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Digital marketing is a challenge, no matter how much experience you have. With so many new concepts and metrics being used by marketers each year, it’s important to stay on top of them and understand why the key metrics are important. To help you out with that, we’ve put together a list of 20 key digital marketing metrics that you need to know.

Each of them delivers a unique insight that’ll offer real value to your business and ensure you’re ready to take on the challenges associated with reaching customers and making sales online. We’ve split the metrics into four distinct categories to make things easier, so read on now to learn more.

Websites

1. Total Site Traffic

Total traffic site is a digital marketing metric that’s self-explanatory, but it’s still a very important one. It tells you how many unique visitors arrive at your website or landing page from all sources of traffic. That will include direct visitors who might have your site bookmarked and many others.

It includes referrals, people who arrive from social media networks, organic visits from search engines, paid search ads, people arriving from an email message and any other forms of traffic too. It’s important to know how many people are visiting your site in total.

2. Bounce Rate

Knowing your website’s bounce rate is key because it can tell you about the quality of your pages and maybe signal that it’s time to make some changes. The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors to your site who don’t perform any action and then leave.

So what does a high bounce rate tell you? It could mean that the quality of the page is not high enough, and the user sees no reason to take any action or explore further. It might also mean that you’re attracting the wrong audience to your site.

3. New Sessions

This Google Analytics metric helps you to understand more about the people visiting your website. In particular, it allows you to find out how many of your visitors are new to your website and how many are repeat visitors. Every business wants to encourage repeat visits and this can help with that.

It’s useful when you’re trying to change your site because it’ll tell you whether the changes you’re making are causing you to lose repeat visitors or not, which is important to know.

4. Total Conversions

When you want to know how profitable your marketing efforts really are, use the total conversions metric. It’ll tell you how you’re converting visitors into customers. This is the aim of just about every marketer, so it’s important to know how you’re doing in this department.

You can track this progress with Google Analytics, but you can also measure conversions directly on your website depending on how it is built. Either way, it’s a vital metric for your website.

5. Page Value

Page value is about letting you find out which pages on your website are most valuable and contribute most to a sale or transaction. Some pages might not be valuable, which could mean that those pages need to be reworked.

You should want to make sure that the page value of each page you have on your site is as high as it can be. That means that the pages and their content will be relevant and that’s the way it should be.

Social Media

6. Average Engagement Rate

As a business operating on social media, one of the main things that you’ll want to do is drive engagement. That’s why the average engagement rate is so important. It shows how many likes, shares and comments/replies your posts receive on average.

Higher engagement is important because it shows that you’re connecting with your audience and making sure that you’re delivering them content that they like and want to engage with. You just add up all forms of engagement and divide by your follower count and times by 100… Or automate all that.

7. Post Reach

Post reach tells you how many people are seeing your social media posts. People can only engage with things if they can see them, so this is the vital first step for any business looking to improve its approach to digital marketing.

Things like the timing of your posts will impact how many people they’re seen by. If you post when your audience is most likely to be online and using social media, more people will see your pots. This digital marketing metric should help you post at the correct times more often.

8. Audience Growth Rate

Audience growth rate isn’t so much about seeing how much your audience on social media platforms is growing by as much as it’s about tracking the speed of that growth. How quickly are you gaining followers; you can then think about the potential reasons behind that.

How many followers you’re gaining is often less interesting and tells you less than thinking about how you fast your audience is growing, so looking at the audience growth rate is definitely a good idea. It’ll help you realize a lot about your situation.

9. Social Share of Voice

If you’re running a company and running digital marketing campaigns, you’ll want to make sure that as many people as possible are talking about your brand. People talk about brands on social media either in a direct (tagging in your company etc.) or indirect (typing your brand name with no link).

By measuring how much your brand is getting mentioned on social media platforms compared to other competing brands, you can see how yours measures up to the rest. It won’t tell you everything you want to know but it will provide insight.

10. Virality Rate

Getting lots of unique views is the goal when you’re looking to make a post go viral. Look at the virality rates of your posts. You want to make sure that people are sharing it to people who haven’t already seen it because that makes the impressions unique.

