14 Must-Have Metrics for Digital Marketing

I ran across this list of the 14 must-have metrics for digital marketing while researching a recent post, so I thought I’d share it with you. The infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines breaks down metrics into traffic-building metrics, conversion metrics, and revenue metrics.

First, we’ll dive into traffic-building metrics before adding conversion and revenue metrics.

14 must-have metrics for traffic-building

Before we even start with the critical metrics you need to ensure your campaigns deliver optimal results and those that provide insights to help you improve performance, it’s essential to distinguish between vanity metrics and actionable metrics. As you can see in the graphic below, vanity metrics may make you feel good, but fail to provide insights to help you improve your performance or monitor results. Examples of vanity metrics are:

• Follower counts
• App downloads
• Email subscribers
• Impressions

Now, don’t get me wrong. Vanity metrics aren’t totally meaningless. In fact, increases suggest you’re doing something right and decreases suggest you need to change something. These metrics reflect your potential, as higher counts indicate your ability to generate revenue. Hence, tracking these metrics over time, especially using a timeline to visualize the change, transforms them into actionable metrics.

In contrast, actionable metrics, such as conversion rate, loyal customers, and page visits, provide insights to help you make better decisions.

Traffic generation

For most online businesses, getting folks to your site is the first step in conversion. Whether you’re generating leads, selling online, driving customers to your brick-and-mortar stores, or collecting emails for future marketing campaigns, getting people to your website is often a necessary element. Hence, you want to understand how people find your website and how effective you are at driving traffic to it.

#1: Pageviews and unique visitors

What you really want to know, more than the absolute number of visits, is the general pattern of visits. Notice that my graph of visits forms a particular pattern, where visits fall off over the weekend and then pick up again on Monday. I also experience drops during the winter holidays and over the summer when folks are out of the office.

Knowing how my visits typically look on a graph allows me to pinpoint problems or surprises, such as a post that really went viral or a couple of flops. A significant change in my visit pattern suggests that something might be wrong with the site or my hosting. Be sure to take into consideration a normal lag between cause and effect.

To really understand this data, I need to match it with other activities, such as new posts, a significant increase in social activity, or changes to the website’s infrastructure.

#2: Traffic sources

Where your traffic comes from is an important question, both in evaluating the success of your digital strategy and in terms of ranking factors within the Google Algorithm. You see, Google uses the online community to assess the quality of any given website, and links, along with traffic, are good indicators of quality content. The more and better your links, the better Google judges your content.

Google views quality links from social networks, direct traffic, and referral traffic from other websites as strong indicators of the quality of your content. Bad links from spam sites, poor quality sites, unrelated websites, or paid links can get you in serious trouble — even get your site de-indexed, meaning it virtually disappears.

Your traffic sources also give you a good idea of how your marketing strategy is going. Getting lots of direct visits means you’re doing a good job of publicizing your web address and building a strong reputation for your brand. Getting lots of referral traffic means you’re doing a good job of blogger outreach and getting other websites to link to your website. Getting lots of organic traffic means your SEO is going well. If you’re not getting enough traffic from any of these major traffic sources, it’s time to revisit your strategy for building traffic from other sources.

#3: Mobile

Consumers love their smartphones and tablets. But, these devices offer limited real estate for websites and owners must accommodate the smaller screen size. Most sites, like mine, are responsive, which means the content automatically scales down to fit any screen size the user has. If your site isn’t responsive, Google will penalize it.

But using a mobile device means more than a smaller screen size. It likely means users are interested in different things. For instance, rather than looking for items on a mobile device, users are more likely interested in directions or a phone number. They’re more interested in viewing coupons or sale items than the most recent press release. And long-form content is really not what users want on their smartphones.

#4: Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR – the percentage of users who click on your ad) applies to Google Ads and other forms of digital advertising, but you can look at your clicks from any platform or marketing tool. For instance, I’m using AddThis to display related posts to entice readers to visit more pages of my website. I get a weekly report showing the number of clicks each piece of content received. Similarly, you can look at the number of Facebook impressions and visits from Facebook over some time as a click-through rate.

