It may look impressive to have a lot of “likes” on your page or website visits, but take a look at what’s happening behind the scenes to get a much clearer picture of the success of your campaign and your brand online.
Paying attention to the right data will show you how your hard work is paying off but will also allow you to make adjustments in real time to optimize your content, resulting in more clicks, more traffic, and ideally more conversions.
The Top 8 Digital Metrics You Should Be Paying Attention To Now
1. Reach
What is it?
Put simply, reach measures how many unique eyeballs landed on your content—it’s your potential audience size. Total Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page, including ads, during a specific duration of time. Post Reach shows the number of unique people who have seen your page posts, but not necessarily the number of times your content was seen.
Why does it matter?
On its own, reach can help you understand how far your content disseminated and how big the audience is for your message. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations such as calculating engagement rate (more on this in a second).
How do you measure it?
The quickest and easiest way to see the number of people who saw your post organically is to view the “saw this post” number. Otherwise, look at the insights section of the specific platform to view the reach of a given post.
2. Engagement Rate
What is it?
Engagement rate is the percentage of people who saw a social media post and engaged with it in any way. That means any like, reaction, share, comment, favorite, retweet, click, etc.
Why does it matter?
It’s more important than any page “like”—it gives an accurate picture of what’s actually happening with your content. It shows you how many people are connecting with your brand and how often, rather than only the brand follower who may never return to engage with your content. A high engagement rate shows people are interacting and talking about your brand, often in a positive way.
How do you measure it?
To put it simply, engagement rate on social media can be calculated by the total number of engagements (like/favorites, shares, comments, etc.) divided by the number of people who saw the post.
3. Conversion Rate
What is it?
The conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a predefined, desired action on your landing page. This can include completing a form, watching a video, booking an appointment, etc., but it’s based off pre-defined goals.
Why does it matter?
Conversions are one of the top metrics for showing true results because conversions are a critical step on your audience’s journey to using your services or buying your products. By paying attention to the conversion rate, you’ll be able to identify the types of content that are the top conversion drivers and either create more content like that or distribute more advertising dollars to that specific ad or to those types of ads.
How do you measure it?
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of desired actions by the number of clicks to the landing page in the same timeframe.
4. Click Through Rate (CTR)
What is it?
The click through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who were served your content and clicked through on it to your landing page.
Action can be taken on an organic social media post, paid display ad, or any other type of placement that is intended to drive traffic to your landing page.
Why does it matter?
This is more common when measuring paid digital, but it can be measured on anything where the main objective is to drive traffic to a landing page. It allows you to get a good picture of how your content is performing and will help you identify if a change is needed in order to optimize your content.
How do you measure it?
As long as you can capture the amount of impressions and clicks, you can calculate CTR. The CTR is calculated by taking the number of clicks and dividing it by the number of impressions.
5. Site Visits
What is it?
Site visits are the number of sessions on your website during any given time. Unlike “pageviews,” it gives you a better picture of the number of users that came to your site and interacted with your content.
Why does it matter?
This metric, coupled with others, can help show the success of your efforts. You’ll be able to see an increase, ideally, over time and be able to attribute the increase in site traffic to your paid and organic efforts.
How do you measure it?
Google Analytics. But you likely already have that set up on your website. If you have Google Analytics and are ready to graduate to the next level, Google Tag Manager is a great next step. More on that soon!
6. Impressions
What is it?
Impressions refers to the number of times a post or ad was displayed—whether or not the post is clicked. It differs from reach in that a single person may be counted several times within impressions. In other words, a single person may represent multiple impressions for any given post or ad.
Why does it matter?
When you’re planning awareness campaigns, impressions can be a very valuable metric since you want to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible (and you want them to see it several times). Some channels also allow you to make your buy, by purchasing those impressions through a set CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) which can help you budget for that channel, and forecast how much extra traffic you can expect to drive to your landing page. For example, you make a purchase for $7 CPM and anticipate a CTR (see #4) of 2.5%. So, to get at least 2,500 people to the site you’ll need to purchase 100,000 impressions and pay around $700.
How do you measure it?
Measuring impressions will vary from platform to platform so it’s important to familiarize yourself with each. This is a more common feature of paid digital (and traditional) media as opposed to organic channels, but measure where you can.
7. Bounce Rate
What is it?
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who come to land on your site, poke around on the page they landed, but then close out or exit your site without viewing any other pages. For example, someone clicks on a Twitter or Facebook post that links to your blog. They then read your blog and decide to close their browser/session without viewing anything else on your site. That would be considered a bounce.
Why does it matter?
If there is a higher than normal bounce rate, which can be benchmarked by industry, that would indicate an issue with the user experience or how you ask for additional engagement on your landing page. For example if someone lands on the page they thought they were going to get to and when they arrive it’s confusing or not representative of what they clicked on, they’ll likely just exit.
How do you measure it?
Measure bounce rate with Google Analytics. At the highest level look at bounce rate on your overall site. To really get the most out of the metric, though, drill down to calculate the bounce rate by landing pages or service line pages as well as by referring network: how the bounce rate compares to visitors coming from social networks vs. those coming from organic search vs. those coming from paid means. A bounce rate between 40–60% sitewide is considered healthy.
8. Video View Rate (VVR)
What is it?
Video view rate, as we prefer to define it, is the number of 3–10 second views of your video divided by the number of impressions of that video. You take the “viewed to X% completion” rates and get a good idea for when people dropped off.
Why does it matter?
VVR gives you a better gauge of the performance of your video than strictly looking at total views or views to a certain percentage. You’re able to see how engaging your video is and how people respond to it but this will also help gauge when you should be branding your video (early on vs. later on) based on when the majority of people dropped off.
How do you measure it?
You can calculate the video view rate natively on many ad platforms; however, it’s easy to take the number of 3–10 second views divided by the number of impressions or people who were served your video.
Each of these metrics alone helps provide ROI for efforts health care marketers are undertaking, but how much weight they hold to your individual campaign really depends on the goal of the campaign (how you define the success of it) and how it supports the overall business goals.
How are you attributing digital efforts (both paid and organic)? Let us know in the comments below.
