By developing a digital strategy with defined goals and setting realistic KPI’s, you’ll be in a much better position to monitor your website’s growth and pinpoint the marketing methods that drive the most online conversions. Our handy checklist includes a list of useful KPI’s and metrics you should measure when analysing the success of your digital marketing strategy.
Inbound links
When your press release, report or infographic has received considerable media coverage, you should make a point of logging the links from the websites so you can qualify any traffic you get as a direct result of the exposure. Inbound links from authoritative media websites like Huffington Post or Mashable will drive significant amounts of traffic to your website and serves to add weight and credibility to your brand. There are numerous tools available to check for the inbound links to your site, the best ones being Open Site Explorer from Moz and Majestic. Both tools allow you to check for current and past links and in some cases you can determine if your content has filtered down from a popular site and subsequently been picked up organically by other smaller websites.
Referrals
By accessing your Google Analytics accounts regularly, you should begin to build a good picture of your main website traffic sources. The referrals section will outline which external sites are driving traffic to your website and the percentage of visitors who came from each source. It’s worth keeping an eye on the sources that are driving consistent conversions on a monthly basis, as it’s those areas that will require further investment. These traffic sources could vary from a guest post on a popular blog or a favourable tweet from an influencer within your industry; either way determine which have had the most significant impact on your website and consider how to build on this.
Social signals Social shares and engagements are by far the easiest way to judge the popularity of your brand by the people who matter the most – your customers, peers and wider community. If your blog posts are regularly shared across social platforms or your video ad campaign gains traction on YouTube this is a strong indication your brand is building loyalty amongst followers. Quality is much more important than quantity so it’s worth remembering that an army of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into a highly engaged community. A smaller fan base who regularly share and engage with your posts are much likely to convert and can also act as brand advocates to promote your product or services to their own network.
Newsletter subscriptions Sending a regular newsletter is a great way of building loyalty with your customers and generating measurable leads back to your website. Ensure you have a balanced mix of helpful and promotional content in your newsletter to encourage subscriptions and increase customer retention. By monitoring the open rate of your mail outs and content click through rate via email tools like Mailchimp, you can get a clear idea of who is responding to a particular type of content and more importantly who is converting.
Blog comments After toiling long and hard over a blog post, the least you’d expect is for someone to read it, enjoy it and hopefully leave an insightful comment or two. A swathe of comments asking for further information on what you wrote about is a good sign that visitors are engaging with your content and finding value in what you have to say. It’s extremely important to devote some time to respond to the feedback in the comments section as this improves customer communication and increases goodwill between them and your brand. Marketing expert Neil Patel, can often be found replying to questions about his blog posts and this in turn makes him a credible and authoritative figure in his industry.
Completed enquiries
It’s important to keep track of how many visitors are completing an enquiry form to gain more information about your services or products. This suggests that many of them are warm leads who are showing an interest in your offering and need additional convincing before they make a purchase. A practical way of keeping tabs on these warm leads is to create goals and funnels in Google Analytics. This will allow you to track each visitor’s online journey and also check if there are any points at which some visitors drop off. This will help you pinpoint areas for improvement, for example creating clearer calls to action, and drill down into whether the process can be made easier for customers.
If you want to implement a digital marketing strategy with measurable objectives including those outlined above, please email hello@polkadotdigital.com to see how we can help!