Top Digital Marketing Metrics to Monitor

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate metric is the percentage of email recipients that unsubscribed from your mailing list after receiving an email from you. Similar to how the open rate metric can be slightly misleading, your unsubscribe metric should not be used to gauge the overall health of your email list. Why? Often when people are tired of receiving your emails, they won’t actually take the time to unsubscribe from your list but instead, just stop reading or clicking on your messages. Where your unsubscribe rate can offer value is by using it as a gauge to calculate overall mailing list growth.

Tip: Measuring subscriber engagement is best done with your click-through and conversion rate metrics.

Click-Through Rate

One of the metrics that is most analyzed by email automation marketers is the click-through rate. Used to determine the percentage of readers that clicked on one or more links included in an email message, this metric helps calculate the performance of your campaigns.

Example: 700 total clicks / 15,000 delivered emails * 100 = 4.6% click-through rate.

This metric is frequently used to measure the results of A/B tests, which are designed to uncover opportunities to increase clicks on your emails. It also functions as a solid day-to-day metric for evaluating the performance of each email sent.

While what can be considered a ‘good’ click-through rate can vary by industry, this metric is vital for understanding how many people on your email list are engaging with your business and learning about what you offer.

Leads Generated

If lead generation is your focus, your emails should offer lead generation content that requires the reader to complete a lead capture form in order to access the offered content. The leads generated metric can be used to track how many new leads your business is generating every day, week, or month.

Landing Page Conversion Rate

The landing page conversion metric indicates the number of people that completed the call- to-action in your email and went to your landing page. While this metric can vary across industries, the overall average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%.

Likes/Shares/Followers

There are a number of granular ways to track how engaged with your content and brand your audience is. At a granular level, consumers ‘engage’ with your business by ‘liking’, ‘commenting’, following, and sharing your content. Likes/Shares/Number of Followers help indicate how much and how often your audience is interacting with your brand and whether or not they are truly interested in the content that you are sharing.

Potential Reach

The metric that measures the number of people who could realistically see one of your posts during a certain time frame is considered the potential reach. This often considers if your followers tend to share your content, as each social share within one of your followers´ networks can expose your post to 2% to 5% of that person´s person audience.

Post Reach

The post reach metric highlights how many people have seen a post since it went live. This simple-to-understand metric is easily actionable as it is largely influenced by timing like when your audience is online the most and if they find your content valuable.

Social Share of Voice

The metric that measures the number of people that are mentioning your brand compared to your competitors is called the Social Share of Voice (SSoV). This measures both direct @Blueprintim or indirect ‘Blueprint Internet Marketing’ mentions. In essence, SSoV is a competitive analysis that indicates how relevant your brand is within your niche.

Applause Rate

The applause rate social metric refers to the number of approval actions (likes or make favorite) taken on a post, relative to the total number of followers your page has. This metric is valuable as it indicates how motivated your audience is in finding your content, which can be used to create new, similarly engaging content moving forward.

Average Engagement Rate

The number of engagement actions such as likes, shares, and comments that a post receives relative to your total number of followers is your Average Engagement Rate. This is a very important metric to track as higher engagement on your content means that it is resonating with your audience. Having a high engagement rate is more important than the actual number of likes, shares, or comments on a post.

Amplification Rate

The ratio of shares per post compared to your total number of followers is your amplification metric. Avinash Kaushik, an industry-leading marketer at Google describes amplification as ‘the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.’ Simply put, when your amplification rate is high, it means that your followers are willing to associate themselves with your brand.

Virality Rate

The number of people that shared your post compared to the number of unique views that post received (impressions) is the virality rate. As with many of the other metrics used in social, the virality rate is deeper than just the number of ‘likes´ a post received. For example, a post could have 15,000 likes and only a 0.1% vitality rate whereas a post with 8,000 likes could have an 8.87% virality rate, making it the clear winner.

Number of Leads

This metric calculates the number of potential sales prospects your business earned through social media per reporting period.

Social Media Conversion

This metric calculates the number of total conversions or sales that can be attributed to your social media campaigns, divided by your total conversion rate.

Referral Visitors

Is a metric that tracks users that find your site through another blog, social media account, or website.

Audience Growth Rate

The audience growth rate metric calculates the rate at which a brand adds or loses audience members for each social channel. The rate is determined by dividing new audience members by the total.

Impressions

This traffic metric is calculated when your paid search ad is served on a search engine results page. It is calculated by search engine data via their API reports.

