels. It could be your social media profiles, email campaigns, or other means.

For effective digital marketing measurements, it is important to monitor these channels individually. What you need to do here is to segregate the traffic channels and find out which ones are the most relevant for your business. This will help you focus on areas that need more attention.

For instance, if the number of organic visitors is going down, it shows that you need to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO).

3.  Measure Inbound Links

For measuring digital marketing effectiveness, you need to evaluate inbound links to your website. It helps with link-building strategy as well.

This factor merits enhanced importance since Google’s algorithm also takes into account the number of links that direct to your website. In simple words, it impacts your website’s prominence in the online world and the number of organic visitors it receives.

There are numerous tools, such as SEMrush and Moz, you can use for this purpose. However, the tip to get more links to your website is to create and post engaging, unique, and relevant content. Also, encourage users to share them.

4.  Compare New Visitors and Return Visitors

Measuring digital marketing effectiveness is also possible by comparing new visitors and return visitors. Start by setting an evaluation period. It could be a week, month, or quarter. Then, compare new visitors and return visitors during this period.

The higher percentage of return visitors indicates the success of your digital marketing. On the other hand, if there are too many new visitors who do not make repeat visits to your website, you may need to make some changes to the content.

5.  Measure Interactions Per Visit

It’s a good thing that your website is getting high traffic. But, not good enough if those visitors aren’t interacting with your website. So, for measuring digital marketing effectiveness, you need to understand the audience’s experience. Also, learn what types of triggers are helpful in stimulating interaction.

Keeping a close eye on them will help you take note of patterns that can improve and optimise your digital marketing strategy. For instance, if users spend more time on pages that have visual content, it implies that you need to invest more time in creating such content.

6.  Take Note of the Bounce Rate

In layman’s terms, bounce rate shows the number of visitors who abandoned your website quickly after visiting it, without performing any action or opening other pages.

Needless to say, when the bounce rate is higher, it implies your digital strategy is in need of strong optimization. It is one of the key factors of the digital marketing and measurement model. Also, you should know that bounce rate impacts SEO as well.

There can be numerous reasons behind a low bounce rate, including but not limited to not having good CTAs, mediocre quality content, targeting the wrong audience, etc.  

7.  Exit Rate

While both the bounce rate and exit rate may seem similar to many, they are actually different. The latter indicates the number of visitors who leave a website from a specific page. It can be calculated by dividing visitors who left the page by the total number of visitors.

Knowing the exit rate not only helps with measuring digital marketing effectiveness but identifies loopholes in the conversion strategy. For example, if a particular page has a high exit rate, you can inspect or audit it to know what’s prompting users to leave it without performing the intended action.

8.  Keep a Tab on Mobile Traffic

Since most people now use their mobile devices to access the internet, you should definitely keep a tab on the mobile traffic your website receives.

It will help you if your website is mobile-friendly. And if it’s not, you know what actions to optimise it further for mobile users.

9.  Click-through Rate (CTR)

If you are running pay-per-click and email marketing campaigns, knowing about click-through rate (CTR) becomes crucially important.

It is basically the percentage or ratio of visitors who click a specific link to the total users. Higher CTR implies a lower cost per click.

10. Cost Factors

There are different types of cost factors associated with digital marketing campaigns. So, if you want to know how to measure a digital marketing campaign, you need to understand these cost factors and optimise them accordingly.

These cost factors include:

Cost per Visitor (CPV)

It indicates the total amount spent on acquiring a new user. You can calculate it by dividing the total visitors received by a campaign by the total amount of investment for that campaign.

Revenue per Visitor (RPV)

It calculates how much your business generates revenue when each user visits your website. Ideally, it should be higher than CPV. In case it’s not, you need to remodel the costing factors.

Divide the revenue generated by a campaign by the total visitors it brought, and you will have RPV.

Cost per Conversion

The cost per conversion, as the name suggests, is the amount spent on converting a visit into a lead or a lead into a sale, depending on how you define a conversion for your business.

Remember that the lower the cost per conversion, the higher the profit.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition focuses solely on revenue. It is a key metric in calculating the amount of investment for every user who ultimately purchases your services/products.

Taking into account all these cost factors is important when it comes to measuring digital marketing effectiveness.

How to Measure Digital Marketing Success? Top Tools You Can Use

Measuring digital marketing effectiveness becomes easy if you are using advanced tools. These tools provide analytics and key data points, which can be used to optimise campaigns and get the desired results.

