Top Metrics for Measuring Marketing Performance: A Comprehensive Guide

Measurement is an important part of marketing. It tells you what you’re doing right and where you can still do better. That’s why we believe that the right digital marketing performance metrics can help save the day! These days, there are many ways for you to create a campaign and many platforms to choose from. But no matter your path, digital marketing performance metrics will be ever-constants that you need to collect and assess for your campaign. But what exactly do you need to monitor? This guide will cover the most salient campaign measurements that you can take to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts.

The Two Salient Elements of Marketing Performance Metrics: What Are Digital Marketing Metrics and KPIs?

To understand how to measure digital marketing performance, we must begin with these two terms: metrics and KPIs. But what are they exactly? These interpretations of digital marketing performance metrics are loosely defined below:

Metrics: This simply means something that can be measured. In the context of digital marketing, these track something specific. They’re often used synonymously with digital marketing performance metrics.
KPIs: These metrics are the unique focus of a campaign. Depending on how you see it, they may be closest to digital marketing performance metrics because they are meant to monitor something specific.

Exploring the Difference Between Metrics and KPIs: The Key to Understanding Digital Marketing Performance Metrics

The reason that these terms are used interchangeably is that literally, any metric can be a KPI. It will just depend on the purpose of your campaign. Essentially, KPIs are the ones that are used to measure marketing performance. They are tied to the goal of the campaign and are looked at to determine its success or failure. So, even if you can technically count the page views on the About Page, it may not be one of the more relevant performance metrics in marketing a new product. Therefore, every KPI can be a metric. However, not every metric is a KPI.

Digital Marketing Performance Metrics That Every Advertiser Should Know About

So, what exactly do you need to measure? In the world of online advertising, there are many elements that you can boil down to a number. However, the digital marketing performance metrics that will be relevant to you will depend more on what your goals are and how you’re running the campaign. But for now, let’s familiarize ourselves with the various digital marketing performance metrics that you can encounter. Below, we will discuss the measurements that you can take for website traffic, conversion, engagement and email marketing.

Website Traffic Metrics

Are you using your website for a marketing campaign? These are the digital marketing performance metrics that you may want to familiarize yourself with.

Unique visitors: The number of distinct visitors who visited at least one page over a certain time
Page views: The total number of pages visited by all visitors
Number of sessions: The number of times that a visitor went to the site over a certain time period
Average session duration: The total time spent by all visitors per visit divided by all visitors
Bounce rate: The number of visitors who only viewed one page divided by all visitors
Pages per session: The total number of pages visited divided by the total number of sessions

Conversion Metrics

In general, conversion refers to the number of people who took a specific action. Meanwhile, the conversion rate is conversion divided by the total number of people who have seen specific content or a certain page. Conversion digital marketing performance metrics completely overlap with other metrics covered in this article. For example, bounce rate can also be considered a digital marketing performance metric. After all, it gives you insights into how many of your visitors are engaging with other pages of the site by subtracting the bounce rate from 100%. Other digital marketing performance metrics like CPA, CPC and CTR will be discussed further in the article.

Engagement Metrics

Every platform has different ways by which the user can interact with the ad or content. Therefore, the relevant digital marketing performance metrics for engagement will largely be dependent on the platform that you’re using. Like with conversion, there’s also a lot of overlap here, such as page views and pages per session. Here are a few other digital marketing performance metrics that haven’t been covered yet.

Traffic sources: These are numbers that tell you how users are being referred to your site
New visitor session: The number of times a new visitor goes to your site again over a time period
Likes and shares: Likes indicate approval, while shares increase the reach of your content by allowing others to see it

Later on, we’ll cover other digital marketing performance metrics, such as impressions and content reach.

Email Marketing Metrics

If you use an email list to connect with your audience, these are the most relevant digital marketing performance metrics that you should track.

