How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Agency?

Ask yourself what your goal or purpose for digital marketing is.

Lead and sales?

Of course! Leads and sales are the starting points of successful digital marketing. However, there are several other important metrics that you must track to get the right idea about the effectiveness of your digital marketing. High website traffic, increase in email open rates, boost in impressions and lower exit rates are some of the desired results of ideal digital marketing strategies.

There are several digital marketing metrics (including the ones mentioned above) that you should be tracking. These not only let you monitor your campaign’s success but also enable you to identify the weak areas where more efforts should go for improvement.
Without proper monitoring, you will end up spending your budget in the wrong places. In this blog, we will guide you on how to measure the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign.

How To Measure the Success Of Digital Marketing?

You might have hired the best digital marketing company. But how do you know if it’s worth spending on digital marketing? What are the results you are getting? Are your business goals being met? How do you identify the trajectory of your website performance?

Here are 10 ways to measure the success of digital marketing campaigns.

Use Digital Marketing KPIs

Digital marketing KPIs are signals that tell you if your strategies are going in the right direction or not.

For example, website traffic shows you how much traffic you are getting from your blogs, social media and other campaigns. If it’s low, you need to change your strategies, and if it’s on the right track, you should identify where you have the potential to attract more traffic.

Another example is the email open rate. If you are investing in email marketing, you should always check for open rates, list growth rates, unsubscribed rates, ROI, and more.

Similarly, if you are into social media marketing, you should keep tracking your post impressions, likes, comments and shares. Also, you should keep an eye on your profile reach, follower growth and search appearances.

Please note that the KPIs you decide to track should be in accordance with your business goals. If your goal is to increase your followers on Instagram, you should be emphasizing more on post reach and engagement rather than leads.

Monitor Your Website Traffic

What is the first thing marketers track for measuring the success of digital marketing?

Website traffic.

If your marketing campaigns across all platforms are running successfully, they will be visible on your website traffic. This is because the end goal of all your marketing efforts is to drive traffic to your website. Your individual goals on different digital platforms may vary, but the main objectives remain constant.

From SEO to email, paid ads, and social media marketing, you will get traffic from all sources if your marketing strategy is on point.

Therefore, you should always track your website traffic and find the reason for any drops or spikes in the result.

Quality of Leads

Website traffic is followed by leads that authenticate the success of your digital marketing strategies. If your marketing team is only showing high traffic in their monthly reports and fewer leads, something is faulty.

It indicates that although you are successful in bringing people to your website, you are not able to convert them. Either your content doesn’t match your products or you’re not able to understand your customer’s pain points correctly or worse, you cannot convince them enough to buy from you.

Moreover, the quality of leads also matters. You can measure the quality of leads by tracking metrics like the number of qualified leads, lead-to-customer conversion rates, and customer lifetime value (CLV). These indicators reveal whether your marketing efforts are attracting prospects who are likely to make a purchase or engage in meaningful ways, making them more valuable than just a volume of low-quality leads.

Focus on Traffic By Source

If you are keen on measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns, start tracking your website’s traffic by source. This will show you how much traffic you are getting through various channels and also where your efforts aren’t producing results.

You can track this metric in Google Analytics. It displays traffic from sources like organic, direct, paid search, display, affiliates and others. You can also find out the sources that are generating more qualified leads than others.

For example, you see that email marketing is bringing you more leads. So, you decide to invest more in email marketing than other channels.

Returning visitors

Every business loves repeating customers. It means that your brand has registered an everlasting impression on their minds.

You can easily track returning visitors on Google Analytics. These are people who come back to your website after visiting it for the first time. This means that they are interested in your products or services and have a high buying intent.

Moreover, you can also track new visitors on the same graph in Google Analytics. This is also an important metric to monitor as you want to reach out to a wider audience.

The returning Vs new visitor metric also shows if your marketing strategies are able to reach a unique audience and retain the existing ones.

Exit rate

How can marketers measure the success of their digital strategies?

Tracking exit rates is one of the ways. It shows you how often visitors exit from a page after viewing any number of pages on the website. If you have a high exit rate, it means that either your content is not relevant to the audience or page is not user-friendly or maybe some call-to-action buttons are broken.

You can track the exit rate in Google Analytics by going to behavior> site content > pages.

