Whenever you are advertising a business, you need to measure your performance. Of course, you can’t measure digital marketing results with a stopwatch. To understand how well your efforts are working, we recommend looking at the following metrics:
New Visitors
The primary goal of many digital marketing campaigns is to generate new customers. When measuring your success, you may be tempted to look at the raw number of visitors that clicked through to your site after seeing your ad. However, theres another important angle: new visitors.
Raw visitor numbers, which can mean users or sessions, includes both new and returning users. Theyre useful on their own, but it doesnt tell the story of how much new business you generated.
You can learn quite a bit about the efficacy of your marketing plan by solely looking at the first-time visitors from your ad. This figure tells you how successful you were at attracting the attention of people who were previously unfamiliar with your business, its products, or its services.
While new users are a great starting point, you still need to see how they interacted with your site to tell if they were truly interested or left disappointed. This leads us to our next statistic.
Average Session Duration
When your digital marketing campaign drives visitors to your website, it is essential to pay attention to their on-site actions and behaviors. One of the first areas you should look at is the average time spent on your site.
The ideal duration depends on industry. However, a short duration time (usually under 30 seconds) could indicate that:
- Your ad was misleading or confusing
- Your website feels untrustworthy to the user, or
- Your website is difficult to use or navigate
But what if your users are spending an exceedingly long time on your site? Maybe around 30 minutes?
Before you celebrate, this could also indicate a problem. Your customers could be struggling to find the product, service, or page that they are looking for.
What you should aim for is normally around a 5-15 minute session duration, depending on your campaign type and vertical. That sweet spot will give you an idea if your customers are getting what they need in an efficient manner.
Your Website’s Conversion Rate
So you understand how your users are getting there and what they are doing on your site . The next step? Convert them.
What you count as a conversion will depend on your goal as a business. The common types of conversion are purchasing a product or submitting a lead.
The most straightforward way to see if your visitors are taking these actions is to check your conversion rate.
Not to be vague, but your conversion rate mileage will vary. Typically, a conversion rate of 1% is common in most verticals. If you need help, heres a handy guide on how to find your conversion rate.
If you don’t see any conversions, you may have a problem! First, check if you have them set up. If they arent, do so ASAP.
The most common tool to track goals is Google Analytics. They have a host of guides and resources on how to set up goal tracking if you havent done it before.
If they are in there, well, you might have to dig a little further. Here are some questions you might want to check out. We ask ourselves these exact questions improve our own ads.:
- Does your ad have a dedicated landing page?
- Is your site easy to navigate?
- Can we make our ad simpler?
If, on the other hand, you notice that your conversion rate is through the roof, jackpot! You should boost those campaigns until they start to level out and your conversion rate starts to decrease. That is your sales ceiling for that ad.
Your Overall Return on Investment (ROI)
When you invest thousands of dollars into your marketing, youre not doing it because its fun; you expect to get something in return. As such, the most important metric is your return on investment (or ROI).
In most cases, the best way to figure out how much money your company is making is to carefully track each of your leads. At the end of the month, see how many of those leads became customers and how much revenue they generated. Compare that to how much you spent and you have your ROI.
That figure ultimately decides if your campaign was a success. If your returns were quite a bit lower than you had initially anticipated, make some substantive changes to your ad before re-launching. It doesnt mean it cannot be successful, it just may need some tweaks. However, if you made a sizable profit, see what worked well and emulate that in your next campaigns.
Need Some Assistance with Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
If, despite your best efforts, you just can’t seem to create an ad campaign that delivers the results you are looking for, don’t panic. Help is available.
FZA Digital has been assisting small, medium, and large businesses from every corner of the United States with their marketing needs for many years. We understand what it takes to create engaging ads and convert visitors into customers. Contact us online or give us a call at (424) 229-2923 to learn more about how we can help your company reach new heights.