In both bearish and bullish economic conditions, working with a digital marketing agency can position your business to achieve its objectives better. Digital marketing firms utilize a wide range of tools — including SEO, SEM, social media marketing, guest posting, and many others — to help your business increase its digital presence.
Ideally, a digital marketing campaign will draw new clients to your business, which, over time, will result in increased sales and higher revenues. Firms that work with digital marketing agencies will likely run campaigns for multiple years in a row, suggesting that a qualified firm can add value to your business.
Once you have chosen a digital marketing partner, you will be able to develop a customized plan tailored to your business needs, restraints, and long-term goals. With an omnichannel marketing approach, your digital footprint will be enhanced in a myriad of ways, eventually reflected in your business’s bottom line.
However, while knowing the end goal — increased income — of hiring a digital marketing company is easy, understanding how your business is performing along the journey to get there can be considerably more difficult. Fortunately, paying attention to multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it easier for both you and your digital marketing partner to gauge performance over time and make adjustments as needed.
As you might expect, there are potentially thousands of KPIs that a digital marketing agency might choose to use. Here, we will look at some of the most important KPIs used by digital marketing agencies. By monitoring each of these 20 indicators, you can effectively determine if your business is moving in the right direction.
1. Total Organic Traffic
In the digital marketing industry, the term “organic” is generally synonymous with “unpaid.” In other words, organic traffic refers to all of the visitors that came to your site via a search engine or other platform in which you didn’t pay for placement. While all types of traffic, both organic and paid, are generally considered desirable, increases in organic traffic are usually a good sign that your site is moving in a productive, more sustainable direction.
If you no longer need to pay for placement to get people to your site, it is likely that your digital footprint has been expanding, and your long-term marketing efforts are finally paying off. As organic traffic increases, the money you used to pay for the traffic can then be directed to bolster another component of your campaign.
2. Average Time Spent on Page
Everyone likes to claim they don’t judge a book by its cover, but we also know this is far from the truth. In fact, when visiting any given webpage, most people will decide whether the page is worth exploring any further within five seconds of their original click.
As people spend more time on a given page, this suggests that you are able to captivate an audience and provide relevant information to them. Integrating foundational SEO practices, such as combining engaging content with current search engine trends, is crucial for achieving this. While other variables, such as the total amount of content on the page, will need to be accounted for, pages with longer visits are usually considered more valuable.
3. Bounce Rate
A website’s “bounce rate” refers to the number of people who leave the entire site after only visiting one page. In most cases, a higher bounce rate suggests your website is underperforming or, at the very least, missing some possible opportunities.
In the best-case scenario, a visitor will “bounce” from your page because you were able to immediately answer their question or provide valuable information right away. But what other questions might this answer inspire? For instance, if you were looking for an item online, once you know the cost of the item, you will likely want to know where it can be purchased. By creating many interlinks that answer more questions and keep visitors on your site, you can keep your readers engaged and minimize the bouncing.
4. Pages Driving Organic Traffic for SEO Strategy
Once you've identified your site’s current rate of organic traffic, the next thing you will want to do is break this information down further and see which pages the organic traffic is generally being directed to. Having more content on your site will improve search engine performance. However, this will only be the case if the new content you are creating is actually useful. Utilizing effective SEO practices can significantly enhance your site’s visibility and ranking, ensuring that your content reaches the right audience. If only 5 out of 500 pages are driving organic traffic, you might want to revisit some of the other 495 and determine whether you want to edit them or delete them altogether. Quality and quantity are equally as important, both in the eyes of Google and your potential readers.
5. Traffic Value
Traffic value is a good way of estimating how much it would cost a comparable firm to create your current digital marketing campaign from scratch. After breaking down your keywords (which we will cover later in this list), you can compare your current keyword performance to how much it would cost to generate an equal amount of traffic in a cash-only marketing campaign. This, more often than not, is one of the metrics where businesses can begin to recognize just how much of a difference an effective SEO content strategy can make.
6. Visitor (Geographic) Location
Breaking down your web page visitors by geographical location is one of the easiest ways for your business to identify possible opportunities for growth. Most SEO-tracking software will at least allow you to recognize which countries your visitors are coming from and break things down by state, county, and zip code. For businesses in Denver, leveraging Denver-based SEO can significantly enhance local visibility and drive targeted traffic.
Suppose that you, a company based in Denver, Colorado, were to discover that 40 percent of your traffic was actually coming from Australia. This can tell you one of two things: that there is a major opportunity for selling to Australians that you are currently overlooking, or if you are a company that operates with a physical storefront, it might tell you that your current numbers might not be as valuable as you initially assumed. Regardless, having this crucial information will still be very beneficial.
7. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Once your business has landed itself on the front page of a Google search — a very impressive accomplishment of its own — your work is still not done. You will still likely be competing against a handful of other links and will need to take the right steps to separate yourself from the competition.
Click-through rate measures the rate of people clicking on your site over the others. On average, each of the sites on the front page will have a CTR of 10%. If your CTR is below average, you may want to consider changing your meta descriptions or finding other methods for improving your first impressions.
