Speaker 1: Let's be honest, listening to a digital marketer talk about metrics and KPIs can be a bit like listening to somebody talking a completely foreign language. Do you speak any English? But in this video, I'm going to be telling you the core digital marketing metrics that you need to know about to really help your business thrive. And most importantly, what you can start doing with those metrics to improving the results you are getting from your digital marketing campaigns. So let's get straight into it. So the first thing to know about metrics is that it's going to vary depending on the type of business you're in. For example, whether you're in an e-commerce business or whether you have a lead generation business where your goal is to generate leads and the conversion then happens offline over the phone through invoicing or whatever it is. The metrics that you're tracking are also going to vary depending on your business goals and objectives. And what I'm going to be going through today is by no means going to be an exhaustive list. This is really just designed to give you an understanding of some of the core metrics that you need to be tracking that are really going to help you have an impact on your digital marketing efforts. So I'm going to break these down into three core categories. The first one we're going to be talking about and probably the most important of all of these are your business performance metrics. The second one is going to be your website metrics. And then third, we'll come on to platforms used by social media channels, ad platforms and search consoles. So let's start with the two business performance metrics that are absolutely critical to any business owner running a digital marketing campaign, whether you're in e-commerce or have a lead generation business. Those two metrics are your CPA and your LTV. CPA stands for your cost per acquisition. In a nutshell, this is how much on average you have to spend to acquire a new customer. So let's say you've spent £2,000 on marketing so far and you've generated tons and tons of leads, but you've only had one of those leads turn into a sale. That means your cost per acquisition would be £2,000. But if you're an e-commerce store, on the other hand, and you're selling products online, let's say you'd spent £500 on advertising and you've had thousands of clicks to your website. But again, only one person has bought. That would again mean that your cost per acquisition is £500. Now you may be thinking that they seem like really high cost per acquisitions to have. However, the cost per acquisition should be directly proportionate to your LTV, which is your lifetime customer value. In a nutshell, this is an average of the total amount of money that a typical or average customer would spend with you over the lifetime of them doing business with you. If you're a brand new business or startup, it might be difficult for you to know exactly what your lifetime value is going to be. But your business model will obviously have an impact on that. For example, if you're selling a product which is literally a one-off purchase and people aren't likely to ever need to buy from you again, your lifetime value is likely just going to be the cost of your product or service. If on the other hand, you're selling, let's say a subscription service, then maybe you'll want to look at the typical churn rates or typical lifespans of a customer in your industry to get a rough estimation of how long customers typically stay in your industry and then work out your monthly fee times the average duration that a customer stays. So let's say you had a subscription of £10 a month and you found that for businesses in your industry, the average lifespan of a customer is 12 months. That would make your average lifetime customer value or your expected customer value in this case around £120. Now, obviously, if you find that your cost per acquisition exceeds your average lifetime customer value, well, you're in trouble. And this is why these two metrics are so important because these are the main things that are going to help your business grow and the metrics that you need to be absolutely obsessing over to grow your business profitably. So there's really two questions you should be asking yourself constantly as a business owner or as a marketer for a business. The first question is how do we increase our lifetime customer value? In other words, how do we get our customers to either buy from us more often or in higher amount? The second question you want to be asking yourself is how do we improve our marketing performance so that we are spending less to acquire each customer? However, just a caveat here, if you are confident about the lifetime customer value and you know that a lot of the customers that buy from you as a one-off will turn into repeat buyers, you may even be able to afford to acquire customers at a loss because you know that you make your profits on the back end. However, this can be an incredibly risky tactic if you don't already have a proven business model and you don't know what percentages of your buyers are actually turning into repeat buyers. Okay, so the next thing we need to look at is your website metrics because if you have any sort of online presence or your business is operating in the digital age, your website is going to be the hub of where those leads or purchases come from. And really the easiest way to do this is just to break these metrics down in the different stages of the buyer journey or even the marketing funnel. So the first thing we want to think about is awareness. So how are people finding us and how many people are actually finding us? The easiest metric to track of this is your website traffic. Now, if you're using a tool like Google Analytics, and if you're not, then I highly recommend you get that set up. The two main traffic-related metrics you're going to see in analytics primarily are your sessions and also your unique visitors. So just to differentiate what these two mean, your sessions are ultimately the total amount of times a new session has started on your website. Now, by default, sessions do reset after somebody's been on your website for a certain amount of time. So multiple sessions could even come from one individual. Your unique visitors, on the other hand, gives you a much better idea as to how many individuals have been on your website. So this is a good metric to track in terms of how effective you are at actually generating that awareness and bringing visitors and potential customers to your website. The next things that you'll want to start tracking here are things like your bounce rate, your average session duration, because this will give you a good indication of how engaged potential customers or visitors to your website are with the content that is on your website. Your bounce rate is effectively showing you what percentage of visitors are leaving your website without taking any further action. This can be clicking a button to go onto another page, filling out a contact form. If they haven't taken any interactions on your website, that is going to class as a bounce. So if you have a very, very high bounce rate, this is an indication that the people coming to your website just aren't resonating with the content on it. Maybe they're not seeing what they want to see on there, or maybe your website is just boring them. Now, it's worth noting here for things like session duration or time on page, Google Analytics can only record the session duration of the previously viewed page on your website. So if somebody hasn't actually viewed more than one page on your website, Google won't be able to tell you the session duration of those visits. Now, there are a number of other visitor analytics and behavior tools that you can use, things like Hotjar and Lucky Orange that will give you much deeper insights into how users are actually interacting with your website, but that's outside of the scope of this video. Now, finally, one of the most important metrics on your website to track is going to be your conversion rate. And it's important to note with conversion rate, this can be broken down by the different goals or even conversion paths that somebody can take to get in touch with you. So the best way to think about this is let's say, for example, you're selling a software product and you have a contact form on your website, but then you also have a form where people can sign up and book a demo. They would be two different conversion goals that you would want to track. And in terms of how valuable they are to you as a business, that's something that you'll need to figure out internally. Maybe it's that people booking a demo, they're probably showing a higher level of intent than somebody contacting you. But that's really for you to work out and explore as a business. The most important thing here is that you are setting up the different conversion goals and different paths that people can take to actually sign up as a potential lead for your business. If on the other hand, you're selling online and you're an e-commerce business, then you simply need to enable e-commerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. And that will then allow you to track your conversions as the people who have bought something on your website. I'm going to link to some resources in the descriptions below this video that will walk you through how to configure your Google Analytics account, how to set up e-commerce tracking, and how to set up conversion goals as well. Now, the final thing we need to talk about here are things like your ad metrics, your social media metrics, and that kind of thing. Now, there are absolutely tons of different metrics available on these platforms, but I'm going to give you and go through the most common ones that you'll hear talked about and what impact they actually have on your marketing. So one of the first ones you may have seen or heard about is impressions. This is effectively the total amount of people who've seen a post on social media, who have seen an organic listing in search engines, or who have seen your ad on one of the ad platforms. However, this impression count will also go up even if the same person sees your ad more than one. So this is literally the total amount of times your listing, your ad, your post has been seen, regardless of whether or not it's by the same person. Reach, on the other hand, is showing you how many individuals have seen that post or listing. Now, another metric you'll see a lot is your CTR. This is your click-through rate. And in a nutshell, this is showing you out of the people who have seen your ad, what percentage of them have actually clicked on it. Now, CTR can be a good indication as to how effective your ad or your post is to the particular audience that you are showing it to. It's also worth bearing in mind with CTR if you're running ads on social media or you're monitoring the analytics of your social media posts. Your CTR and click-through rate can include clicks through to your profile or even clicks into things like the comment section of a particular post