5 Digital Marketing KPIs You Can’t Ignore

The customer journey is no longer the 5-step unified path that we had hoped it would be; now, consumers experience a twisting, turning omnichannel journey before making a purchase. As digital marketers, our job is to ensure that we’re meeting these customers throughout their customer journey, with crucial touchpoints. This is where your digital marketing KPIs step in.

KPIs play an essential role throughout your digital marketing campaigns, as they are established to keep your business goals on track. However, with the ever-increasing amount of data and information we have at our fingertips, it can be challenging to narrow down the most important one or two KPIs that will best keep your business moving in the right direction.

What should you consider when choosing a digital marketing KPI?

Keeping your audience at the forefront of KPI decisions is essential. The more information you have about your audience, their relationship with your brand or product, where they are spending time online, the better performing your digital marketing will be. Understanding the demographics, psychographics, and other aspects that make up your target audience is essential. Keep in mind tough, it’s also important to push beyond that insight to understand how your target audience moves through the customer journey. How many ad views it takes before a person is likely to click? What channel-specific touchpoints are critical to driving conversions?

Having this specific insight will help push your digital marketing campaigns to the next level. And, these insights are gained with proper digital marketing KPIs. Whether you’re just starting your journey with digital marketing or looking to revamp your campaigns, we’ve outlined five key KPIs that will further push your audience insights and create a more seamless digital marketing experience, and ultimately, help to achieve your business objectives.

1. Impressions Served

Simple but important to measure; impressions are the number of times your ad has been served to a person online. If you’re using your digital marketing campaigns for overall brand awareness, the volume of impressions can be more valuable than you might realize. Knowing this metric can help pinpoint how many impressions are required for your brand to stay top of mind with consumers as they move throughout their customer journey. This KPI won’t give you as much audience insight as others, but if you notice that traffic to your website has gone down, it might be smart to circle back to an impression-based campaign to promote brand awareness.

2. Conversion Rate (CVR)

CVR measures the number of users who have converted on your website divided by the total number of users who have visited your website.

Here’s an example: you’re interested in driving sales on your website, so you set up conversions as your KPI. Your campaign results show that you’re getting 100,000 landing page visitors every month. It seems like your campaign is doing great! But looking further, you see that only a small percentage of landing page visitors ever make a purchase.

To get a better campaign result, you can model your “converter” audience to find more consumers who look and act like them and shift your targeting to reach this more qualified audience online. A conversion-based KPI will push you to look at your campaigns this way, which will give you valuable insights to inform future programmatic marketing campaigns.

3. Cost Per Click (CPC):

CPC measures the amount of money paid for every click on an ad by tracking the total cost of a marketing campaign and dividing by the number of clicks. Programmatic advertisers can use the CPC metric to inform budget and bid amounts and to maximize the number of clicks based on budget. Keeping a close eye on CPC benchmarks and performance during programmatic campaigns enables advertisers to pinpoint when campaign efficiency is dipping and quickly course correct.

4. Cost per action (CPA):

CPA measures the cost associated with a particular action such as a sale, click, newsletter sign-up, etc. during a marketing campaign. If conversions are your goal, then tracking CPA will help you optimize the audiences, channels, and tactics that drive the most bang for your buck. Throughout your campaign, you will want to check the quality of users who have taken your desired action. For example, you may find that it is reasonable to pay a higher CPA for better-qualified users than a lower CPA for users who are less likely to take a final action or become loyal customers.

5. Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS):

ROAS is the metric used to measure the revenue you receive for each dollar spent on marketing. For many advertisers, ROAS is the single best metric for measuring marketing effectiveness. If you’re spending on marketing money and not making money in sales, most likely there is something wrong with your marketing strategy. Keeping a ROAS goal of 2:1, 4:1, or 5:1, will ensure your marketing efforts are impacting your business’s bottom line.

If you notice that you are not getting your desired ROAS, the answer isn’t to stop your efforts altogether. Try looking back at the previously outlined KPIs – how are you tracking against your impressions served or CTR goals? You may find that stunted reach, unqualified website visitors, or overspending on inefficiency channels are impacting your ROAS.

Digital Marketing KPIs Can’t Stand Alone

Your marketing goals and challenges will determine the KPIs that you choose to track. If you already have a handle on campaign scale and engagement, you may find that a greater focus on CPC or CPA may be necessary. If you are starting with digital marketing, a focus on impressions served, and CTR may be the metrics you choose to focus on.

Regardless of the KPIs you choose to focus on; it’s essential to look at them together vs. independently. The KPIs you are focused on will serve as building blocks to quantify how well your digital marketing investments are working to drive impact on your business. A unified view of your KPIs will save you valuable time and resources by giving you a single source of truth and a quick path to identifying your digital marketing strategy’s weakest links.

Finding a KPI Focused and Data-Driven Partner

Establishing digital marketing KPIs have never been more important, especially as advertisers must test and adopt new strategies that go beyond business as usual. Digilant’s digital marketing solutions are dedicated to this end.

We use our institutional expertise to help advertisers transform their digital marketing strategy and measurement from the inside-out. We’ve observed that tracking digital marketing performance can be daunting and that advertisers are often unsure where to start — or, if a campaign is already underway, where to go next. As an omni-channel digital services company that always trusts data over a hunch, we rely on performance data to inform strategies and to ensure that we are driving results that our clients can bring to the board.

Are you struggling to track and optimize your digital marketing KPIs? Click here to request a demo of our custom marketing measurement and analytics platform.