#5: Cost per click

Again, cost per click (CPC) is unique to Ads and reflects how much you pay, on average, for each click your ad receives. Your CPC is a function of the keywords associated with your ad, your quality score (which is related to your CTR, how well your ad matches your landing page, and the relevance of your ad to the user’s query), and your maximum bid.

Using data from social platforms, such as X, you can calculate your CPC. For instance, if you paid $100 for sponsored Tweets and got 1,000 visits to your landing page, your cost per click was $ 0.10. Obviously, this gets more complicated when you have multiple Twitter ads running or various posts pointing to the same landing page.

The actual value of assessing your CPC is tracing each click to your website so you can determine whether the click generated revenue and, if so, how much. You can even break it down further by tracking which clicks convert, so you can determine if you’re more successful with a certain demographic or other type of customer group.

Putting all the must-have metrics together

Visualizing data is an essential element of analysis. So, it’s about bringing all your metrics into a single dashboard where you can get the big picture of what’s happening.

Luckily, most social networks, Google Analytics, and Ads offer APIs to make downloading data easy. I use a Cognos dashboard (from IBM) because it not only allows me to bring all my must-have metrics to one place, but also allows visualization. Tableau and Zoho are also great tools for transforming data into visualizations that are easier to interpret. Because the dashboard is interactive, I can send it to clients who can then change the visualizations, combine data points, or compare metrics across social platforms in any way to meet their specific needs.

Metrics for conversion and revenue tracking

#6: Conversion rate

Conversion metrics should be tied to each of your goals — both long-term goals and short-term ones. I think it’s a big problem when your only metric for conversion is sales. That’s because revenue results from a customer journey that involves several intermediate steps before a sale is made. So, you need metrics tied to each stage along the customer journey. You also need some notion of the attitudes driving those sales. Below is my version of the customer journey, which involves a series of circles rather than a linear process because that reflects reality.

You also need some idea of what’s driving conversion — which channels and messages resonate best with your target market. So, must-have metric #6 is actually a series of metrics necessary to determine not only how much traffic is converting, but what’s driving conversion.

The first step is building a conversion funnel in Google Analytics. Here’s a great video from Kissmetrics on creating conversion funnels.

As part of creating your conversion funnel, you likely already thought about the actions that come before conversion, such as subscribing to an email, visiting a landing page, adding items to a shopping cart, and checking out. Create metrics that assess each of these actions. Along with visualizing the funnel, this helps identify where conversions are breaking down — do you need to drive more traffic, redesign your landing page, or remove some clicks from the buying process, etc.? A key point here is to remember that metrics are designed to guide decision-making — to improve performance. Metrics by themselves have little value. So, include metrics that help you know what actions will improve your market performance.

• Next, you want to evaluate channels that send traffic and convert.
• Does Facebook convert better? Or X (formerly Twitter)?
• Do particular types of messages send more traffic to your site? Does message type impact conversion rate?

Again, do more of what’s working and stop what isn’t.

Finally, it’s crucial to determine attitudes associated with conversion. Having a text analytics platform that not only provides insights into satisfaction over time but also offers more nuanced insights into consumers’ attitudes can really boost the conversion rate. For instance, if consumers think your products are too expensive, you can mitigate the effects of such negative attitudes by highlighting the value of your products — more durability, better performance, or lower cost of ownership — compared to cheaper products.

Often, these metrics form KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that guide the development of other metrics.

#7: Cost per lead

Cost per lead sets us on the path toward revenue metrics by assigning a cost to each lead, commonly across different channels and funnels. Often, there are various pathways leading to conversion. Each funnel depicts a particular series of events. This offers firms insights into how to allocate resources across different channels and different funnel actions.

The cost per lead is calculated by dividing the number of leads generated via a particular channel (or funnel) by the cost to maintain that funnel, including ad spend, personnel costs, and other resources needed to create posts in that channel, as well as the amount of supervisor effort required to edit and monitor that channel.

