WSI Digital Marketing Consultant Denise Bowen is passionate about helping businesses reach their growth goals. Denise recently hosted a webinar on measuring digital marketing success. Drawing on her extensive knowledge of digital marketing, including web user experience (UX), conversion rate optimization, paid ads, and search engine optimization, Denise provided actionable insights to help businesses optimize their strategies and achieve measurable results. Watch the webinar recording here and read our recap below.
How to Measure Digital Marketing Success
To effectively measure digital marketing success, tracking key metrics aligned with your goals is essential. Using tools like Google Analytics helps you monitor traffic sources, conversions, and user behavior. But which tool helps you measure the success of your website beyond basic analytics? A robust CRM system, such as HubSpot or Zoho, offers deeper insights by tracking the entire customer journey, from the first interaction to the final conversion. Pairing these tools clarifies what’s working and where improvements are needed, ensuring your strategy stays on track and delivers measurable results.
Metrics to Measure in Digital Marketing Efforts
Successfully measuring your digital marketing efforts requires selecting the right metrics that align with your business objectives. By choosing important metrics such as bounce rate, session duration, and email open rate, you can track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. These metrics measure user engagement and campaign performance, enabling you to generate valuable insights for optimizing future campaigns. Implementing these ways to measure ensures that your digital marketing campaign remains effective and drives continuous improvement in the success of your marketing initiatives.
Benefits of Measuring Online Lead Gen Activities
Knowing how well your current marketing efforts are performing and delivering the best results helps you make smarter decisions.
You can calculate the ROI by quantifying the dollars made from each effort, and you will see what to continue and what needs to be stopped or changed.
This, in turn, guides your decisions on next year’s marketing budget allocation.
It is not just marketing that can be changed - these metrics also offer insights about changes necessary in your operations and systems.
1. Understanding Business Metrics Better
There is so much out there; focus on tracking what is important to you. Below are some key metrics many businesses monitor.
User info is useful when marketing efforts are in place to bring people to your website:
- Website traffic = total traffic, new users, and traffic source (organic, paid, social)
- Demographics = location, age, and gender of those who search for your site directly from the URL bar
- Technology = device type, device info, and browser
- Activity = page views, duration, and conversion rate (the number of users who took the desired action over the total number of site visitors)
Website leads are created when visitors complete a goal and convert on your website. These conversions can include things like phone calls (tracked through a phone tracking service on your website page), form submissions, newsletter subscription sign-ups, or online chats (for example, how many chats were started compared to how many convert into customers?).
Website events are less direct actions that you still want users to carry out. These include things like web page clicks, video plays, site searches, or PDF downloads.
Ecommerce websites need sales-specific measurements such as purchases, average order value, cart abandonment, conversion rate, or acquisition cost. And if you want to dig deeper into how to measure Ecommerce success, check out our post here.
Paid ads spending is expected to reach $1.06 trillion globally in 2025. With so much skin in the game, you may also want to consider measuring things like:
- Impressions (how many times your ad is viewed)
- Click-through rate (CTR) (the number of clicks on your ad versus the total number of users who saw your ad)
- Conversions (the number of clicks that led to a goal completion on your website)
- Conversion rate (the percentage of users who converted on your site over the total number of users who clicked)
- Cost per click (CPC) and leads
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
There are free analysis tools online that you can check out. Or you can ask your local WSI digital marketing consultant to guide you on measuring how much you are getting out of what you are putting in.
2. Lead Tracking Attribution
This marketing term refers to tracking – or attributing – each lead to a source, campaign, or channel, such as SEO, paid ads, social media, email marketing, blogging, referrals, and so on.
Start by installing Google Analytics on your website – it is the best way to track traffic and traffic sources on your website:
- Set up dynamic call tracking to determine the source of visitors who called using the number on your website.
- Use contact forms to monitor which emails originated from your website users. Create unique thank you pages to help track the source of the form filling.
- Ecommerce sites can be set up to track purchases directly on Google Analytics or through a plug-in.