or ad. So one thing you can do on a lot of these platforms is explore some custom metrics and you can make sure that you have the CTR for link clicks only. What this means is that it will show you what's the click-through rate for people actually clicking through to the link in your post or your ad. Another metric that can be important, especially if you're running paid ads, is the frequency. What frequency means is how often are people seeing your ads. This can become especially important when you're running things on social media platforms or if you're running YouTube ads, for example, because it will give you an indication of how many times is one person seeing your ad. So if you see an average frequency of 15, that means on average people are seeing your ad in their feed 15 times. There's not necessarily any right or wrong answer to what the frequency should be and this is really going to vary depending on the type of business you're in. For example, if you're selling in the B2B space and you have a quite long buying cycle, you may want that frequency to actually be higher because there may be more consideration involved in that purchase. But it's also worth bearing in mind that if they're seeing the same ad over and over again, you may end up annoying people and actually having the opposite effect. So if anything, it's good to refresh your creatives, refresh your ads that you're running to make sure that this frequency is kept relatively low. Now, one of the most common metrics you'll hear about when it comes to running paid advertising is your CPC. Your CPC stands for your cost per click. I actually did another video on this recently that breaks this down in much more detail. So I'm going to link to it in the video somewhere up here. But in a nutshell, this is just giving you an indication of how much you're spending to get a click. It's also worth noting that much like your CTR, if you're running ads on any social platforms, your cost per click will also be broken down by overall clicks and then you'll have a separate cost per click for link clicks. And I would say that if you're running ads to your website, you really want to be looking at your cost per click per link clicks because that's going to give you an indication of how much is it costing you to actually get someone to click through to your website. Now, one of the most important things to remember, one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making when it comes to looking at their metrics is that none of these metrics should be viewed in isolation. What I mean by that is you shouldn't go on a mad mission to try and reduce your cost per click, forgetting about all of your other metrics. Because what you'll find in some campaigns is that sometimes the campaigns with the higher cost per clicks can actually have a much lower cost per acquisition. Whereas campaigns with a low cost per click can have a much higher cost per acquisition. Because remember, just because you brought somebody through to your website, that doesn't mean you've brought the right person through. It can be very easy to get clicks from the wrong people, but getting clicks from the right people is a whole nother ballgame. So you need to look at these metrics and be measuring these metrics in a holistic approach and then trying to paint a picture of where your digital marketing efforts are lacking. And on that note, it's also a very good way of getting signs as to what may be broken or where the bottlenecks may be in your digital marketing funnel or with your business. For example, if you have an amazing click-through rate and you're getting loads of clicks through to your website for a very low cost per click, but then you have very, very low conversions and nobody is signing up or buying, this will generally mean one of two things. Either your ad itself or the targeting was way too vague and way too broad, and you're just getting the wrong people clicking or people just clicking out of curiosity because they don't really understand what your ad is about. So the people coming through to your website were never going to be people that buy from you. Or if your ad is very specific and you've got the right audience coming through, then what it probably indicates if you're not getting conversions is that your landing page simply isn't optimized for conversions. I'm going to link to a blog below this video that gives you 16 ways to significantly increase your website conversion rate and turn more of those clicks into paying customers. It might also be that the offer that you have on your website, whether that be an offer to book a demo, whether that be an offer of a product, whether it be an offer to book a call with you or to sign up for something, the offer just isn't positioned in a way that's compelling enough for you to stand out from the noise. So if that's the case, I'm also going to be linking to a video. Again, I'll link it up here somewhere. I'll put it down in the comments, which will go through how to create a truly irresistible offer for your business. But again, bear in mind, this is only going to work if you first bring the right traffic and the right visitors through to your website. So there you have it, guys. I really hope that video has helped. And if you want more training like this on digital marketing to really skyrocket the results in your business, be sure to subscribe to the channel. I've got another video coming up next, which will dive into your cost per click and how you can start reducing that and affecting those metrics. I'll see you there.