The 11 Most Important Digital Marketing KPIs: A Guide

Believe it or not, when I started in marketing in the early 2000s, I heard very little about performance. Even at the largest financial institutions in the world — where investment performance is everything, and I represented a department with hundreds of billions in assets under management — I wasn’t asked to prove the effectiveness of my work with quantifiable data. Well, that’s changed. And rightly so. Today, digital marketing is the top priority. There are entire fields, such as “performance marketing” and “growth hacking,” that rely exclusively on what the numbers can tell us. And believe me, though digital marketing metrics don’t have meaning to our customers, establishing — and strategizing for — the right digital marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) is mission critical to any smart metaverse-era marketing strategy. 

So, which marketing KPIs are right for us? Honestly, probably the same KPIs for marketing used by them? Let me explain. 

11 Mission-Critical KPIs for Killer Digital Marketing

Digital marketing KPIs are measurable values that marketing teams use to track campaign performance against pre-defined objectives. While specific campaigns can prioritize specific digital marketing metrics, like tracking click-through rates of a lead generation ad or the conversion rate of a squeeze page, the following marketing KPIs should be used for all campaigns (as well as to measure the overall effectiveness of the marketing team).

1. Web Traffic Sources 

The Website traffic source metric measures which sources are driving visitors to your website, as well as how visitors from each source are behaving (e.g., goal completions or bounce rate). The four primary traffic sources are: 

1. Direct traffic, from visitors who type your URL directly into their browser to visit your site
2. Referral traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site from a third-party source, such as another website or social media platform
3. Search traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site from searching for your brand or a specific search term or keyword
4. Campaign traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site as a result of a dedicated campaign, with pre-established tracking parameters

This information can be used to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and overall brand awareness, engagement, lead generation and keyword strategies.

2. New Leads Generated

When it comes to leads, there are a variety of essential metrics, including total number of leads, leads per source, and cost per lead. New leads generated refers to the amount of new leads added to your customer data platform (CDP) or CRM during a given time period or as the result of a specific campaign. This information can be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign or your overall marketing efforts, and is of utmost importance because leads are what the sales team uses to convert website visitors from interested consumers to paying customers.

3. Returning Visitors

Particularly important for demonstrating the value of your content marketing strategy, the returning visitor metric tracks what happens when a user returns to your site multiple times. In addition to tracking total number of return visits, this metric can provide valuable information on pages per session, average session duration and bounce rate, three sub-metrics that can tell you whether your content is delivering what you promise — and what consumers and customers expect.

4. Click-Through Rate

Perhaps the most important KPI for analyzing how well your keyword strategy relates to your actual offerings, your click-through rate, or CTR, measures the percentage of searches that produce clicks to your website. While your keyword rankings determine whether your website or web page will appear on a search engine results page (SERP), your CTR demonstrates how effective your meta title, meta description and other website SEO elements are in producing new site visitors.

5. Goal Completion Rate

The goal completion rate measures the percentage of website visitors who take a particular action to complete a predefined goal, like signing up for a free trial or downloading a whitepaper. Used often for A/B testing and user-centric website redesigns, your GCR can be used to determine the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns, as well as your efforts to design for the best UX.

6. Lead Conversion Rate

The lead conversion rate, or website traffic/lead ratio, tells you the percentage of website visitors who convert to leads as a result of your on-site lead generation mechanisms (such as a demo request, a content download or a newsletter signup form). This metric is important because it provides details on the overall quality of your website traffic, as well as which sources are producing the most leads.

7. Lead-to-Sale Conversion Rate

Also known as sales conversion rate and lead-to-customer conversion rate, the lead-to-sales conversion rate refers to the percentage of your leads that convert (e.g., as a result of your email drip campaign or sales conversations) to customers. To determine your sales conversion rate, divide the number of leads converted by the total lead volume and then multiply it by 100%.

8. Cost Per Lead

As with anything in business, marketing needs to be measured in terms of ROI; when measured alongside cost per acquisition (or customer acquisition cost), customer lifetime value and return on marketing investment (see below), the cost per lead metric can provide valuable information on the cost-effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

9. Cost Per Acquisition

Like the cost per lead metric, which indicates how much you spend to generate a new lead, cost per acquisition, or customer acquisition cost, measures the cost of converting that lead into a customer. 

10. Customer Lifetime Value

To determine whether your marketing efforts are worth the investment overall, or to segment your customers according to their value, you can use the customer lifetime value metric. Specifically, the CLV measures the amount of gross profit generated from a customer through the entire customer lifecycle.

11. Return on Marketing Investment

This is your ROI, from marketing, and it can be used to measure how much revenue you’ve generated from a specific campaign, during a specific time period, or overall. To determine your marketing ROI, use this formula: (sales growth - marketing cost) x 100 / marketing investment.

OK, Now What?

Now that you know the digital marketing KPIs against which to track your performance, you need to establish how you are going to perform the ongoing monitoring and analysis. 

For SEO-centric website auditing, the one and only option is SEO Spider from Screaming Frog. For site analytics, the one and only option is Google Analytics. Both are included in our master list of must-have digital marketing tech. 

To streamline your monitoring, analysis and reporting, you can go with a CDP that gathers, standardizes, validates, deduplicates and consolidates data from all sources. But you can also develop your own Google dashboards.

Google Dashboards

Google Analytics dashboards are user-generated visualizations of performance data that, when presented together on one slide, represent your company’s performance across your 11 key marketing KPIs (and any others you want to use). 

These dashboards are completely customizable and can include up to 12 widgets. Each user can create up to 20 private dashboards, while each Google Analytics account can have up to 50 shared dashboards. 

To get started, log in to — or create — your Google Analytics account, and then click the first option in the dropdown list below “Customization.”

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/pypeCEaJeZY
2. Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/7nrsVjvALnA
3. Photo by Piero Nigro on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/AdqD4Tca080
4. Photo by regularguy.eth on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/K_3UV1ZFcJ0
5. Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/tKf03CkdEjo