The Most Crucial Digital Marketing Analytics Metrics & Tools

Digital marketing analytics quantify the success of your marketing efforts. 

Without them, you can’t show the value and impact of your marketing because you won’t know what worked and what didn’t. 

Keep reading to learn what you should know about digital marketing analytics, the different metrics to watch across your digital channels, and the best tools to manage your data effectively.

What is digital marketing analytics?

First, we must be clear about what digital marketing is. 

Digital marketing is advertising campaigns that take place online across your owned channels, such as your website, social media, email marketing, and paid media—all of your content.

Digital marketing analytics refers to the online advertising metrics that quantify the impact of these marketing activities. These could include cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, cost per Mille (CPM), website visits, email opens, and more.

Why is digital marketing analytics important?

By tracking the metrics that are most relevant to your digital marketing campaign, you can gauge its success.

1. You can see if your marketing efforts are profitable.
2. You learn about your customers and their preferences.
3. You can adjust and optimize your marketing campaigns to improve your results (and make more money).
4. Based on your findings, you can improve the user experience and design of your digital assets: website and landing pages, ads, and social media content.
5. You make data-driven marketing decisions for your business.

What are the most important digital marketing metrics?

The most important metrics depend on the digital asset you’re monitoring. The metrics for an email marketing campaign won’t necessarily be the same as those for an e-commerce website.

Let’s look at the different digital touchpoints and their most relevant metrics.

Metrics for social media marketing

Social media is where people are often introduced to your business for the first time. As a result, you want more eyes on your business pages and posts to increase brand awareness. Monitoring how people engage with your content is essential to understand how to enhance your marketing strategy. 

Here are the most common social media metrics to watch:

• Follower count - Track the growth of your audience on your social media pages. Once you have a benchmark, you can track your growth in relation to your digital marketing campaigns.
• Engagement - This metric measures reactions and activity that your post or ad receives. It indicates what your audience is interested in and what creative they resonate with most.
• Impressions - Gauge the number of times a post or ad shows on people’s screens. It’s a base metric used to calculate the other metrics.
• Reach - See the number of unique users who have seen your post or ad.
• Click-through rate - The percentage of users who clicked on a post or ad link. The higher the percentage, the better your post or ad performance. 
• Conversion rate - This metric refers to the percentage of users who clicked on a link and completed the desired action, like buying your product. Your conversion rate shows how your ad or post is performing.
• Cost per action - This tells us what the desired action on your ad costs each time it happens.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) - This determines the profitability of your ad campaign as it indicates the return on investment.

Metrics for search engine marketing

While some may overlap, the metrics to watch are different for your website and your Google Ads.

• Website visits - The number of website visits over a specific period. Monitoring this traffic is vital as it indicates interest in your brand or business.
• Average engagement time - The total time a user spends interacting with a website or a specific web page. This metric tells you about your website visitors' interest in your content. More time spent equals more interest.
• Pages viewed - How many pages a user sees during their visit, which ones, and for how long. Which pages they visit hold valuable information about your customer journey, and what content they read shows you what matters to them.
• Returning visitors - The percentage of users who’ve visited your site more than once. Distinguishing between new and returning visitors helps you to target the users who have expressed a strong interest through repeated website visits. 
• Engaged sessions - The percentage of visitors who stay on your website for more than 10 seconds, whether or not they interact with the page. These are the web sessions that matter. Your total web sessions include sessions less than 10 seconds long, sessions with no conversions, and fewer than two screen or page views. 
• Average page views - Page views tell you how many times a web page has been opened. Then, average page views tell you the average number of pages users look at during a single website visit. 
• Referral sources - This metric tracks which web sources have directed traffic to your site, such as emails, social media, search engines, other domains, and external links. Knowing where your traffic is coming from is essential because it tells you where to invest your budget and which campaigns to optimize if you’re not getting enough traffic. 
• New visits - The number of first-time visitors to your site, aka new prospects. It also means that all these new visitors have entered your sales funnel as long as your tracking is set up correctly.
• ROAS - You need to know the return on ad spend to tell how profitable your Google Ads are.
• Conversion rate - If you’re running Google Ads, you should watch your conversion rate to see the percentage of people who clicked on your ads and completed the desired action on the page.
• Click-through rate (CTR) - Marketers running Google Ads should watch the CTR in their advertising campaigns to measure the appeal of their ads. It shows the ratio of views to clicks of your ad.

Metrics for email marketing

The metrics to monitor email marketing campaigns are different, too:

• Open rate - This refers to the percentage of people from your list who opened your email based on the total number of emails sent. It gives you an indication of how your subject line and snippet content are enticing people to open your email.
• Click-through rate (CTR) - The percentage of people who clicked your email, like clicking a button or on a link.
• Unsubscribe rate - The number of people who unsubscribed from your email list after receiving your email. Being consistent with your email marketing can go a long way to counteracting your unsubscribe rate.
• Email bounce rate - The percentage of emails that weren’t delivered due to a technical issue, like firewalls, incorrect addresses, or addresses no longer in existence. 
• Conversion rate - This metric refers to the percentage of users who completed the desired action after getting your email, like clicking a link, making a purchase, or contacting you.
• List growth rate - This metric shows your email list's growth rate and is important to watch, considering that email lists naturally decay by around 25% a year.

Metrics for e-commerce websites

If you’re selling from your online store, the metrics you watch will be different, too:

• Revenue - Refers to the money generated from selling goods or services over a specific period.
• Conversion rate - The percentage of website visitors who completed the desired action on your website. These actions could be a product purchase, download, or newsletter signup - whatever you set as your marketing campaign objective.
• Average order value - The average amount spent per purchase across your website or by customer.
• Average items per order - The average number of items per website purchase gives you insight into your customer behavior.
• Number of transactions - The total number of purchases made across the website or per customer.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) - This metric shows how much it costs for the business to acquire a customer. It’s calculated by dividing your sales and marketing costs by the number of new customers gained over a specific period. 

Metrics for lead-generation businesses

For lead-gen businesses, the metrics to watch change:

• The number of leads - The number of people who interacted with and expressed interest in your business.
• Lead conversion rate - The percentage of leads who converted into customers, which shows how effective your digital marketing is.
• Cost per lead - The money spent to generate a single lead. This metric helps determine how much you are prepared to pay for leads.
• Lead quality score - This metric uses other metrics such as demographics, interests, and activity to determine the quality of the leads generated and the likelihood of a lead becoming a customer.
• Return on investment (ROI) - This measures the profitability of your marketing campaign by dividing the revenue generated from the campaign by the total cost.

How to use digital marketing analytics in your strategy

As a digital marketer, your data analytics must underpin your marketing campaign strategy and inform every decision you make. Here’s how to use and apply your analytics data effectively.

1. Connect your data

First, you need to ensure you are tracking your marketing data properly. 

Investing in setting up your data pipeline is the unskippable first step. Without sufficient data, you won’t get the insights you need.  

GA4

Setting up Google Analytics 4 correctly on your website is vital to monitoring how users interact with it, regardless of your website type. It lets you track important user data and helps you optimize your campaigns for desired events that take place on your website. 

Setting up your GA4 account is free.

Meta Pixel

If you’re advertising on Facebook, use the Meta Pixel to help track user activity on your website. While this data is less accurate since the release of iOS14, which allowed Apple users to opt out of tracking, it still tracks essential information about what actions Facebook users take on your website. 

Furthermore, when used with the Facebook Conversions API, it bolsters your tracking with additional info that the Pixel may miss as it connects directly with Facebook to gather this info. 

We have an article explaining how to set up your Pixel if you need a hand.

Facebook Conversions API

The Facebook Conversions API is a tool developed by Meta to provide a server-to-server connection to gather user activity securely and without relying on third-party software like your browser.

You can read more about the Conversions API Gateway in this article.

To set up your own Facebook Conversions API Gateway, you need developers to help you, which is expensive. Alternatively, you can set it up with a Partner integration like Madgicx Cloud Tracking. Our Madgicxians set everything up for you in 2 days, and you will see a boost in tracking data. Try it out for free for 7 days.

2. Set your objective

Choose a campaign objective aligned with your business and the goals you want to achieve. There’s no point running an awareness campaign if you want to drive sales. Keep each campaign’s objectives in line with the desired action you want users to take and how it fits in with your overarching digital marketing strategy.

3. Choose the right metrics to watch

You should choose the most relevant metrics to track according to your campaign objective and business goals. If you’re focusing on building your email marketing list, the number of new subscribers is an important metric to watch. Monitoring your app downloads is a relevant KPI if you want more app installs. If you’re running an awareness campaign, you should watch your click-through rate and cost per click. 

4. Analyze industry benchmarks as well as your own

Make sure you know where you stand against other businesses in your industry so you know where to aim. In addition, you should have a benchmark of your own data to work from to track your progress accurately. Knowing these benchmarks helps you create realistic targets to shoot for.

5. Watch your data analytics

Don’t wait for your campaign to end before analyzing the results. You should check your analytics early on to adapt and make changes if you see something that doesn’t look right. 

You’ve got to build a habit of regularly checking your data analytics to keep your finger on the pulse of your marketing. The data will often show you if something goes wrong, like a broken link or an error in your campaign. 

6. Optimize and make data-led decisions to improve performance

It’s one thing to analyze your data but quite another to implement what you have learned. This step is vital to your success. Once you’ve studied your analytics, applying what you’ve discovered to your next campaign must become part of your process.

Recommended tools for digital marketing analytics

Ask any surgeon or mechanic, and they’ll tell you that the tools they use to enhance their capability to perform their jobs are vital to their success.

The same goes for marketing professionals and the digital marketing campaigns they manage. Marketers have analytics tools in their toolkits.

Here are my recommendations.

One-Click Report

If only there were a way to track your digital marketing analytics across all your advertising channels 🤔

Wait, there is! From one real-time marketing dashboard, Madgicx’s One-Click Report lets you monitor cross-channel performance from Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, GA4, and Shopify.

You can choose a prebuilt template or create your own report from scratch. You can easily modify your report by dragging and dropping the widgets to suit your needs. 

One-Click Report lets you share your live dashboard or download it as a PDF. It’s the only reporting tool you need for your paid advertising. Try it out today for free.

DashThis

DashThis offers a data reporting tool that automatically consolidates marketing analytics from various sources. You can choose a template from their library or create your own.

DashThis is ideal for content marketers and SEO professionals and offers white-label reporting for agencies and freelancers to customize their client reports.

Sprout Social

Ideal for monitoring your organic and paid social media presence, Sprout Social’s reporting features are comprehensive and designed to help you broaden your impact across social media platforms.

From social listening to track brand sentiment across social media to actionable audience insights you can apply to your social media marketing strategy, Sprout Social offers you a solid social data analytics reporting tool.

Klipfolio

Klipfolio offers dashboard reporting for businesses of any size. It integrates with most places you can store data to import, consolidate, and visualize your analytics easily. It lets you build dashboards and reports you can share with your team or your clients.

Conclusion

If you weren’t excited about your analytics and what secrets they hold for your business before, I hope you are now. In addition, using the right tools to track your analytics is critical to your success. Try One-Click Report for a simple, easy-to-use reporting solution to track your data analytics. Give it a spin for free.