Bounce rate

The exit rate and bounce rate sound similar but aren’t. Bounce rate is the number of people who leave your website after visiting one page. This metric signals that something is amiss in your pages. Maybe the website is taking too long to load, they did not find what they were looking for or encountered an error page.

You can decrease your website bounce rate by adding relevant internal links, attractive images, and competing call-to-action buttons.

Impressions

The number 1 rule of measuring the success of digital marketing is monitoring the impressions. For SEO, you can track the website impressions on the Google search console. You can filter and track the impressions based on your web pages and keywords. This tells you how your service pages or blogs are performing. If you aren’t getting high impressions for relevant keywords, it means that there is some fault in your SEO or content strategy.

In the case of social media platforms, you can track the impressions of each post under the post itself. Post impressions show how many times your post was visible to the audience on the platform. The higher the post impressions, the more engagement you will get. However, you should not confuse it with reach. As your post on social media may be shown multiple times to the same person. Each time is counted as an individual impression.

If your goal is to go viral and gain new followers fast on social media, you must have high post impressions. Viral posts have millions of impressions, hundreds of likes and comments.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is a critical KPI for measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns, particularly when it comes to paid ads, email marketing, and social media posts. It calculates the percentage of people who click on your ad or link compared to the total number of people who see it.

A high CTR indicates that your content or ad is compelling enough to prompt action, meaning that your messaging, creative elements, and targeting are resonating with the audience. Tracking CTR helps you understand whether your call-to-action (CTA) is strong and if your campaign is reaching the right people.

By regularly monitoring and optimizing CTR, you can improve overall campaign performance. A low CTR might suggest that your audience isn’t engaging with the content, signaling a need for adjustments in your ad copy, design, or targeting strategy. It can also help in refining your keywords for search ads or improving email subject lines. Ultimately, CTR provides valuable insights into how effective your digital marketing efforts are at driving engagement, allowing you to tweak your strategies to maximize conversions and ROI.

New Sessions

Sessions are the number of visits your website gets. A user may initiate a session to explore your website and then visit after an hour to make a purchase. Both events will be counted as unique sessions.

Then comes average session duration, a critical metric for measuring the success of digital marketing. Average session duration refers to the average time a user spends on your website.

A high average session percentage shows that users are taking time to get to know your products and services. It tells that they are interested in your brand and have a high probability of converting. If your session duration is low, it means that something is triggering people to leave your website. Maybe something is wrong with content, UX, or overall website design.

Why Should You Be Measuring the Effectiveness of Digital Marketing Campaigns?

Suppose you run a beauty brand and have hired a digital marketing agency. Your goal is to build a strong brand presence online, increase customer engagement, and drive sales. Now you will be getting monthly reports from the agency indicating the performance of your campaigns. Also, you can yourself monitor the metrics and data.

But why do you need to spend time tracking these metrics?

• To see what’s working: Is email marketing working? Are people opening your emails? Is it bringing leads? KPIs help you see what’s actually bringing sales and traffic.
• Identify weak areas: KPIs let you identify channels where you have potential but the campaigns aren’t producing the intended results. This way you can focus more on such platforms and refine your strategy.
• Find out strong potentials: Strong channels should become stronger. For that to happen, you need to identify the marketing platforms that are successfully generating results for you. By identifying those, you can maybe spend more or enhance the campaigns on those channels.
• Spend smartly: You might be spending more from where you are getting the least results. So, to spend smartly, you need to sort out the marketing channels that contribute highest to the ROI and optimize your spending.
• Plan goal-oriented strategies: There is no hard and fast rule in marketing. What works for your competitor might not work for you. So, tracking the metrics allows you to understand your strong and weak areas, enabling you to change your strategy for better results.

Conclusion

In the marketing world, results are everything, and that’s where KPIs become essential. These metrics provide a clear picture of how well your marketing campaigns are performing, acting as key data points for measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns.

KPIs give digital marketing agencies and businesses valuable insights, enabling them to fine-tune campaigns and ensure they’re aligned with their goals. But KPIs do more than just track campaign effectiveness.

By analyzing these metrics, marketers can spot emerging trends in customer behavior and gain concrete proof of the ROI from their efforts. This data-driven approach ensures that campaigns are not only optimized but also delivering tangible results.