There’s a lot that goes behind launching a successful ad campaign: crafting compelling ad content, securing funds, and optimizing your ad for the highest click-and-conversion rates. But one essential aspect that ties all these puzzle pieces together is deciding how well is your digital marketing campaign actually doing. Success is no longer associated with just sales figures. The KPIs have changed now and go beyond the number of likes, shares, and follower gains. Audience growth on social media matters, email sign-ups matter, and so does overall brand recognition. Thus, relying on sales figures does not provide the complete picture of digital marketing campaigns anymore. This blog will explore the best KPIs for digital marketing campaigns and how to correctly measure your digital efforts.
Best KPIs for Digital Advertisement Campaigns
To effectively measure your digital marketing campaigns, it is important to start thinking about these metrics from the very beginning. Each KPI is intricately linked to the next one and the only way to find out you are walking in the right direction is by looking at the combined stats. Here are the top digital marketing KPIs & metrics to measure your digital campaigns:
ROI
ROI is probably the easiest one to guess. It is the universal one that applies everywhere – offline or online marketing! It is a crucial digital marketing KPI that lets you gauge the profitability of your efforts. It measures the return you get for every dollar spent on your campaign. To calculate ROI, you can use the formula:
A positive ROI indicates that you are generating more than your campaign costs while a negative ROI signals you need to adjust your efforts. Tracking ROI helps you identify which strategies yield the best returns and guides your future budget decisions.
CTR
CTR is another essential KPI you need to know to figure out how effective the ad content is in capturing attention. It calculates the percentage of people who clicked on your ad against the total number of views. The formula for CTR is:
As for ROI, a higher CTR is better and tells you that your ads are resonating more with your audience and are better engaging. A lower CTR may suggest that your content needs improvement. Monitoring CTR allows you to refine your ad copy, visuals, and targeting strategies.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is used to measure user engagement, especially on landing pages. It is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after checking out only one page without taking any action. The bounce rate formula is:
A high bounce rate indicates that your content or landing page is not yet effective and needs to be bettered.
Traffic by Source
To measure your digital marketing success, check your ‘traffic by source’. You can find this information if you use Google Analytics by going to: Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. This digital advertisement KPI tells you where your maximum traffic is coming from. Google Analytics will tell you where the maximum traffic is hiding for you so that you can target those places more:
- Direct: Visitors who arrive at your site by typing in your URL directly.
- Paid Search: Traffic generated through paid advertising campaigns, such as Google Ads.
- Display: Visitors coming from display ads on other websites.
- Affiliates: Traffic generated through affiliate marketing partnerships.
- Other: Any other sources not classified above.
You can identify the best channels that are bringing in the most qualified leads. Through your traffic by source, you might find out that most of your leads are coming from PPC ads. This means good news for your PPC campaigns which you can now allocate more resources to.
Returning Visitors
It is said returning visitors are the best for a business as they are loyal customers who need no special magnets to buy from you month after month. Hence, you must know this marketing KPI to track returning visitors for your business. Tracking returning visitors can tell you a few things:
- You have a well-functioning website that users like to explore.
- Your marketing campaigns resonate with your audience.
Google Analytics lets you track this KPI. On Google Analytics, you can see how many of your visitors are new vs how many are new. This is a great way to gauge the user experience you are providing. You will instantly know if you are creating relevant and enjoyable experiences for them when you see more people coming back.
If you are struggling with analyzing your campaigns, you might need retraining of your corporate team. EducationNest’s digital marketing training courses for corporates cover these and more that are crucial for employees to know in order to hit digital marketing goals.
Average Session Duration
This is an important digital marketing metric that you should know. This one shows you how much time each visitor spends on your site. In general, you want a higher average session duration as it means visitors are spending time exploring your site. They are giving you more time and learning about your business and your offers. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to convert into customers.
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Cost Per Lead (CPL)
After someone shows interest in your business, you need to find out how much you are spending to convert them. CPL is an important digital campaign KPI for measuring how much money you are spending to acquire a single lead.
The cost per lead formula is this:
This is a clear indicator of the efficiency of your marketing strategies. A lower CPL indicates you are getting leads more cost-effectively and vice versa. Monitoring CPL helps you make smarter ‘money’ decisions. If you notice that social media ads have an impressively lower CPL, you might want to allocate more resources there to maximize your ROI.
Customer Lifetime Value
The CLV is a key digital marketing KPI that you must know if you are running paid campaigns online. It tells you the total revenue a customer is expected to generate for you throughout their entire relationship with you.
CLV is considered to be one of the top digital marketing KPIs for several reasons:
- By knowing how much a customer is worth over time, you can calculate what is the maximum you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers. As a general rule of thumb, having a higher CLV is better.
- CLV points out whether it is better to retain existing customers than find new ones. Since it costs less to retain customers than to acquire new ones, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty can lead to a higher overall CLV.
- It helps in segmentation. You might find certain demographics have a higher CLV and thus target them more effectively.
Conclusion
Even when you pour your heart out in shaping ad content and spend tons of money on them, they might not turn out to be as effective as you expect. In digital marketing, smart work is better than hard work. Different campaigns also serve different goals, from brand awareness to lead generation. Hence, each requires specific metrics to gauge effectiveness. In this context, understanding how to measure the success of your online campaigns is crucial.
EducationNest, one of the best corporate training providers in India, offers robust digital marketing training courses for companies in order to help them maximize their ROI. They have expert-led courses covering A to Z of digital marketing basics and advanced topics that employees should know to deliver results.