As comprehensive as Google Analytics is, it does have limitations. A robust CRM (customer relationship management) tool provides more accurate and in-depth data about each customer’s path. Look at platforms like HubSpot or Zoho to get started.
To attribute paid ad campaigns, use the analytics on each platform (Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, etc) to get the data you want.
3. Digital Marketing Testing
For all this data to help you accomplish your goals, you need to test which changes will help improve results. It’s a good idea to start by testing what isn’t working.
AB Testing in digital marketing compares two versions of something to find out which of the two performs better. You can look at colors, placements, wording, images, and actions (redirects). But be careful about not testing too many things at once because then your results will be too vague.
Heat mapping tracks mouse movement to show user behavior on a website page.
Combining these two gives you even greater insights that will move you toward your goal.
And it's important that you don't rush testing. Allow time to gather a large enough sample size of users or data to make any conclusions. Furthermore, testing is a reiterative process. For optimal results, test, analyze, and then repeat!
4. Dashboards and Benchmarks
Tracking is not a one-time thing. You need to be able to compare figures to previous periods (monthly, annually, seasonally). Consistent reporting reveals trends. Display data in dashboards for a holistic view and to help you spot trends quickly.
A comprehensive dashboard provides a central overview of all these metrics. It can be divided into sections and customized to display what’s important to you. In addition, each element can be expanded if you need to dive deeper.
5. Competitor Insights
How do your metrics stack up against your competitors? You can compare things like website traffic, organic research, paid ads, and social media through competitive research.
Review your competitors’ marketing efforts once to twice a year to stay abreast of changes they’ve made. Look for gaps that you need to plug in and invest more into the unique things that help you stand out from the crowd.
The Role of AI in Measuring Digital Marketing Success
AI technology enhances the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns by providing accurate measurement tools for campaign success and helping monitor essential metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, and social media engagement. By automating data analysis, AI offers valuable insights into campaign performance, allowing businesses to track the success of marketing strategies across social platforms and search engine marketing efforts. This streamlined approach helps businesses make data-driven adjustments throughout their campaigns, optimizing their marketing investments and ensuring alignment with campaign goals.
Key Performance Indicators for Measuring Digital Marketing Success
Identifying and tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to measuring the success of your digital marketing campaign. KPIs provide quantifiable metrics that align with your business goals and help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Here are some essential KPIs to consider:
- Bounce Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may suggest that your user experience needs improvement or that your target audience isn't finding what they're looking for.
- Email Open Rate: For email marketing campaigns, the open rate measures how many recipients open your emails. This KPI helps assess the effectiveness of your subject lines and the relevance of your content to your audience.
- Session Duration: This measures the average amount of time users spend on your website. Longer session durations typically indicate that visitors are engaging with your content, enhancing brand awareness and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer account. Understanding CLV helps you make informed decisions about customer acquisition costs and retention strategies.
- Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Rankings: Monitoring your position on SERPs for targeted keywords can provide insights into your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and overall online visibility.
- Social Media Engagement: Metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates on your social media posts can help you gauge the effectiveness of your digital advertising and content strategies.
- Conversion Rate: This KPI measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Tracking conversion rates across different marketing campaigns helps you identify which strategies are driving the most value.
- Exit Rate: Similar to the bounce rate, the exit rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave your site from a specific page. Analyzing exit rates can help you identify problematic pages and improve overall user experience.
By regularly monitoring these KPIs, you can gain a deeper understanding of your marketing performance, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your strategies to achieve better results in your digital marketing efforts. Additionally, setting achievable and time-bound KPIs ensures that your goals are realistic and progress can be effectively tracked over time.
Contact WSI For Our Digital Marketing Services
Would you like to learn how your website stacks up against your top competitors and identify some initial marketing opportunities for your business? Then visit our webinar landing page for a free competitive analysis! For more information on measuring digital marketing success, get in touch with your friendly WSI Digital Marketing Consultant without delay! Or catch up on the whole recording from WSI here:
