16 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Every Digital Marketer Should Know

I hope you enjoy this post!  To get expert ideas into how to grow your business faster online, click here.

Craig Smith  |  Founder & CEO

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the lifeblood of any digital marketer. They tell you when you’re doing well and they serve as a warning sign when things aren’t going quite so smoothly.

Knowing which digital marketing KPIs to track can help increase your conversion rates, marketing driven revenue, and more. This post discusses 16 analytics and web KPI’s that every digital marketer should know to maximize your website and make your business more effective by lowering customer acquisition costs.

Learn these factors (and how you can improve them) and watch the magic happen within your online storefront or lead generation website. 

Let’s get started!

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the metric that identifies how well your website performs on an initial visit. In a nutshell, it helps identify the level of customer satisfaction within the first interaction.

The lower the bounce rate, the better your site performs and the greater the opportunity is to encourage that visitor to come back for another visit in the future and eventually convert into a customer or subscriber.

Bounce rate is calculated by dividing visits (or page views) by bounces.

For example: If 200 visitors viewed only one page on your site out of 1,000 total sessions, your website would have an average bounce rate of 20%.

Ways to improve bounce rate:

  • Invest in targeted blog content that is relevant to the needs of your audience and/or potential prospects 
  • Create calls to action on every page (or at least make it easy for visitors to get back onto a desired section of your website)
  • Consider creating an online chat function for customers who have questions but can’t find answers, contact information etc. This is a great way to bridge the gap with solution seekers with low attention spans.

Pages per Visit

Pages per visit is another important marketing metric to track relating to your website traffic. It’s a stat that tells you how many pages on average your visitors are viewing and indicates how “sticky” your content is.

The higher the number, the more engaged they are with your content; meaning that they’re reading and clicking through to new pages within your site.  The more pages they read, the more they are sales qualified leads.

Pages per visit can be affected in a variety of ways, both from the overall template design you use on your key pages as well as how fast and responsive the site is for website visitors within your marketing efforts.  

There’s no one-size fits all answer for this metric, but it can be a useful data point to note when looking at your marketing efforts. 

Source: Ezoic

Organic Keywords Ranking

When evaluating digital performance, organic search is a core consideration.  A great marketing KPI to help with driving more ecommerce seo traffic is overall organic ranking keywords. 

Think of this as the number of pages that are indexed to a specific keyword page ranking in Google. The higher the ranking, the more likely it is for someone to find your content in Google search results and visit your website.

How to Improve Organic Keyword Rankings:
If your website is not showing up in search results for pages of key terms that are relevant, it may indicate a problem with technical optimization or content relevance.  Consider SEM Rush to help in identifying this core metric.

Source: SEMRush

Digital Marketing ROAS

Paid ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is a key KPI for digital marketers because it speaks to the ability to generate return on investment through paid channels, which can be measured in dollars and cents.

It can be calculated by dividing the total cost of your campaigns by the revenue generated from those campaigns. As an example,  if you spent $100 on campaigns and generated a total revenue of $200, your ROAS is 100%.

Source: postclick.com

Determining what marketing strategy works best at any given time must come 

down to analytics and testing with different types of content.

How to Improve ROAS:

Strategies to increase ROAS of digital campaigns include focusing on specific conversion goals, such as by providing incentives for phone call conversions, testing UX interfaces, and testing core offers, creative, and marketing channels.

Organic CTR

Organic CTR (click through rate) is not a metric that is calculated within your own website analytics. This data is gathered through Google Search console and is the percentage of clicks from search engine results pages (SERP) which are organic listings compared to total number of all SERPs in any given month.

A higher CTR usually means that your website is doing well and ranking on Google’s first page for relevant keywords or topics.  

Ways to increase CTR include:

  • Making sure that there is a consistent and targeted keyword strategy,
  • Optimizing the copy on your page
  • Adding title tags to all pages of content
  • Ensuring Google can crawl your website

A low organic CTR may suggest that you need to improve SEO or see if something else might be holding back ranking performance.

Source: CXL.com

Cost Per Order

A key marketing metric that is sometimes forgotten about within digital teams is Cost per Order.  This can be calculated by dividing total cost of goods sold (COGS) by the number of orders in a calendar month.

The lower your cost per order, the better it is for profit margins and marketing spend efficiency.  By lowering your cost per order, your brand will create earnings and profit, which will in turn lead to more marketing spend.

How to Lower Your Cost Per Order:

Look to reduce the cost per order by negotiating pricing with suppliers or generating revenue streams from other sources such as affiliate income, upsells, and cross-selling. In addition, you can also lower your costs by mitigating customer service issues on your website. This could decrease calls for help that result in higher customer acquisition costs.

Marketing KPIs – Cost per Lead

Another key marketing metric is Cost per Lead (CPL). This can be calculated by dividing the total cost per month by the number of leads, and is a good measure for an agency’s ability to convert inquiries into customers.  See an example below:

Cost per lead (CPL) –  $100 spend/ 10 leads =  $10 CPL

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that helps marketers determine the value of a customer to their business. It is calculated by subtracting all future costs from profits over the lifetime of that customer, then dividing this figure by the number of years they’ve been with the brand.

It can also be calculated as: Revenue – Cost Per Acquisition x Number Of Customers Acquired / Number Of Years

CLV helps in brand awareness and direct response campaigns in helping define the proper attribution to sales revenue. 

This KPI is especially important for companies with a high cost per acquisition rate. In these cases, understanding the lifetime value of an individual customer helps in making marketing decisions about how to allocate budget across different channels and tactics.

Knowing CLV will also help you understand whether your marketing campaigns are successfully attracting new customers or creating repeat buyers and improving customer retention.

