The 15 most important digital marketing analytics metrics

If you’re not tracking the most important digital marketing analytics metrics, how do you know if your campaigns are worth the time and resources? It’s crucial to understand and track the right metrics to ensure that your marketing efforts are effective and keep your business scaling.

Digital marketing and web analytics to track for growth and profit

Let’s look at the 15 most important digital marketing analytics metrics that you should be tracking. Don’t forget that you’ll need digital marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics to track them!

1. Overall web traffic

Almost every organization measures their overall web traffic as a way to determine their success, and there’s a good reason why: Your website is essentially the face of your brand. The ultimate goal of your digital marketing efforts and individual campaigns is to drive more traffic to your website over time. Tracking your web traffic can provide insights into which campaigns are working the best and when they’re most effective.

Increase your overall web traffic by:

• Creating ads that lead to optimized landing pages
• Publishing in-depth blog posts
• Promoting your content through social media platforms

2. Sessions and average session duration

While the first digital marketing analytics metric on the list refers to how many people visit your site overall, sessions refers to Google’s visitor count that happens in 30-minute increments. For example, a user who visits once in the morning and once in the evening counts as two unique sessions.

Session duration is also important to track—this metric shows you how much time each visitor spends on your site and gives you insights into how user-friendly the design is.

Increase your average session duration by:

• Adding videos to your content
• Increasing your web copy’s readability
• Publishing content that targets your ideal audience

3. New vs. returning visitors

This two-fold digital marketing analytics metric helps determine the relevance of your web content over time. Returning visitors signifies that you’re likely providing valuable content that keeps bringing people back. Once you start releasing new content regularly, you can measure your new vs. returning visitor count to see how different pieces of content are performing.

New visitors are a good sign that your organic traffic is in a good place while returning visitors show that the content you’re providing is useful to them.

Increase your new and returning visitor counts by:

• Publishing valuable blog posts that are user- and SEO-friendly
• Including links to your latest content in your email newsletters
• Promoting your blog posts on social media channels

4. Page views and most visited pages

Your total number of page views is a broad digital marketing analytics metric—returning users will trigger a new page view each time they visit. The usefulness of this metric is the ability to see if visitors find value in your entire website or only on certain pages.

If you’re tracking your digital marketing with Google Analytics, you’ll find your most visited pages in the “Behaviors” section, which can show you where most users end up on your website.

Increase your page views by:

• Linking users to the right pages (you don’t want someone ready to make a purchase to land on your homepage!)
• Publishing relevant content that drives organic traffic and increases your ranking in the SERPs
• Creating evergreen content

5. Exit rates and bounce rates

Your exit rate is a specific metric that can give you meaningful insights about your website design—it shows you exactly where a visitor left after viewing your content. The exit rate shows where your visitors lose interest.

Related to this are bounce rates, which show how many people “bounced away” from your site after visiting a single page. Many marketers use the bounce rate to help find out why people are leaving too quickly.

Reduce your bounce rates by:

• Optimizing loading times
• Using exciting images and infographics in your content
• Including internal links in your content

6. Conversion rates

Conversion rates are one of the digital marketing analytics metrics that you’ll hear everyone talking about. Conversions can refer to anything from a physical sale to a completed download or new subscriber, depending on the campaign’s goal. Marketers typically use this metric to measure the overall effectiveness of a campaign, but it’s important to pay attention to the other metrics on this list too.

Increase your conversion rates by:

• Strengthening your calls-to-action
• Adding testimonials or case studies to your website
• Offering a demo or free trial

7. Impressions

Often confused with reach, impressions are a metric that measures the overall number of people who viewed your advertisements or content. There’s one significant difference between impressions and reach: If an individual views your post or ad more than once, it will count as a new impression each time, but they will only trigger the reach metric once.

Increase your impressions by:

• Staying active on social media
• Using imagery in your posts to capture users’ attention
• Improving your overall ad quality

8. Social reach

When posting on social media channels, you want your content to reach the widest number of people possible, and social reach tells you exactly how many people viewed it. This number will always be higher than your impressions and lower than your engagement. A typical goal for engagement is approximately 5% of your reach.

