38 Most Important Digital Marketing KPIs & Metrics

Description:Depending on your approach you can calculate leads and prospects as one group, but in fact lead is not qualified contact and the prospect is already qualified one. There is also a discussion about the difference between conversed and acquired lead. Conversion mostly translated as gaining an actual customer who spent money and acquisition as customer who haven’t’ spent money yet but for example assigned for the subscription. It is also useful to track the number of prospects and then compare it with actual number of generated customers.

Should be High or Low?:You can compare this digital marketing metric through the months and see if there are differences depending on marketing strategy, product offer changes or your employee’s qualifications. If you measure the ratio you can see how accurate your campaign is and if you are attracting really potential customers.

Description:Number of newly qualified potential customers. Can be mistaken with new leads but it’s smaller number after rejecting part of the leads not qualifiable as a potential customer.

Description:It is usually confused with CPA which stands for generated prospects among digital marketing KPIs, but this metric is measuring cost of all the leads generated counted together with both possible customers and the one that will not be interested in your products. This is important to have the campaigning well created for the target customer, so you don’t pay extra costs for attracting people from outside of the target.

Calculation Method / Formula:Total advertising (campaign) cost / number of generated leads

Should be High or Low?:It is related to your campaign and marketing strategies. You should choose it according to your target based on a value of an average customer.

Description:Since acquiring leads and customers through cost-per-click advertising is usually expensive, it is very important to compare it with ROI. If number of your new prospects is much higher than the acquired customers, the actual profitability of paid campaigns may drop to very low results. Conversion is very often mix with acquisition of a client it is important to know the difference,

Calculation Method / Formula:Average toal cost to gain a new customer

Should be High or Low?:If the cost is growing most likely you have a lot of visits of new potential prospects, but the conversion rate is going down.

Description:Time that takes a user to complete a purchase or a Goal from a defined starting point (can be a first second entering your website, or an application form page, or Add-to-Cart action etc.). You have to also define if by an action you mean only actual sale or maybe you include enrolment, signing up for a newsletter etc.

Calculation Method / Formula:defined start point – action completed.

Description:It is the percentage of loyal customers who keep using/purchasing your products in the end of the measured period of time out of customers counted at the beginning of that period of time. New customers are not counted into this metric. That is to say, this digital marketing KPI only counts the customers who came back to purchase more from you. This can help you understand your strategies for keeping your customers.

Calculation Method / Formula:(CE-CN)/CS where CE – number of all customers, CN – number of new customers acquired, CS – number of clients at the begining of the measured period

Should be High or Low?:If the number is going down, you may search for reasons and try to implement some changes. Low number might indicate some new competitor on the market or some new interesting offers that can attract clients.

Description:Also called the attrition rate. It is a percentage of churned customers out of all customers connected either by some contract or subscription for services or products in some period of time (in a month). The main reason for the attrition of the customer is usually poor customer experience or slow service performance.

Should be High or Low?:To decrease the percentage and increase the customer satisfaction you may consider develop tactics how to value your customers and how to build a relationship with the customer.

Description:That metric can be used to measure the loyalty or satisfaction of a customer and therefore is one of the digital marketing KPIs. In other words, it shows the quality of relationship between customer and your company. The metric’s numbers come from respondents/customers. NPS above zero usually is taken as good result. Respondents who rate your company are usually separated in tree groups: Promoters, Detractors and Passives. On average, Promoters buys more, stay loyal customers or even promote your company among other potential customers. The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. Number of Passives increase the total number of respondents, and due to that it lowers down the final NPS.

Calculation Method / Formula:% of promoters – % of Detractors

Should be High or Low?:If the number is going down through a period of time, there might be some problem between your company and customers.

Description:It is the total number of web visits during given time/month

Should be High or Low?:Low number may suggest investment in some marketing.

Description:It’s a ratio between number of new visitors and number of visitors who are coming back to your website within a measured period of time.

Calculation Method / Formula:number of new visitors / # returning visitors

Should be High or Low?:New visitors mean new potential customers so if the ratio is going down it means your marketing strategies or SEO are not well optimized.

Description:An average time spent on the website from the moment of entering the website till the end of active looking, searching through the website. We take into calculation all the visits total time no matter of the result.

Calculation Method / Formula:total visits time / number of visitors

Should be High or Low?:There should be some optimum time spent on a website where you can see the higher conversion rate. So, the growing time doesn’t mean it will be increasing your conversion rate, but you can track the time and conversion rate dependence.