Open rate: The number of emails opened divided by the total number of emails sent
Churn rate: The number of people on the email list who have unsubscribed divided by the total number of email subscribers
Bounce rate: The number of emails that could not be delivered to the intended recipient divided by the total number of emails sent
Spam complaints: The number of emails marked as spam divided by the total number of emails sent

Certain conversion digital marketing performance metrics, such as the clickthrough rate, also apply here. This is because most marketing emails have a link that directs readers to a sales page or a certain piece of content.

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Performance Metrics for Content Marketing?

Now, you know about the various metrics used depending on what you’re trying to measure. So what digital marketing performance metrics should matter to you if you’re focusing on a content marketing campaign? In the end, it will always be about your implementation tactics as well as the goals that you’ve set. However, since most content campaigns out there are designed to be read by as many relevant audiences as possible, you’ll see a lot of commonalities in the key performance metrics for marketing content. We’ll talk about them a little bit more in the following subsections.

Content Reach and Impressions

As we have mentioned, the more common function of content marketing is to disseminate content. That’s why many digital marketing performance metrics are connected with the following performance measures.

Reach: The number of unique users who have seen the content
Impressions: The total number of times that the content was displayed, regardless of whether the user actually consumed the content

However, if you’re trying to evaluate performance using marketing key metrics, these two alone won’t give you a clear picture. Still, they could be used as supporting data to draw better context from other relevant digital marketing performance metrics.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics refer to a user interacting with the created content. Depending on the platform that you’re using, some relevant performance marketing metrics may include:

Number of shares;
Number of comments;
Time spent viewing the content.

Overall, they help you gauge the interest that the people have in the content created. When assessing digital marketing performance metrics for engagement, it’s worth looking into the performance of not only individual content but also pieces produced for the whole month, quarter or year. In doing so, you can use your key marketing campaign performance metrics to create an accurate macro and micro understanding of your content marketing efforts.

Lead Generation and Conversion from Content

Lead generation and conversion are both important digital marketing performance metrics, especially if your goal is for users to move closer to the bottom of the funnel. So, which metrics are relevant to lead generation and conversion?

Number of leads generated
Conversion rate, as in the number of users who performed the desired action over the total number of impressions

The relevant digital marketing performance metrics here can vary wildly, depending on how the content page is structured. This can even be as simple as measuring the number of people who viewed another piece of content on the same platform!

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Performance Metrics for Social Media?

Social media will always be a part of marketing now. With the expectation for brands and businesses to be accessible, they need to establish their presence strategically on social media platforms. And as you measure your progress, what digital marketing performance metrics should you be examining? We will cover the most common metrics that are relevant across any social media site. However, remember that the complete list of digital marketing performance metrics that are appropriate to you will depend on what you use and do.

Follower Growth and Reach

The definition of reach is the same across the board. But what is follower growth? This is one of the most important digital marketing performance metrics for social media because it’s a reflection of the effectiveness of your overall strategy. It means that, in general, your content and brand resonate with the audience. Like all digital marketing performance metrics, this can be a source of a wealth of information, including:

Percent change based on the introduction of an intervention (this is your strategy!);
Month-to-month progress in building a following;
The rate your brand is growing compared to the competition.

Engagement Rate

Remember the digital marketing performance metrics that we talked about in the previous section? It may be possible to use the same ones here. Like with content marketing, the relevant internet marketing performance metrics look at user interaction with the content. Therefore, this can refer either to:

The number of reactions, comments and/or shares;
The percentage of reactions, comments and/or shares over the total impressions.

And just like with content digital marketing performance metrics, this may be viewed per post or per calendar period.

Social Share of Voice

Social Share of Voice is one of the more unique digital marketing performance metrics. It measures many things:

Brand mentions;
Brand-specific keywords;
Hashtags.

These are then compared with the competition. In doing so, you’ll have an idea of how much visibility you have. Beyond the digital marketing performance metrics, you may also be able to gauge your brand positioning. For example, you can perform content analysis on user-generated content using mentions, keywords and hashtags to see what the general sentiment of your brand is.

