How do we evaluate the success of a digital campaign? What indicators should we use to measure against which type of marketing goals? In this lesson I will go through some of the most commonly used key performance indicators in digital marketing and brand communication. First, let's take a closer look at how we measure the effectiveness of your primary digital asset, your website. Now, regardless of the type of website do you run? Its success is measured according to how well it meets the following three objectives. First, does it generate traffic? Are there enough visitors to your website? Are they your intended targets? Second does your website drive conversions? Does it entice visitors to engage in some type of desired behavior, such as registration or content engagement? Third, does it help generate revenue? This framework with the three questions of evaluating websites is a valuable tool for determining which action will most benefit the website success. Now, let's take a closer look at each of these measures. First, there's traffic. Website can earn three types of traffics or visitors. Direct traffic from visitors who directly type the websites URL well into the browser. Referral traffic from those internet users who clicked on the link to the site from another site or social media page and search traffic from users landing on your website. From following the link on the search engine results page. Those search traffic can be technically a type of referral traffic. It has several critical strategic distinctions regarding how the traffic is generated and therefore should be considered and evaluated separately. You can make many inferences about a website, visitors intention preference and behavior based on how they land on your website. Direct traffic to a brand's website is a great performance indicator of its loyalty. The very act of typing a domain name into the web browser can strengthen. Accompanies brand recognition and reinforce the visitors brand loyalty. Now, can you think of a website that you always visit by typing in the address into a browser directly? Do you visit a website so often that you would habitually type? It's URL wherever you open an internet browser, do you have your favorite and most trusted websites saved on bookmarks? These are all examples how direct you URLs can strengthen your brand awareness. A good domain name can help boost direct traffic. Companies must consider a website's domain name as part of its brand identity. A deliberately misspelled or unusual brand name may attract curiosity and awareness in advertising campaigns. However, it's hard to remember or hard to spell website. Domain name can be a challenge in building brand loyalty through direct traffic. Direct traffic can be boosted by advertising campaigns. It is a particularly valuable measure of success in your offline marketing activities that are otherwise hard to evaluate. The trick is to establish a link between the changes in direct traffic to a specific event. For example, a short term surge in direct traffic can be used to gauge the effectiveness of a billboard or TV advertising campaign in which the website URL is promoted. Remember direct traffic is the result of deliberate or well rehearsed behavior. It is indicative of attention and awareness. Referral traffic is generated from visitors clicking on a link to your website embedded in other websites or social media pages. Referral traffic can be paid or unpaid paid referral traffic can come from search ads, other forms of online advertising and sponsored content. In such cases, referral traffic is a direct measure of the success of these channels. Unpaid referral traffic comes from visitors organically landing on your website from links embedded in other sites or social pages. It is a good measure of a brand's influence and reputation you're earned and shared attention. Understanding where your unpaid referral traffic is coming from can inform your marketing strategy. For example, a company's website that gets much unpaid reform traffic from the news media may want to pay specific and close attention to its public relations efforts. You can also treat traffic coming from your own media properties such as social media pages, blogs or cross promotion as a type of referral traffic. Analyzing the pattern of referral traffic from a brand's own social media pages can help identify relevant topics, winning creative strategies and effective touch points. Search traffic typically refers to traffic that comes to a site from clicks on the organic search results page of a search engine. It is a good measure of the success of your SEO or search optimization efforts. For example a website with low organic search traffic but high paid search traffic may want to rethink its strategy because it does not fully capture the power of search engine marketing. It is also essential to focus on the volume of search traffic. And in the search keywords that people use to find a site. Organic search words can provide invaluable insights into how a consumer thinks about your company or products. Now let's look at the second set of KPI for a website. Conversions. A conversion is a target action you wish visitors to take. It is most easily understood in the context of online retail or e commerce. In the e commerce a visitor has converted when he or she purchases from the site. The percentage of visitors who convert called the conversion rate is one of the most critical indicators of a retail website success. Not all websites or retail websites. However, so conversion can be defined in many different ways. Depending on the type of your website, for example, the number of people who subscribed to your newsletter provided contact information or made a referral after visiting a website can all be considered conversions. If these actions match your marketing goals, there is not a standard metric of conversion, you should always divine conversion in a specific context against a clearly defined campaign goal before identifying an appropriate measure accordingly. You should also evaluate the conversion rate against the type of traffic in question. Let's see an example now, which one of the following is not an appropriate measure of conversion rate for a newly launched online fashion retailer to evaluate the success of its online advertising campaign aimed at reaching previously unseen leads. The choices are. A the percentage of first time visitor directed from paid ads making a purchase. B the percentage of repeated visitors from direct traffic making a purchase. C the percentage of all visitors signing up to receive future promotion by leaving their contact information, or. D the percentage of all visitors sharing a special promotion on their social media pages. The answer in this case is B. While all four indicators are successful conversions, a purchase by a repeated visitor who visits the site frequently is not a good performance indicator of a campaign targeting new leads. Finally, since the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive revenue, you should always consider revenue as an important KPI for a website. Revenue comes as a result of generating conversions. So in some ways, revenue is linked to conversion measures. For example, for the retailers, conversion as measured by product purchases or lead generation can easily be translated into revenue performance. However, revenue performance should not be directly calculated from conversion rates alone. Because each conversion can lead to the purchase of different products with different margins, consumers may also be led to the same website by different incentives and promotional strategies. So the cost basis for each conversion will be very different depending on the type of websites you manage and your marketing goals. You should choose traffic, conversion or revenue to measure the size success strategically following. The last example, the goal of retail website is to sell products. Now, since each visit to e commerce site is a potential sale traffic of all types is good. But however, the percentage of visitors who complete a transaction, maybe a more useful measure now any sudden drop in the conversion rate is a sign of problem. That should be addressed as quickly as possible. Examples may include broken links, broken pages or malfunctioning shopping cards or payment systems, product availability, site speed issues and so on. There are many Web analytics tools and services available to help businesses of all sizes and types to monitor and analyze their web traffic. There also tools that monitor and analyze user behavior on the website, commercially available web analytics packages typically build their own metrics and analytical tools based on hundreds of different measures. They can be daunting at times. However, no matter how complex the model and how deep the analysis. There is a set of building blocks for web analytics. Some of the most basic metrics of web analytics include page views, sessions, users time on page entry and exit. A page view or a hit occurs at any time a user access a page or a website. A session is defined as any time users enter a website And a session may consist of one or more page views. A user Is someone who creates at least one session but may make multiple visits or sessions. Time on page is the amount of time the user spends on the page before navigating to a different page. An entry is the first page view of a visit and it's called the entry point, which is often not the whole page and an exit is the last page view of a visit called the exit point. In addition to these basic metrics, there are several important calculated metrics. Some of the most common ones are average page depth, which is calculated as page views divided by sessions. Average session duration, which is the sum of time spent on the page for every page view in the session. Site bounce rate the percentage of all sessions that consists of only one page view. An entrance and exit rates, which are the percentage of sessions that begin or end on the page. The relative importance of available metrics depends primarily on the websites business model, for example, retail websites and lead generation websites want their users to engage in different behaviors and thus may require different sets of metrics. For analytics. For example, an important KPI for a retail website may include average order, value and revenue per session. To summarize, a Web analyst must be familiar and determine the right mix of metrics to improve the result of a specific analysis. But a marketing manager or brand manager must focus on the high level KPIs based on the broader business and campaign goals. [MUSIC]