Description:This metric shows the percentage out of number of all visitors how many of them actually bought some of your products. The target is to have this number fairly high but even if conversion rate is not very high, but the number of visitors is growing your total sales will grow as well. You can measure if it’s worth to use pay-per-click advertisement method. If your traffic is high but there is not comparable number of new subscribers that might not be worth to pay for that kind of advertising.

Calculation Method / Formula:# of successful actions / # of total website visits.

Should be High or Low?:It is one of the digital marketing KPIs that you should check how your strategies or product improvement influence on the conversion rate and based on that choose some directions in growing your company.

Description:First of all, the call for action is a trigger that cause the potential customer to take an action. It is all about creating an impression that the product or a service is what they want to buy. It can be perfectly designed website or a strategic conversation on the phone or via chat. Measuring the ratio isn’t so easy but you can measure the growth of conversion rate after implementing some of the call to action triggers.

Description:You can measure how effective are your payed adds on other websites. If they catch focus of your customers/potential customers to click and search for more information regarding advertised product.

Calculation Method / Formula:number of clicks / number of visitors who saw the addvertisement

Should be High or Low?:You can also compare it with other ways of reaching client. Measure how successful each of the ways of campaigning is more useful or which one needs more investment if the ratio of success is going down.

Description:It is a ratio between number of visits and your website growing. You can track if and how much your traffic increase with building up your website.

Should be High or Low?:The higher number of pages can give you more possibility for better optimization of your website and finding possible customers among a larger group of people.

Description:This is one of the ways to get more traffic on your website. And it is a number of links that are leading to your website from other websites. It is one of the good ways to gain new customers. For a potential customer a link from other website as a recommendation can be a trigger as one of the calls to action trigger.

Description:Also known as natural traffic in digital marketing KPIs. This metric shows your accessibility to exclude advertisement. This shows the market interest in your product and how attractive and professional is your offer is. Also, it is a measure of optimization of your website.

Calculation Method / Formula:# visitors from non payed search results

Should be High or Low?:If the number drops down, maybe you should work on your SEO. It may suggest there are competitors whose websites are shown before in the web search or their offer or visual aspect is more interesting.

Description:This metric is important among the digital marketing KPIs to be able to compare it with the result of the paid traffic of your website. You can measure how much you can improve your natural traffic resulting in a number of new leads through the smart website optimization and including a lot of call to action buttons/ pop-ups, letter subscription or just creating an account.

Description:This metric is important to track to be able to compare it with the result of the payed traffic of your website. You can measure how much you can improve your natural traffic conversion results through the smart website optimization and including a lot of call to action buttons/ pop-ups, letter subscription or just creating an account.

Calculation Method / Formula:# of subscribers or successful actions / # natural traffic

Description:Page authority is also one of the essential digital marketing KPIs. One of the methods to calculate and predict how high a page will be on search engine result pages (SERP).

Should be High or Low?:Possible range is between 1 and 100. When the score is higher the ability to be high in the search results is also high.

Description: It is a ranking calculated by one of the google search engine algorithms. It counts quality of links to a page and based on that gives the value. The higher value the more important the website is.

Should be High or Low?:Possible range is between 1 and 10. When the score is higher the ability to be high in the search results is also high.

Description:You can monitor ranking position of your website/webpages for specific keywords. Changes of this rankings through the time can tell how your website’s SEO performance is changing.

Description:It is a ratio between rank of the specific keywords between previous and current period of time. Based on the results you can estimate if the SEO management is going into correct direction.

Calculation Method / Formula:Rank from the previous perıod of time / Rank from current time period

Description:By using google analytics, you can see which of the keywords brought you the most visitors based on that and the website conversion rate you can estimate weighted conversion rate per each word using number of visitors per keyword as a weight.

Calculation Method / Formula:(# of successful actions / # of total website visits.) * keyword weight

Should be High or Low?:You can compare success rate between keywords. As a result, you willbe able to optimize keywords for your website.

Description:Few top keywords that has the biggest impact on your organic traffic.

Description:The size of traffic coming from video content. Can be evaluated per channel such as Youtube, Vimeo etc.

Description:It’s a number of contacts coming from the payed advertisement that may potentially become a future client.

Should be High or Low?:If the conversion rate is high, then the high number of payed leads is a target. However, if the conversion rate is low then your company pays for the service than is not profitable.

