There are so many different metrics you can measure across the digital space, it can be hard to know which ones to focus on when you’re starting out. This also makes it easy to fall into the trap of looking at vanity metrics. But what should you be looking at to keep you on track for digital marketing success?
What are vanity metrics?
First of all, vanity metrics are the figures you can measure across your digital marketing platforms, which make you feel good about your marketing efforts, but don’t give you meaningful insight into the success of your overall marketing strategy.
Although they can be useful in a small way, to glance at how you’re doing, If you focus all of your time and energy on these, you could actually be hindering the growth of your social accounts as opposed to helping them.
The three things to pay attention to
Website traffic
If you’re just at the start of your digital marketing journey, stop what you’re doing and take a look at your website analytics.
The most well-known web analytics tool is Google analytics. You can use this for free, and see lots of different data points from the number of people visiting your site, the pages they visited, how long they spent on those pages, and the source of where they came from.
On Google Analytics, you can see where your website traffic comes from based on the marketing channel.
Direct traffic
This means people who have visited your website by typing in your URL, or where the source is unknown.
These are website visits that come from a link on another website
Organic search
These are people who used a search engine and clicked on your website which was shown in the results of their search.
Any traffic that arrives on your website via social media platforms.
Paid search
This is traffic that arrives at your website by any pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that you’re running
Do you have a newsletter? Clicks from that will show up under these results.
You can use the figures from each of these to take a look at which marketing channels are most successful for you, and make an informed decision as to exactly where to spend your marketing budget.
Social media reach
Reach, reach, WE SAID REACH. Not followers. Remember we spoke about vanity metrics? Followers are one of those. For example, you can get great reach on TikTok or Instagram, without having that many followers. It might take people a few times of seeing your content before deciding to follow you – but they’re still seeing it.
If your organic reach is growing, it means that your content is doing its job of being interesting to those whose social feeds it appears in. One great way of achieving a greater reach is encouraging shares on your posts. Organic reach is all about genuine connection with customers and potential customers.
Paid reach is slightly different, if you’re running a valuation campaign for example and are paying for a Facebook Ad to take users to a landing page on your website where they can input their details for an instant valuation, you can take a look at this and see how successful that specific campaign is.
We’re NOT fans of the boost button when it comes to obtaining reach – as it’s incredibly untargeted and you could be wasting money appearing to people who are unlikely to require your services. We’ve written about that before here.
Website analytics for engagement
Going back to Google Analytics, we’ve mentioned how it’s important to track the number of people coming to your website and where they’re coming from, but it’s also good for checking how engaged they are when they land on your site.
You can use analytics tools to see:
The bounce rate is made up of the number of people who visited a page without clicking on something to take them to another one. The higher the bounce rate, the more work the page requires in keeping people on it, and wanting to click on something else to learn more about you and your services.
The longer someone spends on a page, the more they’re engaging with it which means they’re interested in the content.
And there we are…
There are so many numbers that can be monitored and that we do monitor, but if you’re unsure where to start, those three are the most important and the best ways of initially monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
Leave a Reply