Over the past month, our digital marketing experts have talked through – Digital Marketing Tips and how to approach the two main digital channels for most businesses – Facebook and Google.
Today, we touch base with them to understand what and how to track your digital metrics for marketing success.
“Digital marketing is all about tracking what works, what doesn’t, and knowing how to improve this to make a channel work for your business,” says Stacey Vermaak, Growth Marketing Consultant at Lulalend.
While each business is different, there are a core set of key performance indexes (KPIs) that you can start tracking in order to make sure that your marketing efforts are performing well for your business.
“As a fundamental rule of thumb, you want to make sure you are tracking through to your final goal – either a sale or a signed client or contract. Also, be sure to track the monetary value of these.”
Michael Rampjapedi, Digital Marketing Manager at Lulalend says, “You should focus on implementing the conversion tracking tools available on the various marketing platforms, as well as in setting up Google Analytics to track any actions on your site that are important to you.”
Vermaak continues, “One mistake many businesses have made is tracking to a point too early in their funnel and then judging their marketing based on the number of leads, or cost per lead, without understanding how many of those leads convert into sales for that specific channel or campaign. This often leads to over-investment in a channel and under-investment in others. It’s important to understand that not all leads are created equal.”
“It is important to assess marketing performance based on return on ad spend and profitability rather than on metrics such as cost per lead,” said Vermaak.
They agreed that, for most businesses, the below metrics are a good starting point:
- Traffic split by channel (users) – get this in Google Analytics
- Cost per user by channel or CPC (cost per click)
- Conversion rate by goal and by channel/ campaign/ ad message
- Customer repeat rate – how many purchases each month are from repeat customers vs new customers
- Lifetime value
- Retention rates (for long-term clients, or subscription services)
- Cost to acquire a customer by channel
- Return on Ad Spend (ROI) – while you can simply divide revenue by costs, we prefer to divide profit by cost in order to benchmark based on profitability.
While some of these may seem foreign now, if you can get started with tracking these on a monthly basis you will start to understand how the different levers involved in your marketing are working. Once you understand which ones you can affect, you are able to develop a plan to get you where you need to go.