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Performance Metrics for Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is important if you want to organically build an audience. Doing so will take time as it requires growing your authority and content library, among the other things needed to improve your ranking. So, what are the digital marketing performance metrics that you should look at if you’re working on search engine optimization? More than 200 factors determine a page or a site’s ranking. But don’t worry! There are not nearly as many digital marketing performance metrics that you’ll need to manage. To see how effective your SEO efforts are, be sure to consider these components.

Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings

Organic traffic refers to the traffic that you receive from search engines for free, essentially the opposite of paid traffic. To make it more effective as one of your chosen digital marketing performance metrics, we recommend separating the unpaid traffic referred from social media sites. Meanwhile, keyword rankings refer to your position when a user looks up a certain term. The more content that you’ve created, the more digital marketing performance metrics of this type you’ll need to monitor. Even if you rank first today, it doesn’t guarantee your placement forever. You need to constantly check these digital marketing performance metrics to monitor any developments.

Backlinks and Domain Authority

In the eyes of a search engine, backlinks are some of the most important digital marketing performance metrics for SEO because they determine how authoritative your website is. Search engines consider:

The authority of the websites where the backlinks came from;
The number of backlinks obtained;
The frequency of backlink creation.

To more easily assess the authority of your website, you may need to go beyond digital marketing performance metrics with Moz. Moz provides a score that compares how well your site will perform against competitors for similar keywords.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) from Search Results

Going back to our earlier discussions, click-through rate is one of the digital marketing performance metrics for measuring conversion. It is calculated as the percentage of the users who clicked the link after seeing it. So, in the context of SEO, it tells you how many people clicked on the link after they saw it in the search results. What does this tell you that other digital marketing performance metrics can’t?

It shows how effective your headline and description are.
It gives you a glimpse into how relevant your content is for the user based on the keyword search.
It tells you which keywords you should target.

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Performance Metrics for Paid Advertising?

Today, the competition over the digital landscape is immense! That’s why more often than not, you’ll need to invest in paid advertising to maintain a competitive edge. Just remember, you’ll need digital marketing performance metrics to make sure that your ad budget is well-spent. Especially with paid advertising, it’s important to go beyond looking at the individual metrics.

For instance, let’s explore two digital marketing performance metrics for paid advertising: cost per click and return on ad spend. Consider if the CPC is too high for the returns. If it is, it may be time to tweak some things! Below, you’ll find more marketing performance metrics examples that can help you run better-paid ads campaigns.

Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Mille (CPM)

CPC and CPM are two metrics that you see a lot when talking about paid advertising. To understand their functions as digital marketing performance metrics, keep in mind these are also pricing models where your spending is based on different KPIs. For CPC, you’re measuring your spending per click. This is more common for campaigns created to generate income. Meanwhile, digital marketing performance metrics such as CPM are more common for brand building, where improving awareness and visibility are prioritized over selling. Therefore, these two digital marketing performance metrics rarely exist in one campaign.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return on Ad Spend is something that you should keep an eye on if you’re creating an ad to make an income. Of all digital marketing performance metrics, this is the only one that can:

Assess the effectiveness of the campaign;
Help you determine future budget allocation;
Track how profitable certain channels and platforms are.

To calculate, just divide the revenue generated by the spending. However, you may need to look at many other digital marketing performance metrics to calculate this. For example, it may make sense to separate ROAS calculations for Facebook and the website to see which is performing better. Just remember, the calculations haven’t considered the capital and operational costs yet.

Ad Impressions and Clicks

Impressions and clicks are also two important digital marketing performance metrics in paid advertising. Remember that we mentioned CPC and CPM earlier? Knowing the number of impressions and clicks is necessary for calculating those. Apart from that, these digital marketing performance metrics allow you to take a closer look at your campaign. For example, if the users are not clicking on the ad, what could be the issue? Knowing these metrics will allow you to narrow down the problem, saving you from examining all digital marketing performance metrics and trying to tweak everything all at once. Just like with CPM and CPC, impressions and clicks will be more relevant with brand awareness and revenue-driven campaigns, respectively.

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Performance Metrics Related to Customers?