With that said, here are the top tools to measure digital marketing performance:

• Cyfe

Cyfe provides analytics and key details about your website quite conveniently on a single screen. It can also work as a project management tool as it tracks sales, consumer trends along with traffic as well.

One of the top-rated tools to measure digital marketing success, it is suitable to be used by social media managers and digital marketers.  

Pricing: There’s a free version available with limited features. The price for the premium version is $19 per month.

• Klipfolio

It is an analytical tool for measuring digital marketing effectiveness. Klipfolio provides digital marketers with a dashboard, which they can tailor according to their requirements. They will find on this dashboard a detailed view of analytics and data critical to their digital marketing performance and website.

The data is presented in a readable format, which is a big plus. Besides, it is accumulated from various sources, including social media channels. This tool is ideal for small businesses and growing companies.

Pricing: Klipfolio is available in different packages, starting from $17 per month to $179 (billed annually).

• Geckoboard

Using Geckoboard can help you view your team’s KPI in a visible and quantifiable manner, making measuring digital marketing effectiveness a breeze. This tool can also serve as a project manager.

Pricing: Geckoboard subscription is available in different packages, starting from $25 per month.

• Mixpanel

Mixipanel is another tool you can rely on when it comes to measuring digital marketing effectiveness. It provides access to vital data pertaining to your products and customers purchasing them. Basically, this tool assists companies in better understanding their customers so that they can tailor their offerings accordingly.

Pricing: Mixpanel comes in three pricing versions; free, startup ($99 per month), and business ($999 per year).

• Moz Pro

Measuring digital marketing effectiveness becomes easier and quick with Moz Pro. It is a content and SEO performance measuring tool that analyses key metrics related to your website’s readability, traffic, and success.

Pricing: Moz Pro is available in four different packages; standard ($99 per month), medium ($149 per month), large ($249 per month), and premium ($599 per month).

• Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics can help companies get more customers as it plays a pivotal role in measuring digital marketing effectiveness. It basically analyses a company’s marketing channels and engagement metrics to help optimise its campaigns. This tool works best for every type of organisation, regardless of its size and scale.

Pricing: Kissmetrics is available in two packages; Growth ($500) and Power ($850).

• SEMrush

Any list of tools to measure digital marketing performance is incomplete without mentioning SEMrush. Trusted by many, it provides users with a comprehensive dashboard, which allows them to monitor and track valuable metrics of their website. It streamlines SEO data, making it easier for marketers to analyse and optimise their websites in a more effective way. Simply put, SEMrush is no less than an asset for SEO specialists.

Pricing: SEMrush is available in three packages; Pro ($99), Guru ($199), and Business ($399).

• HotJar

It is a click tracker tool that tracks the frequency of clicks on different pages of a website. HotJar represents this click frequency visually with the help of heat maps.

With the obtained results, you can identify the areas of your website that need to be optimised for better results.

Pricing: HotJar pricing depends on the basis of page views per day. It ranges from $89 per month for 20,000 page views to $989 for 800,000 page views.

• Megalytic

Megalytic makes measuring digital marketing effectiveness easy by simplifying analytic reports. It also makes them more insightful by eliminating redundant elements. Digital marketers, with the help of this tool, can have a clear picture of their digital marketing performance. It is best suited for digital agencies and marketers.  

Pricing: Megalytic comes in four different packages. The basic package costs $39.99 per month, while the price of the Standard, Premium, and Enterprise packages is $99.99 per month, $199.99 per month, and $399.98 per month, respectively.

• Meltwater

It is a complete suite that helps businesses gain insights into their digital marketing performance from across the web. It works by tracking mentions, conversations, and topics across social media, blogs, podcasts, news outlets, and various other sources.

It is particularly suitable for businesses running brand awareness campaigns as it offers them insights on estimated content marketing ROI, consumer behaviour towards the brand, sourcing conversations related to the brand, etc.

Pricing: Four different versions of Meltwater are available. Prices not listed on the website

•  Google Analytics

It is a quintessential analytics service, period. The results can help you gain resourceful insights into your digital marketing and website traffic effectiveness. With this tool, you can track your goals, calculate ROI, and study your customers’ behaviour.

Pricing: Google Analytics has a free and paid version. The latter costs $12,500 per month.

Wrapping Up

We hope that this in-depth guide will help you in measuring digital marketing effectiveness. For further valuable insights and guidance, you can reach out to the most experienced team of creative and skilled personnel at Zoom Digital. We look forward to hearing from you!