The virality rate is calculated by measuring a post’s impressions, measuring its shares and then dividing the number of shares by the number of impressions. You then times that figure by 100 to find the percentage that’s known as the virality rate.

Email Marketing

11. List Growth Rate

You’ll want many people to sign up to your list as possible when you’re running an email marketing campaign by using mail trackers. You can track the growth by taking the number of unsubscribes away from the total of new subscribers, dividing it by the total number of subscribers and multiplying it by 100.

Seeing how your list is growing or if it’s growing at all can be good for you. You should push through the setbacks and keep growing your list.

12. Number of Unsubscribes

If you’re gaining a lot of subscribers but you’re finding that many people are unsubscribing too, this should tell you something. It could mean that people were drawn in and happy to subscribe, but really weren’t happy with what happened after that.

People unsubscribing in large numbers should send you a message things need to change. It’s disappointing when this happens, but with the right changes, you can turn it around.

13. Revenue Per Subscriber

When all’s said and done, you want to turn those subscribers into paying customers; that’s what the end goal always is. This will help you find out more about your return on investment, which is obviously important for any business out there.

By seeing how much revenue you make per subscriber, you can tailor your emails accordingly. You might need to switch focus and think about other things that encourage your audience to make purchases after signing up to your email list.

14. Email Sharing Rate

The email sharing rate refers to how many times people who receive your emails share them through social media platforms. Your emails should have a button that says “Share” or something to that effect, it should track how many shares each email gets automatically.

Another similar but different metric is known as the forwarding rate. As the name suggests, this tells you how many times your emails get forward by recipients to their friends and contacts. It’s another helpful metric because it tells you how engaged people are with your brand.

15. Revenue Per Email

Revenue per email is another important digital marketing metric because it lets you know how much money you’re making because of the emails you’re sending out to subscribers. That’s the main aim of all this.

You can then find out which emails are serving you best and leading to the most revenue gained. From there, you can make positive changes and ensure all of your emails are as effective at boosting revenue as they can be.

Advertising

16. ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend)

The return on investment spend metric refers to the return you get from specific ad campaigns and not just the overall marketing campaign that you’re waging.  It’s worked out by dividing the campaign revenue by the total cost of the campaign.

It’s easy to work out, and it tells you a lot about how successful your advertising campaigns are in each specific instance. From there, you can make sure you’re doing the right things every time and reducing the number of failed or disappointing ad campaigns you run.

17. Impressions

The impressions your ads make refers to how many times the ads appear in paid search ad sections on Google or other search engines. It can also refer to ads shown on sites that aren’t your own. Lots of impressions are good for brand awareness.

There’s a difference between ads being seen and being displayed. The impressions can tell you when an ad was displayed, but it doesn’t tell you that a person saw it when it appeared on their screen.

18. Quality Score

If your ads have a high Quality Score, which is a number between 1 and 10, it’ll help you gain a higher position in SERPS for your ads. Platforms like Google gather user feedback to determine the quality score and look at things like ad relevance to work it out.

By getting a higher Quality Score, you’ll get a higher ad ranking and that can help your brand so it’s something that’s definitely worth considering and tracking in more detail if you’re not doing so already.

19. Ad Frequency

You want to make sure you’re not showing the same people the same ads all the time. Ad frequency allows you to measure the number of times your target audience views an ad so you can ensure they’re used efficiently and productively.

If you’re advertising on Facebook, you can split test your ads and ensure that you get the most out of each of them in terms of performance and return on investment.

20. CTR (Click-Through Rate)

CTR or click-through rate gives you an understanding of how many people click through to your landing page when they see an ad of yours. A low CTR tells you that your audience is seeing nothing appealing in your ads and are choosing not to click.

It might mean that your ads aren’t relevant to the audience you’re trying to target and that’s something that’s a problem to fix as swiftly as possible.

Each of these digital marketing metrics serves an important purpose for businesses and helps you optimize your overall approach to marketing. With the help of the metrics we’ve discussed above, you’ll fully understand how your advertising is working and how their use can improve. That’s essential to the success of your marketing campaigns.