In the bad old days (which really are not that long ago!) the digital marketing landscape was a free-for-all where instant ‘experts’ touted their money-making formulas (think snake oil salesmen) and convinced followers into spending thousands for coaching programs and /or services that didn’t work. Of course, without metrics for measuring the ROI of digital marketing, these ‘experts’ continued raking in the money from gullible and desperate businesses.
In other words, every Tom, Dick & Harry is a Digital Marketer, lacking the scientific and financial knowledge necessary to inform and optimize the creative side of Marketing
It’s not hard to understand why measuring ROI is such a concern. In a massively multi-channel, multi-media world, how do you choose where to invest time and money? There’s so much that can be so easily measured—Web conversion rates, engagement indices, influence scores. At the same time, each digital marketing project may produce an entirely separate set of metrics making apples-to-apples comparisons challenging or impossible. It’s easy to get distracted from what’s actually important to the business.
Knowing which metrics are truly important starts with at least a theoretical understanding of how digital activities relate to ultimate business goals Do more likes on your Facebook page translate to greater mindshare and a stronger brand? What about compared with banner ads? Do your tweets generate a higher rate of customer acquisition than your outbound e-mails? Over what time period are results expected? What metrics are consistent enough that they can be used to truthfully compare one initiative to another? This process can be out-sourced but the digital marketers will need to know the nuts and bolts of your company and what your drivers are….. In a digital world, deciding how best to measure ROI is a core business decision every bit as important as ultimately measuring it.
As long as Digital Marketers continue to fail to get trained in, master the use of and optimise Digital Marketing Performance & Digital Marketing ROI, they will struggle to demonstrate to CEOs that they are not ‘money spenders who jump on (and hide) behind the latest fads and blow smoke, but real business generators.
Metric #1 Page Views and unique visitors
For most businesses the first step to conversion is directing potential customers to your online presence – your website. Whether you’re doing lead generation, online sales, driving customers to your brick and mortar stores, or just collecting emails for future marketing campaigns, getting people to your website is a necessary element. Analysing total traffic to your website gives marketers an understanding of overall digital reach and the effectiveness of campaigns. What you really need to know, along with the absolute number of visits is the general pattern of visits – these patterns will allow you to concentrate on the days/times when your visitors are lower – for example Weekends and Holidays. To really understand this data, it will have to be cross referenced with other activities such as new posts, a large increase in social activity, or changes to the website infrastructure, i.e. change of host or installation of a SSL certificate. Analyze this data early and often within your analytics platform to avoid missing issues that can grow into big problems if left unattended.
Metric #2 Mobile
As we have seen from a previous blog post, mobile sites are now vital, so your website must be responsive (which means the content automatically scales down to fit in whatever screen size the user has) — and if you’re site isn’t responsive, Google will penalise your site. However, high mobile interaction likely means users are interested in different things, so, rather than looking for services to buy on a mobile device, users are more likely interested in directions, contact details /form or a phone number, long-form content is really not what users want on their smartphones. If Google Analytics shows a lot of mobile traffic, you might consider developing a mobile app to customise the experience for mobile users versus having them struggle with a mobile website.
Metric #3 Traffic sources
Where your traffic originates is an important question both in terms of evaluating the success of your digital strategy and in terms of ranking factors within the Google Algorithm. Google uses the online community to evaluate the quality of any given website and links (along with traffic) are good signals of quality content. The better your links, the better Google judges your content.
Referral traffic can provide an understanding of audience segmentation from different sources and identify what marketing efforts offer the most user engagement. Increase syndication and promotion to sources driving referral traffic to boost customer acquisition. Google views quality links from social networks (ie. shares and tweets), direct traffic, and referral traffic from other websites as strong indicators of your content quality. Bad links from spam sites, poor quality sites, unrelated websites, or paid links can again result in you being penalised and could even get your site de-indexed meaning it virtually disappears from Google!
Metric #4 Bounce Rates
Bounce rates indicate that users have entered your website on a page and left without clicking on additional pages within your site. High bounce rates may signify that content on a page is not captivating to users or lacks a strong call to action to encourage engagement. However, this may not be the case for all pages and content such as blogs are often intended to encourage a single interaction. Analyze what types of pages are producing high bounce rates and adjust content accordingly to increase user interaction.
Metric #5 Qualified Leads From Marketing
The best way to track the ROI of specific marketing efforts is to track leads from individual campaigns and understand what helped them convert. Measuring conversion rates helps understand how resources are being used and the success of a campaign. By identifying what marketing efforts help bring in a lead, your team can adjust resources to create more content that drives users to take action and eliminate those with poor ROI. Measuring leads by individual campaigns also helps hold teams accountable for growing business opportunities.
Metric #6 Social Fan Growth
Monitor your fan growth across social channels to identify which platforms offer the best engagement opportunities for your brand. Track ad performance to discover what copy, content and imagery drives the most fans to like your page. If you run contests and promotions, track metrics to establish the ROI of your campaign pounds.
Your website and your business’ overall online presence is a long-term investment, a strong online strategy is a mix of good initial set-up for your website, great content that’s updated frequently, reputable backlinks to your site that make your enhance your brand and an engaged online audience via social media and frequent web traffic. When you tackle Digital Marketing the right way, your organic search results will be worth the time you spent, and are easier to maintain over the long term without an extortionate monthly bill.