Clicks

Clicks is a straightforward metric – when a user clicks on your ad and visits your landing page, it is counted as a click. This data is provided by search engines but can also be monitored with other on- site analytics programs.

Click-Through Rate

The click through rate, usually referred to as CTR, measures how many clicks a campaign has generated and is an important metric to monitor to determine the performance of your campaigns.

CTR is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks that your campaign received during your reporting period by the total number of impressions in the same time frame. If your campaign had 120 clicks out of 1,000 impressions, your CTR would be 12.

One thing to keep in mind with CTR is that there isn’t a perfect number, the average can vary widely based on what industry you are in. For your measurements, a benchmark should be set and then an increase in percentage would be considered a success.

Quality Score

Often considered one of the most elusive KPIs amongst PPC marketers, the Quality Score metric is a Google creation that indicates how relevant your ad content is by comparing certain performance variables and other metrics like CTR. Quality score isn´t as straightforward as other simpler metrics like clicks, but it is an important one for advertisers to monitor as it determines how much money a company needs to pay to advertise with Google.

Google is very transparent about what factors are considered when calculating Quality Score and these include CTR rate, keyword relevance to ad group, the relevance of ad text, historical Google Ads account performance. A good quality score is considered between 7-10 and will lower your average CPC to advertise with Google. Monitoring and having a good understanding of quality score helps advertisers refine their campaigns and make better marketing decisions.

Cost Per Click

Cost per Click (CPC) is the average amount that an advertiser will pay for a click. CPC should be distinguished from the bid amount or the established maximum CPC amount as often the true CPC rate will end up being lower than the bid amount due to how PPC auctions work.

Average Position

When most search queries are entered, Google will serve a balance of both paid and organic results. The average position metric is intended to average out where your ad appears in SERP results (with the top position being page 1 / position 1). It can be difficult to isolate the average position metric because of the nature of search engines serving increasingly personalized results.

Number of Leads

When the goal of an advertising campaign is to attract qualified consumers for long-term committed services or high ticket items, where a purchase often needs a nurtured experience, an important metric to track is the number of leads. Ways to gather leads can include an email sign- up sheet, application submission, or information request.

Cost Per Lead

Especially in the high ticket or committed service industries, it can take months before a lead converts into a customer. When this is the case, advertisers need a metric to measure the efficiency of their lead generation. If a cost per lead metric is used, advertisers can project a cost/ lead target to work towards profitability goals.

Cost Per Acquisition

PPC marketers set a cost per acquisition (CPA) when they set up their advertising campaigns. The CPA is the price that an advertiser pays for each customer that they acquire, and it’s calculated by dividing total conversion cost by the number of conversions. Marketers also use targeted CPA, which is a technique used when bidding that helps automatically set bids to increase as many conversions as possible. In order to apply targeted CPA, you must have conversion tracking enabled on your campaigns and have had a minimum of 30 conversions within the previous month.

Lifetime Value

A broad indicator of overall account health and a paid advertiser´s abilities, the Lifetime Value (LTV) calculation can be complex. LTV is designed to measure a customer’s lifetime of purchasing products or services from a business. A SaaS company could measure this metric by the number of months or years that a customer subscribed to their service but a large company like Burger King, trying to calculate the LTV can be incredibly complicated.

Impressions

This metric doesn’t do much by itself but is often used to calculate other metrics and KPIs. Impressions are the number of times your ad has been displayed but that doesn’t mean that someone saw the ad each time it was shown – it just means that it was displayed on a website or app X number of times throughout your campaign.

Click-Through Rate

The number of clicks generated per impression of a banner ad is the click-through rate (CTR). This is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

Display advertising is usually sold on a CPM basis, which is the cost of 1,000 impressions of the ad unit.

CPI (Cost Per Impression)

Cost Per Impression (CPI) is the cost incurred to each potential customer that has viewed your display advertisement.

Clicks

The number of clicks on an ad that you are running that lead a person to leaving the ad unit is calculated as the number of clicks received.

Click to Lead Conversion Rate

The click-to-lead conversion rate calculated the percentage of visitors to your website that was captured as leads, resulting from clicking on your display campaign.

Cost Per Lead

The metric that measures how cost efficient your display campaign is when it comes to generating new leads for your business is called cost per lead. It divides the campaign spend by the number of leads that have expressed interest in your services or completing the lead generation goal established in the campaign.

