So, you have started to invest heavily in your digital marketing efforts. How do you know you are making progress? What KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you should look at? Most important of all, how do you know you are getting most of your efforts and dollars?
As you may have observed from my earlier posts, I tend to believe and analyze things more from a strategic standpoint because that brings the most bang for your efforts. There is no point for example in measuring and fretting over your Adwords campaigns alone, if your overall digital marketing strategy is not aligned properly with the nature of your business, which may have more customers on Facebook or Twitter than lurking and doing searches on Google.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am not advocating that you abandon efforts to measure your tactical marketing efforts and initiatives. All I am trying to say is that measuring the impact of your overall digital marketing efforts is quite different than measuring data at a more tactical level. While it’s important to measure ROI for each channel that you market on, it’s even all the more important to measure the impact of your overall digital marketing efforts.
Although I discuss this in a separate blog post, please remember that marketing department is no longer just another department of your business. Instead your marketing department can provide you lots of data and insights that can have a direct impact on your overall business and the underlying strategy. Simply by looking at the data points that your digital marketing tools can provide to you should be sufficient to make you understand this concept.
Measuring Digital Marketing Effectiveness
In my opinion, measuring the impact of your overall digital marketing efforts involves answering the following questions:
- How do you know you are reaching the right audience in the digital space?
- What percentage of your audience is digitally savvy and exhibits a degree of digital behavior that it can be considered in the category of ‘digital audience’?
- How do you know you are using the right digital channels for your digital marketing efforts?
- How do you know that your audience is responding effectively and optimally to your digital marketing efforts?
Data about your business and audience
As part of your digital marketing analytics, you should collect enough data on a regular basis that should provide you useful insights about your business and how are your customers interacting with your business. Here are some critical data points to consider.
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What devices are your audiences using to touch your business?
As a business who is concerned about your digital health, you must know how your customers touch your business. You must measure and record this data at an enough granular level to know how your customers touch your business when they want to reach you for example for customer service issues, or when they are shopping for services provided by your business. Knowing this data will help you optimize your site, your landing pages, your calls to action, and other aspects of your site.
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What devices are your audience using that are resulting in the best conversion rates?
This is one of the most common but most powerful metric that you can use to position your business and its offers. Are most of your conversions coming from desktop computers or tablets or other devices? You should know this information about all types of conversions that you define for your business.
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Do you understand all your customer journeys? Is your site designed and structured appropriately to handle those journeys?
Every organization must know and understand the various ‘journeys’ that its visitors and customers take to interact with its services. Unless you know the specific customer journeys that your customers are using to interact with your digital business, you may not be able to convert them properly.
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What online channels are your visitors and customers using to interact with your business?
Each digital business gets its online traffic from various sources. As a digital marketer, you must know the specific channels that are bringing traffic to your business and how those online channels are helping your business advance its online business goals.
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What is the average order value per customer?
This may be different across various product and service lines. However, you must know this for each of the digital channels that your customers are using. For example, you may find that the customers that you acquire through Google search may be resulting in more sales and more value per order than the other sales channels.