8. Total Backlinks
A “backlink” indicates that another website is linking back to your site, which is one of the most natural ways to measure your site’s current digital footprint. While the quality of the sites you are linked to will need to be considered, increasing your total amount of backlinks is one of the most effective methods for driving more traffic to your key pages and improving your overall Google rankings.
There are many ways to increase your total backlinks. Digital marketing agencies are key contributors to ensuring an increase in backlinks. Guest posts, paid articles, social media, supplementary websites, press releases, and directories are just a few of the ways a digital marketing agency can increase the number of paths leading to your site.
9. Backlink Quality
The importance of having backlinks connected to your site is undeniable. However, quality is a crucial component of a successful outcome. One high-quality backlink can easily produce more traffic than ten or even a hundred low-quality links. When evaluating backlink qualities, the linked websites' domain authority, number of visitors, and contextual relevance will all be very important.
10. Total Pages per Session
Having a low number of total pages per session can indicate that each page provides valuable information to users and that you 'can answer visitors' questions right away. It can also mean that people are quick to abandon your site, so the bounce rate should also be included.
A high number of total pages per session can suggest that your site is very interesting, which is why total session time should also be considered in this context. Regardless, you will also want to take the necessary steps to improve your website's user experience (UX) and ensure that visitors spend more time on your site to peruse your content.
11. Exit Pages
An “exit page,” as you might guess, is a page where people ultimately decide to leave your website. In some cases, you can expect a page to be an exit page, such as a page where people go to place an order with your business. In other cases, exit pages can reveal which other pages are actively driving people away from your site. This can be caused by ineffective linking strategies, broken links, broken pages, and various other issues.
12. Broken Links
One of the things that many people do not realize about digital marketing is just how active the processes involved truly are. Creating a high-quality webpage doesn’t necessarily mean that it will remain that way forever.
When someone clicks on a link that leads them to a dead-end, they will likely abandon your site and look for information elsewhere. Checking for broken links and broken pages on a regular basis — which can be done automatically with various software — will help you significantly improve your site’s overall quality.
13. Inner Links
Inner links, generally speaking, make it much easier for people to navigate your site. If you have a page that mentions (or lists) the services your company provides, you should include links within the page's content that makes it easy to jump from one page to another. This will ultimately help keep people on your website and also make it much easier for them to follow through with various actions.
14. Average Page Speed
As a rule of thumb, you should assume that most people browsing the web are just as impatient as you are. Pages that take more than three seconds to load will lose a significant portion of their traffic. If your pages require five seconds or longer to load, your bounce rate will increase.
Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to improve your average page speed. Optimizing images and videos can help make the site load more quickly. Additionally, minimizing pop-ups and other data-intensive features will help even further.
15. Content Length
As mentioned multiple times, both quality and quantity are very important in digital marketing. While some decisions may persuade you to choose one over the other, when you have the option, you should undoubtedly pursue both.
Google uses the E-E-A-T Algorithm which emphasizes Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Writing content in alignment with Google's E-E-A-T guidelines is one of the ways that you can begin building credibility in the eyes of search engines.
16. Returning Visitors (Percentage and Total)
There are only a few things more flattering than having someone visit your site and return to it in the future. Your returning visitors are the ones who believe your website has valuable information and, naturally, are likely to take some tangible action in the future. Increasing both the percentage and the total number of returning visitors to your website will suggest your campaign is moving in a productive direction.
17. Link Velocity
Link velocity is a backlinking metric that measures how many backlinks your website is generating on a monthly basis. This can be caused by backlinks that are incorporated into your broader digital marketing campaign or any other backlinks generated organically by other people who liked your content. Regardless of the source, increased link velocity will broaden your digital footprint and help improve your expected search engine performance.
18. Shares, Likes, and Comments
Ideally, your website is easy for visitors to navigate and allows them to interact with the content you’ve created. Shares, likes, and comments all need to be taken with a grain of salt, but having people engage with your social media content helps create lasting connections that may lead to future actions. Depending on the industry you are operating in, you may want to increase engagement even further and begin directly interacting in your comment sections.
19. Dominant Keywords
Keywords help drive results, which is why identifying dominant keywords is crucial for any sustained digital marketing campaign. What kind of keywords are currently driving people to your site? What kind of keywords do you hope will drive people to your site? Which keywords are currently being underutilized? Answering these questions can sometimes be quite difficult, especially if you have limited experience in the digital marketing space, but these answers will often point your campaign in a much more productive direction.
20. Competitor Rankings
Without context, interpreting the metrics measured above can make it difficult to evaluate your business' overall performance. This is especially true during a very volatile year when everyone might be experiencing increased or decreased traffic in waves.
In order to conceptualize how your business is performing, you can use various tools (such as Semrush) to compare your website to the businesses you are competing with. Did your traffic skyrocket while theirs plummeted, or vice versa? If so, the next thing you'll need to determine is why, exactly, these trends are playing out this way.
Measure Your Business' Online Performance with Peaks Digital Marketing
The most successful digital marketing strategies will require many different data points and many different outlooks. Peaks Digital Marketing monitors this data and generates in-depth reports to reorient your business and help you understand what changes are needed. Making it to the front page of Google is a steady climb that can take a considerable amount of time. Get to the top of your search results with a trusted SEO and digital marketing company in Denver, Colorado, and reach your summit.
