Demystifying Fundamental Digital Marketing Metrics for Google, Email Marketing, and Social Media
Successful digital marketing campaigns require a considerable amount of creativity and imagination. It takes time to build an eye-catching website, develop engaging social media or email campaigns, or establish your thought leadership through insightful blogs and eBooks. But how do you know your digital marketing efforts are working?
By tracking the right digital marketing metrics, you can see the results of your marketing team’s efforts. With so many metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to review, though, it can be difficult to tell which metrics provide the best insights — so we’ll walk you through the most fundamental ones for five major platforms.
The Key Metrics To Watch by Platform
Fundamentally, marketing metrics provide essential insights into how well your marketing campaigns are performing. While there are dozens of metrics per platform that all provide valuable insights, let’s focus on a handful of the most fundamental metrics across five widely used digital marketing tools and platforms:
1. Google Analytics 4
Your Google Analytics platform offers detailed insights into website traffic, user behavior, conversion data and much more. The following metrics help you understand how many people are coming to your website, where they’re coming from, and what they’re doing:
- Total Users: Total users who visited your website.
- Sessions: A group of user interactions with your website that takes place within a given time frame—for example, a single session can contain multiple page views.
- Page Views: A view of a page on your website that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code.
- Traffic Sources: How people are finding your website and where they come from when they visit the website. You can also see their location and key demographic data as well.
- Conversions: A conversion on your website means someone completed a form, clicked to call your phone number, or clicked on any other important CTA.
For example, these key metrics can help your marketing team identify what content on your site people are engaging with and where their interests lie.
2. Google Search Console
Businesses depend heavily on their website’s “organic” visibility in Google searches, or how near to the top of the search results for a relevant keyword it is. Here are a few of the fundamental metrics in Google Search Console, a free marketing tool Google provides for insights into how your business is getting found through Google searches:
- Impressions: How often someone saw a link to your website in their Google search results.
- Clicks: How often someone clicked a link from Google to your site.
- Avg. Position: The relative ranking of the position of your link on Google. 1 is the topmost position underneath the ads, 2 is the next position, and so on.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who saw the link to your site on Google and clicked through.
- Keywords: The keyword search terms used to find your website in Google. Google only shows a small percentage of keywords people are using.
3. Google Ads
Paid search and display advertising in Google are useful methods for achieving specific marketing goals, from directing customers to products and services to providing useful mid-funnel resources like eBooks or white papers.
These metrics are essential for evaluating how effectively your Google Ads campaigns are performing:
- Impressions: How many times your ads were seen.
- Clicks: How many times someone has clicked your ad.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who saw the ad and clicked through.
- Average Cost-Per-Click (CPC): The average paid-per-click on the ads.
- Conversion: A contact form completion or call from the ads.
- Keywords: The search terms you are bidding on with Google.
- Search Terms: The keywords that people actually put into Google.
- Ad Copy: what type of content motivates people to click on an ad and become a customer.
4. Email Marketing
There are many competing email marketing platforms, such as our favorite HubSpot, each with its own competing blend of features and tools. Whichever platform your business uses, the fundamental metrics they measure are the same.
- Opened: Identifying whether the recipient opened your email.
- Open Rate: The percentage of sent emails that were opened.
- Clicked: Identifying whether the recipient clicked a link in the email.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who opened the email and clicked through your email links.
Tracking these metrics over time provides insight into how effectively your email campaigns are engaging with both existing and returning customers as well as potential customers. HubSpot can take this data and create automated follow-ups taking your email marketing to a higher level and driving better results from engagement prospects.
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the most important social media platforms for B2B companies. To use LinkedIn to its full potential follow these key metrics:
- Followers: Users who follow your main business page.
- New followers are new to the page.
- Net followers are your total followers over the month.
- Clicks: The number of clicks on your content, company name, or logo by a signed-in LinkedIn member.
- Impressions: The number of views your content received when it is at least 50% on the screen for 300 milliseconds or more, or when it is clicked.
- Social Actions: Tallies of various actions users can take on social media, including the number of times members have liked, commented, or shared each update.
- The higher the number, the more individuals are engaging with your content.
- These actions increase impressions, awareness, and the opportunities for link clicks.
These metrics help you determine the overall growth and engagement of your business’s social media audience, measuring your ability to manage your business’s social reputation and help spread word of mouth for your products or services. As a general rule of thumb, grow your LinkedIn followers and you will grow your company.
Summary
At Intuitive Websites, we pay special attention to the KPIs and metrics that matter most to your goals for long-term and short-term business growth. When you work with us, we make sure you understand which metrics are most important to you and demonstrate the return on your marketing investments.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and see what our marketing experts can do for your business.
