The landscape of marketing metrics is constantly evolving. As we gain new ways of harvesting more granular and more-accurate data points, it’s critical for marketers to understand which metrics are gaining in popularity and why. 

Here is a quick roundup of which traditional automated marketing metrics are still worth keeping an eye on, and which new metrics are becoming worthy of your attention.

Established key metrics to watch

Social-media metrics: Tracking social-media growth provides insights into the expansion of your online presence and audience reach. Additionally, monitoring engagement rate allows you to gauge the level of interaction and connection with your audience, indicating the effectiveness of your content and campaigns.

Website-traffic metrics: Understanding website traffic is fundamental to assessing the performance of your online platform. Organic traffic — visitors who find your website through unpaid search results — offers insights into the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring traffic per channel helps identify which channels are driving the most visitors, enabling targeted optimization strategies. Referral traffic indicates visits from external sources, shedding light on the effectiveness of your partnerships and backlinking strategies.

SEO metrics: Search-engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in enhancing your online visibility and attracting organic traffic. Monitoring keyword ranking allows you to track your website’s position in search-engine results for specific keywords, guiding your optimization efforts. Google’s quality score assesses the relevance and quality of your ads and landing pages, influencing your ad rank and cost-per-click.

User-engagement metrics: User-engagement metrics provide valuable insights into the level of interaction and interest from your audience. Average page views per session indicate the depth of exploration and interest in your website content. Monitoring website traffic overall allows you to track the volume and patterns of visitor interactions, informing content optimization and user-experience enhancements.

Conversion metrics: Ultimately, the success of your marketing efforts lies in converting visitors into customers or leads. Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, reflecting the effectiveness of your conversion-optimization strategies. Return on ad spend (ROAS) evaluates the profitability of your advertising campaigns by comparing the revenue generated to the amount spent on advertising, guiding budget allocation and campaign-optimization efforts.

Emerging metrics to investigate

Data-driven personalization: Personalized campaigns are crucial for standing out in a competitive market, demonstrating understanding of individual customer needs and preferences. Metrics include the success rate of personalization campaigns and customer response to personalized content.

Voice-search optimization: This is vital to ensure visibility and relevance in an era where voice assistants are increasingly shaping consumer search behavior. Monitoring metrics such as voice-search impressions and conversion rates from voice searches is essential.

Data privacy and compliance: Prioritizing data privacy and compliance is essential for maintaining customer trust and loyalty in an age where data breaches and privacy concerns are prevalent. Metrics to consider include compliance adherence and customer-trust metrics.

Video marketing: We see that video marketing continues to dominate content-consumption trends, offering unparalleled engagement and storytelling opportunities. Tracking metrics like video engagement and conversion from video content is key.

Influencer marketing: As consumer skepticism grows toward traditional advertising, influencer marketing remains a priority for fostering authentic connections and driving purchasing decisions. Look at metrics, such as ROI from influencer campaigns and audience sentiment.

Customer-segmentation effectiveness: Effective customer segmentation is key for delivering personalized experiences that resonate with diverse audience segments, driving engagement and loyalty. Metrics to watch include segmentation accuracy and engagement with personalized content.

Brand-advocacy metrics: Measuring brand advocacy is essential for leveraging the power of word-of-mouth marketing and harnessing the influence of loyal brand advocates. Look at metrics such as advocacy reach and customer-generated content metrics.

Cross-channel attribution models: Implementing cross-channel attribution models is important for accurately measuring campaign effectiveness and optimizing resource allocation amid the expanding number of marketing channels. Evolution in attribution models necessitates tracking metrics like multi-channel attribution success and customer-touchpoint influence.

Conclusion

Relatively recent developments, such as voice search and data-privacy regulations, and the proliferation of influencer marketing and video marketing, have given rise to their own host of useful metrics. Not all of these metrics will be relevant to your marketing success, but ignoring those that are could be depriving your business of actionable feedback.

At the same time, don’t ignore the social media, SEO, user engagement, and conversion metrics that have proven successful in the past. A successful marketing campaign will often still rely on these numbers to determine how best to activate new customers and retain your existing audience. How you adapt, adopt, and integrate the old and the new will be critical to any successful digital-marketing strategy.

JoAnne Gritter is the chief operations officer at ddm marketing + communications, a B2B digital-marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries. She is responsible for overseeing and facilitating collaboration between all major functional areas at ddm, including finance, human resources, IT, operations, sales, and marketing.