Description:The total amount of subscribers of who found your website due to the paid advertising via Google AdWords or another paid search platform. In the digital marketing KPIs, this metric KPIs allow you to estimate if that kind of marketing is worth the price. You can compare this number with the organic new subscribers and try to improve your SEO to be able to decrease your budget for the payed advertisement if necessary.

Description:It is a total cost of advertising to convince a potential customer to buy your product or service. It may show you how good is your marketing strategy. The target of any marketing should be gaining as much as possible new customers not just visitors without real value. You have to remember to include in the expense’s salaries, costs of software, equipment, rent etc. Conversion is very often mix with acquisition of a client it is important to know the difference, acquisition means gaining a potential client that starts a subscription but he haven’t spent money yet while conversion counts only customers who spent already money on your product or services.

Calculation Method / Formula:(Total Marketing + Sales Expenses) / number of New Customers Gained

Should be High or Low?:It is related to your campaign and marketing strategies. You should choose it according to your target based on a value of an average customer.

Description:Since acquiring leads and customers through cost-per-click advertising is usually expensive, it is very important to compare it with ROI. So, if number of your new prospects is much higher than the acquired customers, the actual profitability of paid campaigns may drop to very low results. Conversion is very often mix with acquisition of a client it is important to know the difference,

Calculation Method / Formula:Average toal cost to gain a new customer

Should be High or Low?:If the cost is growing most likely you have a lot of visits of new potential prospects, but the conversion rate is going down.

Description:This digital marketing metric measures ranking of how good your advertising campaign is. However, you should be aware and create your ads according to your goals. It is not too much valuable to have a very high score coming from the people who won’t be interested in your product. Also, you may consider changing your paying plan for other types like cost per sale or cost per lead.

Should be High or Low?:Higher number lets you to stay in the top results of the search engine. However depending on the ratio between clicks and actual sales is very important and for some companies it may generate higher costs and incomes.

Description:Number of visitors of your social media profiles or you blog posts. To increase the number of the visitors you can work on sharing a valuable content, based on the results develop a sharing schedule, don’t share the same content more than one time. While it is one of the digital marketing KPIs, it is also specifically a social media metric.

Calculation Method / Formula:# visitors through the social medla profiles or advertisements

Should be High or Low?:Traffic on your social media can highly increase traffic on your website so it is important to well maintain all your media profiles and optimize content for each network separately.

Description:Number of leads or customers coming from your social media profiles or you blog posts. To increase the conversion rate, you can add call to action links, buttons on every of your post. You can offer an email subscription on your blog by a welcome pop-up etc.

Should be High or Low?:By the call to action design on your social media posts you can increase the number both of new leads and customers and track it. The effectiveness depends on level of your activity on your social media, Number of new posts etc.

Description:Conversion rate is one of the most used digital marketing KPIs in performance evaluations. shows the percentage out of number of all visitors how many of them actually bought some of your products. The target is to have this number fairly high but even if conversion rate is not very high, but the number of visitors is growing your total sales will grow as well. So, you can measure if it’s worth to use pay-per-click advertisement method. If your traffic is high but there is not comparable number of new subscribers that might not be worth to pay for that kind of advertising.

Calculation Method / Formula:# of successful actions / # of total visits.

Should be High or Low?:You may check how your strategies or product improvement influence on the conversion rate and based on that choose some directions in growing your company.

Description:The size of company social media and email audience in total. Includes followers, fans, subscribers and people who are already engaged and also willing to engage in the future with company actions.

Description:This metric, which is one of the digital marketing KPIs, measures how much effort your customer has to input to get his issue resolved. Besides the effort itself for that measurement very big impact will have a customer experience. Usually customers can rate you much lower due to the bad communication experience even if their problem wasn’t complicated.

Calculation Method / Formula:You can measure it on a scale from 1 to 5 representing the amount of your customer’s effort.

Should be High or Low?:Target is the minimum effort of your customer. If the results are far from the target you should investigate and try to improve your product or services to be more user-friendly and reliable.

Description:The total number of news, opinions or articles in media regarding to the facility and working staff.

Description:It is one of the most common profitability metrics used for financial decisions included in the digital marketing KPIs. It helps to analyze how efficient/profitable was your investment. Profit vs Investment. In that case Investment in Social media marketing

Calculation Method / Formula:Net Profit / Cost of investment

Should be High or Low?:The problem with this digital marketing KPI is that it doesn’t include time. So, it might be misleading. Depending on your investment you may have results immediately or you need to wait longer time for accurate benefit.