5 Essential Website KPIs for Digital Marketing Performance

You’ve spent weeks if not months planning a great digital marketing strategy for your organization. You’re producing content across multiple platforms, including your website, social media sites, and email newsletter. Now you want to know—is it working? What parts are successful and what can be improved? KPIs can help you answer that question.

What Are KPIs for Digital Marketing?

Modern websites and search engines are designed to collect and display extensive amounts of information about the people who visit and what they are engaging with. Those statistics are called key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Understanding your KPIs is essential to building and optimizing your digital marketing content. But KPIs can’t tell why visitors are making their decisions. They are merely an indicator of how visitors are choosing to interact with your content. They can’t tell you whether visitor engagement is low because a page layout doesn’t flow, the content is too dense, or the product just isn’t relevant to them.

For each KPI that you measure, you’ll need to look at the marketing content itself and how it is presented in order to interpret why your traffic is behaving the way that it is and what you can do to improve it.

1. Digital Engagement

One of the most effective ways to market your content is through social media. In order to have an effective social media strategy, you’ll want to put out a variety of content on several different platforms. Tracking your digital engagement on these sites will help you understand what your audience is interested in and how to build a following that will engage with your business.

Everyone has limited resources, and everyone has areas where they would like to improve, which is why you need to pick and choose your battles. Selecting which KPIs which KPIs are going to have the most impact on your business is an important step in that process.

What Is Digital Engagement?

The digital engagement you receive on social media is made up of all the likes, comments, shares, and other ways that people interact with your account. This KPI can quickly become complex, as there are so many different social media sites, types of content, and other factors that are going to affect the marketing strategy for every industry.

While everyone hopes to have posts that go viral and bring in tens of thousands of impressions and engagements, the reality is quite different for the vast majority of accounts. A good digital engagement rate for many organizations is 1%, meaning that one out of every hundred people that view your content choose to engage with it. That number may seem low, but think of all the social media content that you see every day and how much of it you directly engage with. While companies that heavily rely on social media may try for an engagement rate of around 5%, that becomes increasingly more difficult as they grow their follower count.

2. Keyword Ranking

Around nine billion searches are conducted every day on Google, each one sorting through hundreds of billions of web pages. In order to make your website rise above the rest of the noise and place high up on Google’s search engine results page (SERP), you’ll need to conduct keyword analysis. 

Keywords are the terms that people type in when they conduct a Google search. Understanding what keywords your potential customers are using and how to rank for them is essential to search engine optimization (SEO).

Keyword Ranking Analysis

A good keyword analysis is an extensive process that will incorporate several different tools. Avalanche frequently uses a tool called SEMrush to gauge keyword ranking. SEMrush will allow you to see where your webpage ranks on Google’s SERP for individual keywords and how many people are searching with that keyword. It also allows users to look at their competitors and see what keywords they are ranking for.

Effective SEO will use keyword ranking analysis to create content that will help your website climb the rankings and bring in more potential customers.

3. Click-Through Rate

You’ve sent out your emails, created your social media posts, and ranked your pages on Google’s SERP. You’re seeing a lot of impressions, meaning the number of people who are seeing your links, but how many people are choosing to click on them?

A click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who view your content and are enticed to click on the link and follow it through to your website. You’ll want to track the CTR for each of your platforms to see which marketing content is performing well and what isn’t.

What Is a Good Click-Through Rate?

Like most KPIs, this will vary for each platform, industry, and specific organization. A 1% CTR on a social media post can be pretty good, but the same CTR on an email marketing campaign targeted at your most loyal customers isn’t so good. But, generally speaking, a CTR of 1–5% is a pretty common goal for many marketing campaigns.

4. Conversion Rate

Once people are on your website, you’ll want to track how many of them are convinced by your content and decide to further engage with your organization. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who ultimately take one of the actions you are pointing them towards. You may track the conversion rate for email subscriptions, PDF downloads, product page views, lead forms, and free trial registrations. Each one can be an important step in making an eventual sale.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

There are many different ways to formulate a conversion rate, depending on which metrics are most important to your business. A simple way is to divide the number of form leads you obtain by the number of unique visitors your site received. But you can get more specific if you want to. You can calculate the conversion rate based on what page initially brought visitors to your site. Perhaps your conversion rate is much higher for one blog post than another, which may indicate that you should create more content around the subject of that post.

Using calls to action (CTAs) is a great way to increase your clickthrough rate by encouraging your readers to complete the desired task. By comparing your most and least successful clickthrough rates to their respective CTAs, you may be able to see which CTAs your readers respond to.

5. Customer Acquisition Cost

After all the work you’ve put into your marketing strategy, you’ll probably want to know whether it was worth it. And if you’re in the business of making money, that means you’ll probably want to know whether your marketing efforts were successful or not. That can be a complicated question to answer, but the customer acquisition cost (CAC) is how you can try to represent that answer.

What Is Customer Acquisition Cost?

The customer acquisition cost is a ratio of how much investment each customer interaction cost to obtain compared to how much revenue that customer generated. A CAC ratio will differ for each company and will largely depend on how much value each customer represents. If you paid $8 per customer, but each one only represented $6 in value for your organization, that’s a bad CAC. But if you’re paying $20 per customer and turning $100 in profit, that’s a lot better.

For some people, this is can be the most important KPI because it shows whether or not they are getting their money’s worth. However, because there are so many factors that contribute to the cost of a digital marketing campaign, and because it can be difficult to determine the total revenue generated from each customer, determining a CAC is rarely an exact science. Therefore, a CAC is typically used specifically when running a paid advertising campaign. When you run an ad on Facebook, you know how much that ad cost and how many people clicked on it to visit your website.

Get Digital Marketing KPI help from Avalanche

There are a ton of different website KPIs, each of which can be formulated and interpreted in countless different ways. It can be difficult to sort through the noise and figure out which data are important and which aren’t. That’s where Avalanche Creative can help! Our team members are experts at understanding KPIs and building an effective marketing strategy around them. Schedule a call today to find out how Avalanche can help your business.