Digital marketing accounts for more ad spend globally as consumers shift their attention towards online videos, and this trend is expected to grow in the foreseeable future. In this day and age, brands tend to attribute success to marketing spend, and digital marketing has become a priority for performance-driven marketers in propelling their campaigns for exponential growth.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is promoting brands, businesses, and ideas through digital channels. These channels include social media, websites, pay-per-click advertising, search engines, mobile applications, or any new platform or technology that allows marketers to push their brand messaging through an online or digital channel.

Also read: 5 ways digital has impacted the growth of businesses

Digital marketing and its many metrics

A key component of a digital marketing campaign is the marketer’s capability to attribute performance to the targeted consumers. They should see whether the campaign messages resonate well with their audiences, and measure whether they are spending on their ads efficiently or not. They should also measure digital marketing campaigns down to the performance of each specific ad copies and visuals, as well as if the audiences they target are the right ones for the content.

It is the role of digital marketers to determine which metrics they need to look at and focus on, and to attribute these metrics to the success of the business.

Digital marketing metrics allow digital marketers to stay ahead of the competition by benchmarking their performance versus other companies. These metrics also help them determine trends before or as they happen, and ride them as they are most relevant to consumers.

Every business is different, which is why they should have their own set of metrics. There is no single template for digital marketing campaigns because each set of initiatives need to strategically meet the business’ success metrics. It is the role of digital marketers to determine which metrics they need to look at and focus on, and to attribute these metrics to the success of the business. They need to be able to find out the metrics that matter.

TeamAsia’s digital strategy team weighed in on some of the digital marketing metrics that matter for 2019 and beyond.

• Organic traffic growth. In the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the key performance metric is generating and growing organic traffic. Organic traffic is defined as users who proceed to your website via search engines, such as Google or Bing. SEO aims to optimize a website so that it becomes the best answer to search queries. The end goal of SEO is to get a website to the top of a search engine’s results page.
  
  

  Why this metric matters: By growing your website’s organic traffic, your website becomes more and more relevant to users searching for solutions online. Consumers use search engines to find solutions to their challenges, and SEO is how you become the best answer to their questions and needs.
  
  

• Landing page views. A landing page view is counted when social media users successfully and completely load a webpage that you directed them to via call-to-actions on your social media content. This is the success metric for both social media content and website development as this does not only measure how successful you are in getting people to click your links, but also in optimizing your website to load as quickly as possible.
  
  

  Why this metric matters: Social media marketing is almost always integrated with website development, and true conversions rely on successfully getting engagements across different channels.
  
  

• Video watch rate. Content is king, and videos sit atop the digital content food chain. Video is the content format that generates the biggest amount of meaningful engagements for both organic and paid traffic. It gets your audiences to sit in front of a screen and consume your brand messaging in a way that is so inherently engaging that social media algorithms favor displaying video content over other media types. ThruPlay and 100% watch rates are the success metrics for social media videos.
  
  

  Why this metric matters: Getting people to not just click on your video links, but watch your video until the end means you have succeeded in creatively crafting social media content that people engage in and care about.
  
  

• Organic engagements. Organic engagements are likes, reactions, shares, comments, and clicks that users do without your social media content being boosted or paid for.
  
  

  Why this metric matters: Engagements are the impetus to creating viral social media content. This metric allows digital marketers to spot viral content and further optimize content creation in order to improve reach, engagement, and chances for virality.
  
  

• Conversions. The ultimate performance marketing goal is, of course, driving conversions. But the term “conversions” is a catch-all term for different digital marketing end-goals, measuring your digital channel’s performance vis-a-vis your brand or campaign’s objectives. Conversions can be brand interest metrics such as reach and content engagements, or sales and eCommerce-related goals such as products sold online or return on ad spend.
  
  

  Why this metric matters: This is the ultimate success metric. Getting conversions means achieving the goals you set at the start of the campaign, and is why you need to optimize your content. Whether you are aiming for stronger brand awareness and interest or getting people to buy your products online, conversions are success metrics that are aligned with the brand’s objectives.
  
  

At TeamAsia, our digital strategy experts thoughtfully run digital marketing campaigns – whether for social media, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, lead generation, or search engine optimization – and these are just some of the most important metrics that we consider to accurately determine the success of the campaigns.

Want to learn more about how we can drive better success for your digital marketing initiatives? Contact us today!

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