While few will question the importance of digital marketing, there still seems to be a struggle for marketers to prove what they are doing is having a true impact on the business. While many will look to the bottom line of sales directly attributed to digital activity, far more metrics indicate company growth, brand awareness, trust, and authority. Here we take a look at which digital marketing metrics mean the most.

Prospects

A prospect, or lead, can be defined as anyone who has performed an action, such as a content download, where they have provided their email address and other contact information. These are the people who may not be a buyer at this time but have entered the funnel. These leads can be nurtured through email workflows, teleprospecting campaigns, and other outreach until they are ready to make a purchase. Having a steady flow of new contacts will ensure your marketing funnel doesn't dry up.

Marketing Qualified Leads

As defined by HubSpot, "A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead judged more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on lead intelligence, often informed by closed-loop analytics." These are contacts that have performed an action that deems them far enough down the funnel to warrant further qualification. Qualifiers will vary by industry, so you'll want to develop a list that will determine if you have a valid marketing qualified lead.

Sales Qualified Leads

A sales-qualified lead is one who has checked all the boxes on your qualification list and is ready to have a real discussion about moving forward with a purchase. While these leads may not turn into customers right away, they are close enough to the bottom of the funnel to warrant a discovery call and continued outreach by your sales department.

Website Visits

Your number of website visits is a strong indicator of your online presence. Your ability to drive people to your site will affect your search engine rankings, lead generation capabilities, and website conversions. Content distribution and SEO factor greatly into your website's ability to be found online. Social media, blog posts, email newsletters, and Pay Per Click Ads can all help to increase your audience.

Blog Views

Your company blog is your most forward-facing piece of content. Your ability to attract viewers will help you gauge the effectiveness of your content distribution, subject matter, and design. Posting blogs to social media company pages, groups and conversations will help expand the reach of your blog. Email newsletters, blog recaps, and links from other blog posts are all ways to extend the shelf life of your blog.

Lead Source

Knowing where each contact, lead, and visit comes from will help you evaluate each aspect of your digital marketing strategy. This will allow you to increase efforts on your most successful channels while cultivating new ideas to bring your other channels up to speed. You'll want to closely monitor the numbers as they pertain to blog posts, social media pages, PPC ads, referrals, email campaigns, and organic traffic.

Click Through Rate

Your click-through rate measures the frequency that people click on a call to action within a blog post, social media post, or email. This helps you determine the effectiveness of your calls to action and overall content. Creating CTAs that stand out and communicate a value proposition will help you increase your click-through rates, and as a result, your website conversions.

Website Conversions

Converting visitors to leads should be one of the primary functions of your company website. In order to do so, you should have a call to action on every blog post and every static website page. Your call to action should align with the content on that particular page and link to an optimized landing page that contains an offer. Whether this offer is a content download or a free service, it should provide relevant value to your prospect. The only way to turn a website visitor into a lead is to capture their contact information through a form. The number of leads you gather through your website is one of the best indicators of the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.

Social Media Interactions

Social interactions such as clicks, likes, comments, and shares all help to measure your social media presence and the quality of your content. There are many different types of social media posts that can be used to drive engagement. Social media has become a part of the buying cycle and represents an easy way to engage with prospects on their preferred channels. Always reply to comments and encourage followers from other platforms to follow you on your other pages. With LinkedIn posts now becoming public, driving social media interactions has become even more important as public posts will now rank in search engines.

Email Opens and Clicks

The number of opens and clicks you have will largely depend on your timing, subject line, and the segmentation of your contact database. Are you reaching the right audience, at the right time, with the right content? A/B testing will help you determine which aspects need work. Subject lines play a significant part in your number of opens, and there are several tactics you can use to improve your email's most forward-facing feature.

Return On Investment

Typically, marketing ROI is measured by dividing your total marketing costs by the number of sales generated. This can be an excellent way to determine your ROI, but there is more to digital marketing than generating sales. Many campaigns aim to increase your following or build brand awareness, which can be difficult to measure. Segmenting your campaigns according to your goals can help to better show your return, but there is still some gray area. While it has become more difficult to establish a clear ROI, establishing benchmarks and closely tracking your KPI's can show the progress you've made regardless of the metric.

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