We’ve talked about paid advertising, but measuring internet marketing-relevant factors goes beyond the campaign. That’s why there are relevant digital marketing performance metrics, created especially for assessing the financial value of the customer to the business. So, why is this so important? Looking at the revenue or the profit doesn’t paint a clear enough picture of where you should focus your paid campaigns. With these digital marketing performance metrics, you’ll be able to decide whether to focus on bringing in more customers or getting the existing ones to buy again.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value refers to the overall spending of the customer on the business. This is one of the digital marketing performance metrics that tell you more than what the actual number is. It can also give you some insights on:

How long they have been a customer;
Their purchasing power;
Whether or not sufficient efforts are being made to get more sales out of existing clients.

But with most digital marketing performance metrics, even just the number gives you some sense of what’s happening. For example, if the average CLV is too close to the average value per sale, then it means that most of the clients aren’t buying again. However, there are other digital marketing performance metrics to confirm this (check the third subheading here!).

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC tells you how much it took to get the customer to buy for the first time. This is calculated by dividing the total ad spend by the number of customers acquired. Here, you want the number to be as low as possible. However, just like with all digital marketing performance metrics, it’s important to be realistic about the numbers based on the industry that you’re in, the level of competition, the platforms that you’re using and the cost of the product that you’re selling. For many digital marketing performance metrics, it’s good to assess per platform, per time period, per season and other relevant segmentation of a campaign or strategy. This way, you can see when and where it’s easiest to get customers.

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate refers to the number of acquired customers who have bought for the second time over a certain period. If you’re looking to assess customer loyalty and product satisfaction, then this is one of the digital marketing performance metrics that you should be monitoring. It is calculated by dividing the customers who made a second purchase by the customers acquired over the same period. So, what should this period be? With digital marketing performance metrics, it’s important to consider the average sales cycle in the industry. If you’re selling mattresses, it’s not realistic to expect them to buy another one within the same quarter.

Analyzing and Interpreting Digital Marketing Performance Metrics

Having the numbers is one thing, but what should be your next move? Once you get the relevant digital marketing performance metrics, these should be your next steps.

Data collection and reporting: This means making sense of the data that you have. For example, should you look at the digital marketing performance metrics per week or per quarter? Although, you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much because there are dashboards for this.
Identifying trends and patterns: Any unusual spikes, upward/downward trends and other oddities must be noted.
Making data-driven decisions: What do the trends and patterns tell you? Use this, along with your other insights, to make a decision.

Analytics Tools and Platforms to Evaluate Performance Using Marketing Metrics

Today, a lot of the analyses can be done for you. So, unless you want to really dig deep, there’s no need for you to create a spreadsheet to calculate the digital marketing performance metrics on your own. Below are the three most popular options.

Google Analytics: This is a free Google service that lets you track important metrics on your website.
Social media insights: Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are tools that you can access and use to look at digital marketing performance metrics on specific social media platforms.
CRM systems and marketing automation platforms: These help you manage customer interactions and perform repetitive marketing tasks, respectively.

Challenges with Digital Marketing Performance Metrics

Unfortunately, using performance metrics comes with its own issues.

Data accuracy and quality issues: There may be potential errors in data recording. Things like bots clicking your ad will also affect the quality of information captured through digital marketing performance metrics.
Integrating metrics across channels: Different platforms may have different definitions for the same metric. And if there’s no integration capability for the platforms that you’re using, it will be harder to combine everything.
Attribution modeling and multi-touch attribution: Multi-touch attribution counts all conversion touchpoints when recording, which can complicate data calculations.

Ready to Start a Campaign? Digital Marketing Performance Metrics Will Help Keep Everything in Check!

Having metrics is non-negotiable. Besides, how else would you know whether or not your efforts are proving successful? Digital marketing performance metrics do more than determine whether your implemented strategies paid off. With a little bit of your analytical prowess, you can also use them to replicate your successes. One of the less explored yet highly effective ways of hitting your desired numbers from digital marketing performance metrics is native advertising. As experts in this field, we’re happy to help you! We at MGID will give you access to advanced tools, a personal manager and a department of creative specialists when you sign up with us. See your digital marketing performance metrics hit new heights when we work together!