Decoding Digital Marketing Success: Key Metrics and Indicators

Do you know which KPIs for digital marketing are most important to track for your business’s success? In this blog, we cover the most important digital marketing KPIs and give you tools for how to understand them and implement them into your digital marketing check-ins.

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Digital marketing success is always dependent on your business’s unique goals. However, there are several tried and true KPIs in digital marketing that you can track to make sure your business’s marketing is working. From form fills and sales to increased phone calls and site traffic, this article will explore what digital marketing success looks like and the significance of these key metrics in evaluating your campaigns’ performance KPIs.

1. Form Fills: Capturing Leads and Building Relationships

Form fills are a critical metric in digital marketing success. Form fills often represent the first step toward lead generation. When a visitor provides their contact information through a website form, it indicates their interest in your products or services. A high number of form fills signifies a strong marketing strategy that effectively engages and motivates users to act. Form fills signal that your targeting techniques are finding quality leads who are ready to take action with your business!

By optimizing your website's user experience and implementing persuasive call-to-actions, you can encourage more form fills. Tracking and analyzing form fill data allows you to identify the most effective lead-generation channels and refine your marketing efforts accordingly. Moreover, it sets the foundation for nurturing leads and building lasting customer relationships.

2. Sales: Driving Revenue and Conversions

The ultimate goal of any digital marketing campaign is to generate revenue. Digital marketing success is often measured by the number of sales or conversions achieved through online channels. By tracking and analyzing sales data, businesses can evaluate if their marketing is working, identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize their strategies.

Effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques, such as compelling landing page design, persuasive copywriting and streamlined checkout processes, are vital in driving sales. By continuously monitoring sales metrics, businesses can understand customer behavior, identify conversion bottlenecks and implement strategies to enhance the overall customer journey and ensure digital marketing success.

3. More Quality Phone Calls: Driving Offline Engagement

While the digital landscape continues to evolve, phone calls remain a valuable channel for customer engagement and conversions. Increased phone calls indicate a successful digital marketing campaign that motivates users to take the next step and make direct contact with your business and should always be a KPI for your business’s digital marketing.

Implementing call tracking enables you to attribute phone calls to specific marketing channels, allowing you to assess their contribution to your overall success. By optimizing your website for mobile devices, displaying prominent phone numbers and implementing click-to-call functionality, you can enhance the user experience and encourage more phone call conversions.

4. Increased Site Traffic: Expanding Reach and Visibility

Site traffic is a fundamental metric in digital marketing success, as it reflects the number of visitors your website attracts. Increased site traffic indicates effective marketing efforts that drive awareness, visibility and brand exposure. However, it's essential to focus not only on quantity but also on the quality of traffic as a performance KPI.

By utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, creating high-quality content and implementing targeted advertising campaigns, you can attract relevant and engaged visitors to your website. Analyzing site traffic data, such as bounce rates, average session duration, and page views, allows you to understand user behavior, optimize your website's performance and maximize conversion potential.

5. Social Media Engagement: Building a Community

Social media is often a consumer’s first stop when researching a brand. Especially in industries like beauty and wellness, images of past work and happy clientele speak volumes for new customers. An active social media presence helps your business reach new followers and potential customers and signals that your business truly cares about the individuals it serves.

It’s important to understand that not every “like” and “share” means your business’s social media strategy is working. Vanity metrics are all too common when measuring social media success. A few metrics that are truly meaningful to your business’s social presence are:

  • Engagement rate
  • Follower growth rate
  • Click through rate (CTR)
  • Conversion rate
  • Sentiment analysis

Learn more about these high-impact social metrics and vanity social metrics from our blog From Awareness to Conversion: How to Monitor Social Media KPIs for Success.

6. Increased Reviews: Both Positive and Negative

No one wants more negative reviews, but think of it this way: your business’s review marketing strategy is working.

Ideally, the positive reviews of your business far outpace the negative reviews. However, if your review marketing strategy works effectively, seeing more negative reviews than usual shouldn’t cause alarm!

Search engines value and reward businesses with a steady stream of reviews and responses to those reviews. A professional and timely response to a negative review lets potential customers know your business goes above and beyond to serve customers and set wrongs right. 

While effective review marketing earns your business points with search engines and new customers, reviews are also an invaluable resource for learning more about your business. Positive reviews can help you brainstorm how to improve high-performing products and services and can help inform where you allocate budget. Negative reviews give insight into weak spots and how you can strengthen those areas.

Review marketing is a must-have for a successful digital marketing strategy for your business. Learn more about how RevLocal can get your business started with review marketing in our blog!

7. Positive ROI on Marketing Dollars: Create More Space for Better Work

If you see an increased profit margin and ROI on your business’s marketing dollars, your marketing is working!

An overall positive ROI is a win, however, understanding the ROI for each of your business’s digital marketing channels can give even greater insight into your business’s digital marketing success.

A few channels to analyze for ROI are:

  • Social media
  • Paid advertising campaigns
  • Website traffic
  • Content SEO and rankings
  • Email campaigns
  • Traditional marketing methods (fliers, mailers, billboards, TV…etc.)
  • Video content

Understanding which specific channels have high-performing KPIs and which do not can inform quarterly and annual marketing goals and give you confidence in your strategies and new directions.

As each of your marketing channels moves towards a positive ROI, you’ll find your business has more margin and space to do even better work, take risks and reap a higher reward.

8. Better Search Engine Rankings: SEO Strategies

Routinely checking where your website and content pieces rank in search engine results is an excellent indicator of your SEO efforts. Both organic and local strategies should be taken into consideration!

Consistently rising in search engine rankings is the goal, however, don’t be discouraged if your website or content isn’t ranking the same for every keyword and query. If your business ranks low for a particular keyword, consider building a campaign to create more buzz and demand around that service. Make sure to update your content for relevant keywords and links! If your business is ranking high for a service that isn’t very profitable for your business, think of ways to use that landing page or service to drive traffic to higher-profit services or products.

The more specific you can get in understanding your business’s search engine rankings and SEO value, the better! No information is useless; everything can be used to help grow your business.

Final Thoughts

Digital marketing success is a multifaceted concept encompassing several key metrics and indicators. From form fills and sales to increased phone calls and site traffic, each metric contributes to evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns and achieving your business goals. By monitoring and analyzing these metrics, businesses can make informed decisions, optimize their marketing strategies, and drive sustainable growth in the digital realm. Embrace the power of data-driven insights and unlock the true potential of your digital marketing efforts!

RevLocal is a digital marketing agency that provides digital marketing solutions to small business and multi-location brands. If you find one or more areas of your business’s digital marketing strategy that aren’t performing, contact us to learn how we can help! 

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