How Do You Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing?

So, you finally caved and implemented a kick*** digital marketing strategy for your business. Congratulations, that’s amazing!

But how do you know if it’s working? How do you measure the success of your digital marketing strategy? It’s an important question and is often an inquiry that Andrew Marr, CEO & Owner of Digital Storyteller, gets from prospects and clients.

He’s here to answer it today. Watch Andrew’s video below to learn how he measures the success of a digital marketing strategy. Let’s get started.

The Most Important Question to Ask

Whether or not your digital marketing strategy is successful or not comes down to one main question: Are you getting more clients?

If the answer is no, it’s time to reevaluate your strategy. Here’s how you can do that.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

We’ve all heard of KPIs.

Digital marketing KPIs, according to Digital Dot, are “quantifiable metrics that you can use to measure and monitor the partial and overall success of your digital marketing strategy.”

KPIs help to establish clear goals regarding campaigns and can be used in a variety of marketing approaches, including:

“Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing”
And more

Here are some of the most important KPIs to track when it comes to your digital marketing strategy.

How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

At Digital Storyteller, we conduct monthly and quarterly reporting for all of our clients. These reports help us show clients how we’re moving the needle, what’s working for them in their digital marketing strategy, and where we can shift to improve.

Below are some factors we evaluate:

Authority Score

Authority score, according to Semrush, is their “compound domain score that grades the overall quality of a website or a webpage.” Your score can range anywhere from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more credibility a site typically has. Obviously, an authority score of 100 is #goals, but realistically, a score ranging from 32-48 is where you’ll see a strong organic marketing score lie.

This figure is determined by a few key factors including:

Backlinks
Organic keyword rankings
Site health
Site age
Among many other factors

Because of these factors, authority score takes time and consistency to grow. After all, you can’t grow your authority score overnight– even though we wish you could.

Ranking Keywords

There are, of course, specific keywords that your business will want to rank for. If you’re in the commercial insurance industry in San Diego, for example, some of your keywords might include:

“Commercial Insurance San Diego”
“Business Insurance”
“Business Owner”
“Risk Management”
And so on

Using a tool like Semrush—which collects research on your business’s SEO, PPC, content, and social media efforts—can help you identify the keywords you are currently ranking for (or currently not).

Information about ranking keywords is critical to making your way up the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is defined as “visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources.”

The amount of organic traffic that your website receives is a huge indication of where or not your marketing strategy is successful.

Average Session Duration

Session duration shows how much time visitors spend on your website. As a general rule of thumb, you want a high session duration. That means people are engaging more on your sight instead of clicking away!

You can increase session duration by:

Providing quality informational content on your site
Ensuring your site is easy to navigate; user-friendly
Incorporating video content

Bounce Rate

What is bounce rate? Bounce rate indicates how quickly someone exits (or “bounce” from) your website after visiting it. For this reason, we want a high session duration and a low bounce rate. Semrush tells us that “an optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.”

Our goal is to keep people on-page as long as possible. You can decrease your bounce rate by:

Making sure your website loads quickly
Including all information that prospects might be looking for
Creating an easy to navigate the site
Prioritizing engaging content
Eliminating page errors

We, of course, cannot end this article without talking about social media statistics. In our monthly and quarterly reports we give in-depth information for each social platform being used on:

Growth (i.e. followers)
Interactions
Reach
Comments
Clicks
Number of posts
Profile views
Impressions

As we’ve worked with our clients, however, we’ve noticed that it’s not uncommon for clients to get hung up on numbers. For example, the number of followers or likes they get on an Instagram post.

It is very important, however, to identify where their prospects spend time. For example, Instagram followers and likes might not matter so much for a financial services company compared to a clothing brand.

While it’s important to be active and engaged on Instagram, a better indication of a financial services company’s success might come from a platform like LinkedIn or YouTube. For those interested in learning more, here’s an article on what social platforms are best for your business to be on.

To reiterate, likes and followers don’t automatically equate to success, but it is important to be engaged and consistent within your social media strategy. Naturally, this means that as time goes on, your following, likes, engagement, etc. should increase.

Notice the trend? Slow and steady growth wins the race.

Depending on who you ask, engagement might be a more important factor than the number of likes and followers.

Well, that’s all folks. We hoped you learned a thing or two from this article! If you’re interested, read on for more on social media, specifically the difference between social impressions and social engagement.