Increase your social reach by:

• Fully branding your social media profiles
• Posting original, meaningful content regularly
• Interacting with your community

9. Social engagement

Social engagement is a digital marketing analytics metric that shows how many users interacted with a specific social media post through clicks, likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc.

Engagement is typically the most meaningful measure of your social media success—you only earn engagement points when someone chooses to interact with your brand.

Increase your social engagement by:

• Responding to user comments
• Encouraging users to like, share, follow, etc.
• Running giveaways and contests

10. Email open rate

Your email open rate is one of the most important digital marketing analytics metrics to track when list building (which should be a part of any campaign). This metric shows the percentage of people who opened your email out of everyone who received it. Marketers can use open rates to determine the effectiveness of their customer segmentation, send time, and subject line.

Increase your email open rates by:

• Using subject lines that stand out and invoke curiosity
• Not being too serious
• Using best practices to avoid spam filters

11. Click-through rates (CTR)

Click-through rates measure how often someone clicks on, well, anything. You could use this metric to track your paid ads or your email blasts—email clicks typically have some of the highest conversion rates. Click-through rates directly affect your cost per click.

Increase your click-through rates by:

• Creating a sense of urgency
• Motivating users with the fear of missing out (FOMO)
• Split testing your ad copy

12. Cost per click (CPC)

Tracking cost per click applies to any paid advertising marketing. This digital marketing analytics metric is crucial—you need to know how much an individual click costs you and how that affects your overall campaign budget. Optimizing your CPC means that you can focus a larger percentage of your budget on areas other than paid ads.

Decrease your cost per click by:

• Researching new keyword variations
• Lowering your bids and adjusting them by things like ad schedule, location, and device
• Improving your quality score

13. Cost per conversion

Cost per conversion is an important metric to watch, but only if your goal is to convert sales directly online. For example, for an e-commerce site where visitors add items to their cart and convert on the checkout page, this metric is a must-track. Cost per conversion shows you what the costs are to get a visitor to make a sale.

Decrease your cost per conversion by:

• Evaluating your low- and high-converting keywords
• Adding negative keywords
• Improving your landing pages

14.  Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition is a digital marketing analytics metric that’s relevant for any business that has (or wants) returning customers, which is almost every single one. From e-commerce sites to subscription-based models, tracking and taking steps to lower your CPA should be a metric that you pay close attention to.

Decrease your cost per acquisition by:

• Increasing your customer lifetime value
• Running retargeting campaigns
• Optimizing your checkout process

15. Overall return on investment (ROI)

Tracking your overall return on investment—what you spent vs. what you earned—serves as a baseline for measuring the success of your marketing efforts. Calculating the ROI of your marketing campaigns is crucial in determining whether they were actually successful or not. When you see high conversion numbers, it’s easy to get excited and start celebrating the success of your latest campaign, but it’s important to take into account the other metrics on this list to determine what costs came with those conversions.

Increase your overall return on investment by:

• Using digital marketing predictive analytics
• Focusing on important metrics (like the ones on this list!)
• Investing in a customer data platform (CDP) to enhance your overall marketing efforts

Grow your revenue by tracking the right digital marketing analytics metrics with Lytics

How does using a CDP along with digital marketing analytics tools help your marketing efforts succeed? There are many “what-ifs” that affect your campaigns: What if your customers are opening your emails on a phone and converting on a different device? What if you get a conversion, but you have no idea who that person is or how they found your product? What if someone made a purchase after reading the subject line but never opened the email? The list is endless.

That’s where the Lytics CDP comes in. Lytics connects with Google Analytics to give marketers a clearer view of the big picture and real insights into their customers. Don’t miss out on another opportunity—get started with Lytics today to get answers to those “what-ifs” by tracking the right digital marketing analytics metrics across every touchpoint and watch your revenue grow.