The trend towards digital marketing has been one of the biggest recent shifts in business. The ability to target highly specific groups online has drastically reduced marketing costs and made it possible for small businesses to compete with large ones.
However, businesses cannot guarantee success by just applying digital marketing techniques without considering what they want to achieve with them and measuring if they’re working. It’s important to know what key performance indicators (KPIs) you will monitor from the beginning. There’s plenty to choose from, but here are a few basic ones that every business should track.
1. Organic search traffic
Organic search traffic refers to visitors who click on a business’s website after it appears on a search engine results page. Search traffic is considered to be “organic” when the website is not one of the “sponsored” results that have paid to appear at the top of the page.
This shows how a search engine optimisation strategy – a cornerstone of digital marketing – is working. Although SEO strategies take time and money to work, they can be very cost-effective because you don’t have to pay whenever someone clicks through to your site, as you do with other strategies. You can also hire agencies to do SEO for your business, such as King Kong, a leading Australian agency.
2. Landing page conversion rate
Directing lots of traffic to your website is all well and good, but it means little if people don’t buy something, sign-up, or complete some other desirable action that benefits your business. The landing page conversion rate gives you a picture of how many are doing that. If it’s not many, it indicates that something is wrong with your website or the page they are landing on.
3. Cost per click
This is one of the simplest KPIs you can use to understand whether your digital marketing strategy is cost-effective. Clicks are used instead of impressions (how many people see your marketing) because it’s a better indicator that somebody has actually acted in response to your marketing.
4. Return on investment
You should already be tracking this for many different areas of your business, and digital marketing shouldn’t be any exception. At the end of the day, this is what it’s all about.
Conclusion
Monitoring KPIs and analysing performance is essential for digital marketing success. One of the big advantages of digital marketing is the flexibility to make changes quickly and easily when things are not working, which you cannot know if you’re not keeping track.