#8: Bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who visit a single page of your website and then exit. For some business models, bounce rate is crucial because it takes a series of page visits to consummate a sale. For others, a single-page visit isn’t a significant factor in success.

#9: Average pages per visit

Average pages is another metric from Google Analytics, like bounce rate. While bounce rate only refers to the percentage of visitors who view a single page, average pages is more nuanced. Someone who views 20 pages per visit is likely qualitatively better — has a higher potential for conversion — than someone who views only two pages.

#10: Average time on site

Average time on site is just what it says — how long visitors spend on your site.

Of all the must-have metrics, this is the most deceiving because the visitor might be a slow reader, take a phone call with your website open, forget to close the tab (Google stops tracking after 30 minutes of inactivity), or any other reason. I usually don’t pay much attention to this metric.

Bounce rate, average time on site, and average pages have more meaning as trends than as absolute point measures. If your bounce rate, time on site, and/or average pages are not optimal, you might try things to improve these metrics. Over time, you should see improvement. If not, try something else to improve your bounce rate and average page views. As I said, I pretty much ignore time on site.

Also, monitor your bounce rate and average page views over time. Just because you optimized them at 1 point, doesn’t mean they’ll stay optimized.

All three metrics are essential in the Google algorithm used to rank websites. Hence, they both impact how much traffic is generated to your site by impacting your position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

#11: Cost per pageview

Here’s another must-have metric designed to bring us on the path of revenue analysis.

Basically, you divide your expenses by the pageviews. Not one of my top 10, but interesting.

#12: Return visitors

This is really a great metric from Google Analytics because it shows how much folks value your content — they don’t come back often unless they like it.

Monitoring Google Analytics metrics

Most of what we talked about so far are must-have metrics from Google Analytics. What’s missing are a whole bunch of valuable must-have metrics also available on this platform. I love the customer analytics available from Google — especially now that they have built in cohort analysis, demographics, and interests in the newest version, GA4.

Customer analytics provide valuable insights into what motivates your visitors, their lifestyles, and what they need. Mining this information guides content creation and product development, and helps make your marketing more successful in many ways.

Putting must-have analytics together

Google Analytics provides custom dashboards within the platform and these are a great way to bring all your must-have metrics into a single, downloadable place.

Must-have revenue metrics

#13: ROI

Some earlier must-have metrics should help calculate your ROI. For many businesses, this is the driving force and yardstick against which they measure success. Not that I’m saying that’s right, I understand.

#14: Customer acquisition cost

One thing to remember about customer acquisition is that not all customers are created equal. That’s because order sizes vary across customers. So does the number of orders.

Revenue or yield management is a process that optimizes revenue by evaluating the importance of different customers, often based on CLV (customer lifetime value). For instance, airlines charge business travelers more because they travel more often and represent a higher lifetime value to the airline. Plus, they’re not as price-sensitive as passengers traveling for pleasure. In exchange for higher prices, business travelers gain points for upgrades and other perks to make their travel more enjoyable.

In addition to customer acquisition costs, it’s crucial to assess the value of individual customers (or groups) to the organization and develop plans to retain the most valuable ones and reduce costs for those who represent less value. You’ll also want to track the behaviors of customers who represent more or less value to the organization. Do they share similar channels? For instance, do Facebook customers spend relatively less compared to customers acquired through other channels?

Final thoughts

OK, enough for today. In future posts, we’ll cover conversion metrics, revenue metrics, and a few of my personal favorite must-have metrics.

Please be sure to add to this conversation in the comments. What are your must-have metrics? Which of these must-have metrics do you monitor on a consistent basis?

Need marketing help to support business growth?

We welcome the opportunity to show you how we can make your marketing SIZZLE with our data-driven, results-oriented marketing strategies.  Sign up for our FREE newsletter, get our FREE guide to creating an awesome website, or contact us for more information on hiring us.

Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.