New Visitor Percentage

This KPI measures how many new visitors were attracted versus returning visitors who have landed on a webpage more than once within an established period of time (typically one month).

This metric helps you understand if your marketing strategy is driving any increase in traffic or not. It’s important to track this ratio over various periods of time as it may fluctuate with different marketing strategies being tested at different times throughout the year.

Add to Cart Rate

When optimizing within eCommerce environments, the “add to cart” KPI is a crucial metric to monitor and optimize.  This can be calculated as the number of people who add an item to their shopping cart, divided by the total number of visitors that visit a product page within your site. The higher this KPI is, the more likely it is for you to convert these visitors into buyers and create repeat customers in the future.

Ways to impact the add to cart metric include:

  • Changing the product price, description and/or images to make them more appealing
  • Checking if there are any technical issues with items on your site that might be preventing visitors from adding products into their shopping carts such as blocked pop ups
  • Redesigning the product page presentation within your store

Mobile Traffic Percentage

Understanding the traffic dynamics of your website and how many visitors come from phones is a crucial piece of information for any digital marketer.

The percentage of mobile traffic can be a helpful metric to gauge the success of your SEO, PPC, or marketing campaigns in this channel.

If you are in B2C and are seeing mobile traffic levels below 40-60%, chances are your mobile experience may be underperforming and your brand may be limited within mobile search results.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is traffic that comes from a link on another website. Referral traffic is useful in understanding the effectiveness of online marketing because it can help to track how well your content or page is doing in getting other websites to share them with their readers. You need to be able to recognize and count referral visits, instead of just those coming directly from searches.

Source: megalytic.com

Geo Location

In web analytics, geo location data helps to understand your traffic patterns. This data is important in understanding how to reach users more effectively and what content resonates with which demographics.

Geo Location can be broken down by country, city, region or even post code level data if you have the location of all your customers when they make a purchase online.

How to Improve Geo Location:

A simple best practice to get started with geo targeting:  Create country specific banners and homepages to speak to your international visitors.  For example, a Trinity client created a Great Britain homepage and banner sequence after seeing that 15% of the traffic was from the United Kingdom and this drove 20% conversion rate growth in that traffic segment.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

TTFB is vital in measuring how fast your website starts delivering content to the user.  It improves UX, organic traffic, and conversion rates.

If you have been using Google Analytics, then you may already be aware of this metric as “Time to Load.”

In order for users not to abandon your site before it has fully loaded, TTFB should be below one second (1000 milliseconds). Anything above that will start causing abandonment rates and page loading time metrics in Google Analytics to rise significantly.

The good news is you can improve TTFB by looking at the following:

  • Page weight : By removing unnecessary scripts and images, you will be able to trim down your pages’ payload size. Images make up about 60% of web content, so this is a great place to start for reducing page load time.
  • Server response times: The faster your server responds, the faster your site will load.
  • Browser caching: Your browser caches images, scripts and other resources locally to save bandwidth which can increase TTFB. This means you may want to consider using a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare or MaxCDN that handles this automatically for you.
  • Image compression:  Compressing your images will help by decreasing their file size.
  • Site speed can have a huge impact on organic search KPIs, especially with the upcoming Google Experience update, so it is worth the effort to look closely at this factor of your strategy.
Source: Nexcess

Top Site Searches

Within an eCommerce business, understanding the products that users are searching for is critical for your merchandising and promotional strategies. 

Look at your top key-phrases to get insight into emerging trends, shopping patterns, service issues and missing assortment items. 

For example: Let’s say you are reviewing your site search data and a top search for this phrase is “brown leather ugg” with over 2,000 people searching in the last month and you are out of stock.

This indicates that there’s a need for more inventory of these items, and it might be important to focus more on this category in replenishment efforts. This information is critical to share with your marketing team and corporate buyers.

Some other information you can glean from examining this search term are geographical locations (since google reports where searchers come from) or any special promotions that are going on during specific seasons – such as winter holidays. You’ll want to ensure those seasonal specials are promoted on your website.

Site search example from chewy.com

Top Landing Pages

When evaluating all of your campaigns as one aggregate, it’s helpful to review all of your top landing pages.

Top landing pages are the ones with the greatest conversion volume, traffic, or average order value. These are your best performing campaigns and should be considered for increased promotion within your marketing budget, while other campaigns may need to be adjusted or improved.

Landing page performance is usually measured using one of these metrics:

  • Conversion Volume: The number of total conversions divided by the total amount of traffic it received
  • Order Value: The sum of all orders multiplied by their CPA

It’s important to understand that you cannot apply a constant formula such as “every campaign needs at least 500 visits per month” in order to evaluate individual landing pages, because not all landing pages will produce enough revenue when given equal exposure time. Some low converting landing pages can have very high performing metrics but low traffic due to macro demand.

Summary

So, there you have it. Seventeen great metrics that your business can track and improve in order to grow sales and conversions.  Regardless if you are in ecommerce, lead generation, or even just have a static website that is not central to your business – these metrics will provide a fantastic foundation to build upon, make decisions from, and ultimately optimize against as you continue your journey of digital growth.

To learn more about how you can take your brand to the next level, contact us today for a complimentary diagnostic audit.

Cutting Edge Methods to Grow Email Sales Faster in 2022

Drive campaign results and automation excellence while taking your email to the next level with our 2022 Email Playbook (PDF).

About Trinity

Helping online brands grow since 2006. How can we help you? Find out today!

Get a FREE website diagnostic consultation and report for your site.

FREE WEBINAR

7 Ways to Drive Loyalty & Lifetime Value With Email