You’ve created a spotless digital marketing strategy. You’ve launched a website and started publishing top quality content on your blog. You’ve also opened business profiles on multiple social networks. Not to mention countless hours you’ve spent on optimising your site for search engines. You’re working really hard to drive more traffic to your site and boost the conversion rate, but there are no results.
“Why is this happening?” you’re asking yourself.
Well, there are two potential answers to this question.
First, you’re not measuring the performance of your digital marketing campaign at all.
Second, you’re not keeping track of the right metrics.
In either case, you’re missing out an amazing opportunity to tailor your digital marketing practices to your business’ needs, make data-driven decisions, and boost your revenue. Worse yet, you’re failing to target the right audience and get them to convert.
Here are a few techniques that will help you prevent this on time.
1. Conduct a Market Research Survey
Why are people buying one product five times as often as another? Why do they leave your site without making a purchase? What do they think of you and the way you connect with them? To determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign, you need to answer these questions. And, one of the most effective ways to do so is to collect your customers’ feedback.
Fortunately, in today’s era of hyperconnectivity, it has never been simpler for businesses with restricted budgets to collect their customer-related data and yet not go into the red. One of the most powerful ways to understand the WHY behind your customers’ decisions is to conduct a market research survey.
They are easy to create, analyse, and enable you to get answers really quickly. For example, you could send them via emails, create polls on social media channels, or even post a brief survey on your site. To make sure your users take your questions seriously, you should also consider setting up paid surveys. By knowing that they will be compensated for answering the questions, your users will take them more seriously and be motivated to provide you with accurate and honest answers.
2. Stay on Top of your Website Traffic
Why do you write quality content, do SEO, or build your presence on social networks? To drive more organic traffic to your site, I suppose. However, that’s not enough for you to succeed. To get the most of these practices, you need to know which ones are worth investing in.
This is exactly why you need to monitor and measure your website traffic regularly. By knowing how much website traffic you receive per month and whether it is increasing, you will be able to focus on only those channels that work for you and, in this way, boost both your rankings and revenue.
To understand how your site’s traffic works, you need to dig deeper. Here is what you need to keep in mind.
What are your traffic sources?
Not all traffic is equally important to your site. To boost your rankings and page authority, you need to go the extra mile in generating traffic from trustworthy, authoritative, and relevant resources. Most importantly, you need to know where and how your target audience finds you.
Namely, there are numerous traffic sources you need to analyse, including organic traffic (when a user types in a keyword on their own), direct search (when a user looks for you specifically via Google or some other search engine), paid search campaigns (when a user sees your ad and clicks on it), referral visitors (those who have visited your site because it was mentioned or linked to on another blog or website).
How stable is your traffic?
There are numerous factors, such as seasonal fluctuations in your industry, which may affect your website traffic significantly. For example, if your site was doing great in December and January, it is obvious that its traffic will plummet once the holidays are over. This is exactly why you need to observe it over a period of at least a few months. Of course, if any large spikes or drops in your traffic that keep appearing, they will definitely catch your eye. Your goal is to figure out what has caused those changes and adapt your digital marketing strategy to them in the future.
3. Know your Email Marketing Metrics
Despite the rise of social networks, email marketing is still one of the most powerful acquisition channels. It allows you to provide your potential customers with a customized and targeted experience. Most importantly, if done right, it will significantly boost your sales and revenue.
To make the most of your email marketing techniques, you need to track their effectiveness continuously. Here are some major metrics you should keep in mind:
- Open rates tell you how many people opened your email.
- Click-through rates tell you how many recipients clicked on at least one link in your email.
- Conversion rates are the percentage of users who clicked on a link within an email to complete the desired action.
- Bounce rates refer to the number of your total emails that could not be delivered to a recipient.
- Unsubscribe rates represent how many people unsubscribed from an email you sent.
- The list growth rate is the pace at which your email list grows.
- The overall ROI is the overall return on investment for your email marketing campaign.
4. Keep Track of your Landing Page Conversion Rates
With the rise of the internet, the bar is constantly getting set higher. Today’s customers have become more demanding and they don’t want to waste their time on sites that aren’t tailored to their expectations. And, to fully optimize your pages and make the corrections needed, you first need to know which ones are generating better conversions and which ones are underperforming.
Start with the bounce rate, or the number of users who leave your site after viewing just one page. But, you should know that people don’t usually leave your site after visiting its homepage. Given this fact, you need to dive deeper into your exits and see at what stage your visitors are abandoning your site.
You also need to measure your click-through rates, or the ratio of page clicks to the total number of page views. Namely, the better your CTR is, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Finally, pay attention to the average session duration, or the average time your visitors spend on your site.
Each of these figures contributes to creating the overall picture of your conversion rates. Most importantly, by monitoring and measuring them regularly, you will be able to make informing decisions and create high-converting pages.
5. Analyse your Social Media Reach
Did you know that over 50 million businesses use Facebook Business Pages? Social media marketing has become the holy grail of every business’ digital marketing strategy, irrespective of its size. Still, even though the majority of companies are already present on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram, they still don’t understand how important it is to track their social media marketing performance. Namely, the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report points out that 87% of marketers don’t know what their most profitable social media strategies are.
On the contrary, they focus on the digits irrelevant to their growth, such as likes, shares, or the number of followers. Even though these figures can sometimes make you feel good about your achievements, they don’t really show how profitable your social media campaign is. What’s worse, they cannot give you any actionable tips on how to improve your social marketing tactics. That’s exactly why they’re called vanity metrics and relying on them solely may jeopardize your online presence.
To prevent this from happening, you need to avoid them and focus on some more precise social media marketing metrics, including:
- The social share of voice. Sometimes, social media mentions aren’t enough for you to measure your users’ engagement with the content you share via social networks. That is why you need to estimate your social share of voice. It will help you position yourself in the industry, understand where your brand stands compared to your competitors, and learn what kind of content works in your industry.
- The engagement rate will give you an insight into how your content performs. By measuring your bounce rate, conversion rate, applause rate, and amplification rate, you will be able to understand how engaging your content is and how it resonates with your target audience.
- The audience size helps you see whether your social marketing strategy is improving as expected. It includes calculating the audience growth rate, new follower rate, and the follower ratio.
What’s great about social networks is that they provide you with their own reporting tools. For example, on Facebook, you just need to go to the “Insights” tab to understand what your audience is doing online, how they’re interacting with your content, and how it impacts your business.
Back to You
Today, digital marketing is a must. However, building a digital marketing strategy is not always enough for you to grow your business. To do so, you need to measure its performance regularly. By monitoring and analysing your major KPIs, you will not only gain an invaluable insight into the performance of your digital marketing campaign, but also know what practices to stick to and which ones to ditch.
What techniques do you use to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign? What are the most significant KPIs you measure?
