The 5 Metrics Every Marketing Clients Wants to See

If you want to retain clients for the long term, you need to confidently display the digital marketing metrics and KPIs that translate to results.

Contrary to what you may think, a quick boom in website traffic, the account follows, or page views isn't going to cut it.

At the end of the day, your clients care about acquiring high-quality customers and improving their bottom line. To that end, you need to create actual results to build a reputation that stands the test of time.

If you want to start convincing your clients to stay on board, start taking a closer examination of these 5 important digital marketing metrics now.

5 Important Digital Marketing Metrics to Show Your Client

When you measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, quality often scores over quantity. In the reports, a client is not interested in several irrelevant indicators. What matters most are the metrics that clearly show where you are and what you still need to achieve.To figure it out, we have compiled five important digital marketing metrics for different types of campaigns:-

1. Traffic to Quality Lead Ratio

Traffic is a valuable metric for any business online. If your website is your virtual storefront, then your traffic equates to getting new customers in the door to browse your offerings.

However, traffic alone is sometimes considered a vanity metric. A vanity metric is a digital marketing metric that can indicate great performance but ultimately tells you very little about your progress toward a goal.

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For example, if a business sets an arbitrary goal of acquiring 1,000 new customers from an ad campaign, page traffic tells you little about your performance. This metric simply tells you that people are visiting, but not what they actions they are taking whenever they visit your landing page or website.

Make no mistake - improving your client's online traffic significantly is something that you should share and highlight. The issue arises whenever you are not simultaneously seeing improvements in conversions, page session duration, or revenue as a result of this traffic. Your client will quickly realize that these numbers matter very little if they are getting a quality ROI.

Instead, you want to highlight to the client how much of this new traffic is high-quality. You can demonstrate this by revealing how many of these users become leads. You can highlight this by comparing the traffic increase to conversion metrics such as follows, subscribers, form submissions, or calls.

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In other words, quality is always better than quantity. If you gain 1,000 new leads out of 10,000 visits, you have a lead ratio of 10%. Compare this to 100,000 new website visitors, but only 1,000 leads, which equates to 1%. That's a lot of wasted budget and effort reaching users that are not interested in your client's offerings.

2. Conversions

Continuing from the head above, tracking conversions is crucial for demonstrating the value of your digital marketing efforts. A conversion is the result of a website visitor completing an action on your page that happens to be one of your goals. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to earn more subscribers, then any new subscriber can be considered a conversion.

Common conversion goals are purchases, submitting a form, subscribing, sharing, following, or downloading/installing a file or app.

Whenever you set up custom goals for your campaign, you are better able to gather important digital marketing metrics that better tell the story. Instead of simply using a general traffic boost as the highlight of your presentation, you can support your metrics with those sexy conversion rates. Doing so provides undeniable proof that the client's advertising budget is being put to excellent use.

The types of conversions you'll want to show your client depends upon their immediate business goals. If the primary goal for the previous and coming months is to boost brand awareness, you may want to highlight an increase in subscribers, follows, or shares. An increase in views of a specific page or time spent on that page may also help you and your client to understand user intent.

Likewise, if the primary goal is to gain direct sales from a sale or promotion, you need the purchase conversions to back up your efforts. Failure to produce these conversion metrics will not only leave you exposed but will serve as a clear indicator that your campaign requires additional testing and improvements to get the job done.

3. Engagement

Engagement is crucial for illustrating to clients what types of actions users are taking regarding their content. You can identify engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, follows, or even an increase in page session duration.

Engagement is valuable as it demonstrates that your marketing efforts work. On the flip side, a lack of engagement typically leads to an increase in bounce rate - quick page visits that result in no action whatsoever. Not only is a high bounce rate indicative of poor creatives, but it's also something that Google can and will hold against a site when it comes to SEO and search rankings.

You should utilize this important digital marketing metric as a measuring stick for your digital marketing efforts. Regularly A/B test ads, website pages, and social posts to determine which images or copy yields improved engagement. An increase in engagement naturally improves the amount of organic traffic your client receives, which, in turn, can further boost conversions and sales.

An increase in organic results means gaining brand awareness and increasing revenue without spending additional funds. Ultimately, this may well be the best digital marketing campaign metric you can show to a client to demonstrate an impressive ROI.

4. Revenue by Channel

Revenue refers to the amount of money gained by utilizing digital marketing tactics for a business on a specific channel. You should not confuse this with profit, which is what's left from the revenue stream after deducting expenses.

A channel refers to any platform used to implement your digital marketing tactics for a client. Examples of digital marketing channels include paid search, SEO, social media, or content marketing. You can further qualify a digital marketing channel by individual platforms (i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, or LinkedIn).

You owe it to yourself and clients to demonstrate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by channel. While previous metrics such as conversions and engagement are important, the client's bottom line is what will ultimately have the final say in whether or not utilizing a channel is a worthwhile pursuit.

If a digital marketing channel produces a healthy revenue stream, then it's likely a no-brainer to keep improving your efforts there. If the client's brand is performing exceptionally well, you may even choose to double down. Inversely, a revenue stream that costs more than it's worth will indicate that the channel requires more love and care. It may be in the client's best interest to abandon certain channels altogether in some instances.

The important thing to focus on is your agency's actions regarding the revenue earned through a marketing channel. Every client loves to see a smashing success. However, taking the initiative to pull back on underperforming channels and prevent unnecessary budget spending can also go a long way in solidifying the trust and partnership between your agency and the client.

5. Lifetime Customer Value

If there's one thing each of these digital marketing metrics has in common, it's that each highlights the importance of gaining more for less. That's why the final important KPI we're featuring is the lifetime customer value (LCV).

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To better understand LCV, you'll first need to understand a few metrics that go into the formula.

Every customer has an average purchase value (APV). This refers to the value of all of their purchases from a business within a period. Similarly, they also have an average purchase frequency (APF), which is their number of purchases in a period compared to total purchases.

You can then determine the customer's overall value by multiplying your APV by the APF. Now that you know the approximate value of a customer, you can compare this data to the lifespan of the customer. This provides you with a customer lifetime value that you can use to better understand your ROI on a customer-by-customer basis.

While this may sound slightly complex, it's fairly straightforward. Let's say that your agency spends $200 on Facebook Ads to acquire a new customer. During that customer's lifespan, they make two purchases for a total value of $100. You effectively lost money when bargaining for that customer's business. On the other hand, if you acquire a loyal customer who completes ten purchases at a value of $500, you've now made money back and then some.

The takeaway here is being able to demonstrate that your digital marketing efforts do not simply result in one-off purchases. Such events can be classified as churn, and are generally indicative of unsatisfied or underwhelmed customers. The goal should always be to cultivate an engaged and loyal following from the conversions that you acquire. You achieve this not only from the initial point of contact but through an ongoing nurturing process.

The higher your average lifetime customer value, the more profit that awaits your client. Furthermore, a higher LCV also indicates that customers are happy with the product or service. Content customers boost your marketing efforts by providing social proof and boosting your organic traffic. The resulting snowball effect is how your agency creates a sustainable foundation for your service and will create a client for life.

Show Clients These 5 Digital Marketing Metrics to be Successful

Businesses outsource their marketing efforts to agencies like yours for a reason. They either lack the knowledge, the skills, or the time to effectively give their marketing channels the attention they deserve.

They're actively looking for you to succeed and looking for data they can trust. So long as you can provide them with high-quality metrics that indicate progress and care, they're generally willing to let you do what you must on their behalf. That means you'll have more time to cultivate a following and build better campaigns so long as you work to maintain their confidence.

You can do this successfully by regularly reporting on these 5 key digital marketing metrics. All of these not only show an increase in visitors, but also show that those visitors are interested, engaged, and willing to spend money on a product or service that they like. It's not always about maximizing attention, but getting attention from those that truly count.

Every business wants to ally with an agency that produces customers that are happy and ready to buy. By using these metrics to guide your marketing efforts, you'll be able to build long-lasting client relationships that set your agency up for long-term success.