Are Digital Marketing Metrics Important?
One might ask are digital marketing metrics important? It depends. Let me explain. Digital marketing metrics alone are useless. There is no point in gathering and reading measurements if the purpose/goal of the measurements is not determined. However, when integrated thoughtfully into your marketing strategy, digital marketing metrics can be tremendous indicators.
Let’s explore more, shall we?
Marketing strategy is a topic that reaches beyond the scope of this article; nevertheless, one crucial part of your marketing strategy is defining your goals. This is where the metrics will play a significant role. Let’s break it down: Foremost define your marketing goals, then select the right digital marketing metrics to monitor and measure your progress towards the defined goals.
Now, the real question is, what are marketing goals? Why do you need to define marketing goals? I am glad you asked. If you have any online presence, you will try to get at least one of the following objectives (goals):
- Increase engagement.
- Drive awareness.
- Increase traffic to your website or blog.
- Grow the number of followers.
- Increase the number of subscribers.
- Strengthen customer loyalty.
- etc.
Once you select which goals you would like to achieve, plan the appropriate actions and monitor the correct metrics to follow your progress towards the goals. The table below displays an array of the main marketing goals and metrics to measure the performances:
Are we done now? Not yet. It is great to know how to measure progress, but not all metrics are equal. If your tweets are getting a lot of impressions it is positive, but the number of shares and comments are a higher quantity. Why? Again, I am glad you asked. Because it is an action from your followers, community, or users. If they care, they will act, by sharing your message and engaging with you or other users in the comment section. The idea is that an action takes real engagement, compared to just a thumbs up or a view. Comments and shares are actionable metrics, whereas impressions and thumbs up are just vanity metrics. You have to pay attention to both actionable and vanity metrics. It is always good when you get more followers and thumbs up, but don’t celebrate yet, until you start to see an increase in actionable metrics, as this is the real measurement that will predict the course of your business.
Here is a list of vanity and actionable metrics:
At this time, there is no consensus among the digital marketing community about which metric is considered a vanity or an actionable metric; however, the table above provides an entry point to understanding the different marketing metric categories.
I hope this article sheds some light on this topic. Let me know your thoughts about digital marketing metrics and how you used them in your industry.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