Cost Per Acquisition

A metric that directly measures the revenue impact of marketing campaigns, cost per acquisition (CPA) measures the cost to acquire one paying customer on a channel or campaign level.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric isn’t used a lot in display advertising, but it does measure the percentage of single-page sessions from a particular traffic source where your visitor left without interacting with anything else on the page.

Engaged Visit Rate

This metric is essentially the opposite of a bounce rate and measure the quality of visits to your site from your display ads. The calculation for engaged visits is 100 – Bounce Rate = Engaged Visit Rate.

Cost Per Engaged Visit

The cost per engaged visit metric is calculated by dividing the total display ad cost by the number of engaged visits.

Page Views Per Visit

Pageviews the number of pages on your site viewed by each visit. With a lot of interactions happening on one single page now, this metric is losing its value. However, for the time being, it is still a helpful metric for ad-supported sites.

Cost Per Page View

Similar to page views per visit, this is a valuable metric for an ad-supported site to figure out the cost of generating an extra page view.

Revenue

The revenue metric is the calculation of all revenue attributed to visits resulting from your display ads. It works well for eCommerce but can be difficult to track offine conversions.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your ad or organic content is presented to someone and in many cases, one of the metrics you can control the most as it is largely related to advertising budget. Impressions can occur from search results, social platforms, third-party websites, and paid ads.

Reach

Simply put, reach is the total number of subscribers and followers that will see your content. Your reach can include your followers from Facebook, your email subscribers, or participant in a monthly loyalty program. The better defined your brand and voice are, the more effective your campaigns will be, which will improve your reach.

Engagement

Essentially, the meeting point of impressions and reach is engagement. This metric is the calculation of how many of your subscribers and followers are actively engaging with your content. Engagement can include likes, shares, and acquisition-related activities like click-throughs. Good engagement is typically a result of continued activities that promote your brand and services.

Email Click-Through Rate

The number of recipients that have received your email opened it and THEN clicked through to your website is your email click-through-rate. By constantly looking for ways to optimize your email campaigns, ensuring your design is mobile- friendly, including strong CTAs and compelling subject lines will help improve your email-click- through-rate.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

A vital metric for eCommerce marketers, cost per acquisition shows how much you are paying to acquire your customers. This metric can compare how different marketing campaigns and investments are performing as far as driving traffic and conversions. It is important to keep in mind though that what is considered a ‘good´ CPA is largely dependent on what your average order value is. As an example, if your CPA is $15 and your AOV is $100, that would be considered good whereas if your CPA was $20 and your AOV was $25, it would not be a good indication.

Tips for improving your CPA can include segmenting your campaigns so that you are targeting customers that have a higher likelihood of responding to your CTA´s and landing pages.

Organic Acquisition Traffic

Ideally, you want to be able to attract as many people as possible to your site organically without having to pay for it. This is an easily available metric that can be tracked within common analytic programs and will show you how many people are reaching your site organically and from where.

A key factor for improving organic traffic is by ensuring that all technical on-site SEO elements are properly implemented and optimized.

Social Media Engagement

Many of the social media metrics already mentioned are incredibly valuable to eCommerce organizations. The top ones to track are likes per post, shares per post, comments per post, and clicks per post to help get a better idea of what type of content and advertisements are generating engagement and action for your products.

Abandonment

The number of people that add a product to their shopping cart but leave your website without purchasing is considered your abandonment rate. This is an important metric to monitor so that possible sticking points in your funnel or website glitches that may be preventing someone from completing your checkout process can be corrected.

Customer Retention Rate

The percentage of customers that you maintain over a period of time is referred to as your customer retention rate. The better you are doing at servicing your customers, the higher the number will be. In order to accurately track this metric, it is essential that you remove your new customers from the list so that your metric is only reporting retained customers over a certain time period.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The total amount earned from customers over the period that they are customers with your business is the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) metric. This is determined by calculating the length of the relationship, AOV, repeat transitions, and retention period.

Repeat Customer Rate

The repeat customer rate metric indicates what percentage of your customers have made multiple purchases. It is a helpful way to track how well you are servicing your customers, as repeat purchases indicate they are happy with your products and services.

Refund and Return Rate

Refunds and returns are a challenge for online retailers. While returns can be a powerful motivator to influence a customer into making a purchase, they can also a burden on businesses if not properly forecasted in financial models. Tracking your refund and return rate can help monitor spikes, indicate quality issues with products, and identify the overall health of your online store.