The Five Digital Marketing Metrics That Will Drive Your Business in 2017

In the world of digital marketing, the numbers tell the story.

Want to know if the time your are spending writing those clever Facebook posts is worth it?

Check the number of reactions, comments and shares you are getting and see how many of your “Fans” and their friends you are reaching.

Are your followers loving your tweets on Twitter? Check the number of retweets you are getting.

It seems like every action you take online has a COMPLETE analytics suite to support it.

That can be good, but it can also be a little – no A LOT – overwhelming!

I will confess, I am a “numbers guy”.

But, I will even admit that, after awhile, everything runs together and the value of any single “metric” starts to lose its meaning.

That's why I focus on just 5 numbers, the 5 digital marketing metrics that will drive your business in 2017. 

Key Metric #1 – Page Behavior on Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a number lover's nirvana. The problem is there are literally thousands of numbers to look at.

I go directly to a single screen to see how our website traffic as a whole, as well as any single individual page, is doing.

It's the “All Pages” screen. Here's the one for kimgarst.com, one of our two websites.

You can get there by entering Google Analytics, then selecting the “Reporting” tab first and scrolling down and clicking on “Behavior”. Once there click on “Site Content” and then “All Pages”.

Look at the wealth of information!

I can see our top perfroming pages ranked by “Pageviews” and all of the key data on each. From there I can make decisions about what's working, what's not and what our community wants more (or less!) of.

For instance, from the data above I can see that two of our free offers are crushing it (#2 and #4) and that we might want to add a free offer on top Instagram Hashtags (that blog post received 63,000 pageviews and people spent, on average 10:01 on the page!)

Key Metric #2 – E-Mail Open Rates

What's the point of spending all of the time and effort building an email list if the people on the list never open the emails that you send them?

Yes, email open rates are a critical metric that you should be intimately familiar with, but what's a good open rate?

That's a question I get asked A LOT!

My answer is “It depends”, and that answer usually drives people crazy! But, let me explain and you will see why.

So far in 2016 we have sent 65,823 “batches” of emails ranging from a single email to a single person to one reaching over 160,000 individual subscribers.

Our opens rates ranged from a low of 5% to a high of 68% with an average of about 14%.

The massive fluctuation is based on the segment of our entire subscriber base we choose for the mailing and the subject.

For instance, the results below are for a follow-up email we sent to people who signed up for and attended one of our open training webinars.

A whopping 48% of the subscribers opened the email and 15% actually clicked on one of the links in it.

Whereas just 11% of the subscribers receiving one of our recent newsletters opened it and just 2% clicked on a link.

However, the “top” performing email had 236 link clicks while the “bottom” performing one had 2,493!

My point?

Email open rates are a critical digital metric that will drive your business in 2017.

You need to become familiar enough with yours to understand what a good open rate is versus a bad one based on your business, your market and the type of emails you are sending to the different segments of your list.

Key Metric #3 – Facebook Post Engagement

Our Facebook Fan Page numbers are HUGE. We have 400,000 Fans and our posts typically reach 1,000,000 – 10,000,000 people per week.

However, in my opinion, those numbers don't mean a thing!

What really matters is the number of people “engaging” (meaning reacting, commenting or sharing) with our Facebook posts.

As a rough comparison, the number of Facebook Fans you have is similar to the size of your email list. The number, or percentage of post engagements is similar to your email open rate and link clicks.

I know our posts for the week are particularly engaging when the post engagement rate (number of post engagements divided by Facebook Fans) is above 25%. In the screen shot above it's 29%, which is pretty strong.

Key Metric #4 – Landing Page Conversion Rate

Is this a good landing page? By good, I mean high converting.

Let's find out.

We have an absolute scale we measure our landing pages performance against.

If our landing page conversions rate (the number of people who complete the information divided by the number of people who land on the page) is under 30% we pull the page, work on it and try again.

From 30% to 50% is considered “average” for us and we leave the page up while we continue working on it.

Above 50% is considered “good” and we pore a disproportionate percentage of our Facebook Ads budget to promote is.

How do you calculate your landing page conversion rate? There are lots of ways. Google Tag Manager is free and pretty easy to set up.

We use Facebook Ads and fiind the two pieces of data we need in the Ads Manager dashboard.

The landing page conversion rate is simply the “Results” (the number of people who made it to the “Thank You” page) divided by the “Link Clicks” (the number of people who clicked the actual ad and were taken to the landing page).

In the example above ,the landing page conversion rate is w whopping 60.2% (5,231/8688).

So, the answer to my question is “Yes”, this is an exceptional landing page.

Key Metric #5 – Blog Social Sharing

We use a WordPress plugin (Social Warfare) to make sharing our blog content quick and easy.

How many people share our blog posts, and where, tells us the relative value of the information we are providing for our online community.

For instance, the realtively new post above, a post about the best time to post on Facebook, has been shared 149 times…on Facebook!

We have had posts shared 50,000+ times and other shared under 100. By tracking this metric we know which of our blog posts are resonating the best with our community.

A Few Final Words about Digital Marketing Metrics

What I have presented above are the 5 digital marketing metrics I use on a weekly basis to tell me, in a glance, how our website, email, Facebook, landing page and blog are performing.

Each of the above is free and realtively easy to set-up.

Don't be afraid of the numbers, embrace them. They provide amazing insights that will drive your entire business in 2017!

What are your favorite and/or the most powerful digital marketing metrics you look at? I would love to hear you answer in the comments section below.

About Author

Kim Garst

Kim Garst is a renowned marketing strategist and speaker who is trailblazing the use of artificial intelligence in digital marketing. With over 30 years of experience as an online entrepreneur, Kim helps entrepreneurs grow their business and authority online by using AI technology. She is leading the way with proven AI frameworks that help entrepreneurs build authority in their space.

She is keynote speaker and an international best-selling author of Will The Real You Please Stand Up, Show Up, Be Authentic and Prosper in Social Media.

Named by Forbes as a Top 10 Social Media Power Influencer, Kim is well-known for her skill to simplify complex technology and make the use of AI understandable for business growth. Her relatable, actionable advice helps guide new entrepreneurs to harness the power of AI to succeed in digital marketing. Kim is leading the way in combining human and technological skills to create a new model for AI-powered marketing.

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