Things to Consider Before Measuring Digital ROI

Not too sure where to get started when measuring ROI? You’re in the right place.

Measuring digital ROI can often prove confusing if you don’t know what you are looking for. You can use soft metrics like social media impressions, email engagement, and website visitors which are essential for shaping your digital marketing strategy.

Or you could focus on hard metrics, like spend and revenue. Both hard and soft metrics feed into calculating digital ROI. This confusion often leads to businesses all over the world outsourcing their digital workloads to a digital marketing agency.

First of all, lets lay out some of the types of key performance indicators that can help you determine your ROI –

• Overall digital performance: Traffic, sales leads and user reach.
• Channel: social media platforms, search engines, websites
• Performance based on source: Pay-per-click, sales emails, direct website traffic and organic search.
• Performance based on digital campaign: Conversion rates, lead generation and click-throughs to your website.

Once you have decided which key performance indicators are the most applicable to you and your business, you can then start to measure them to determine your ROI. However, do be aware that measuring ROI does have some disadvantages. It all depends on what type of business you are and what constitutes the return. At the same time, it also depends on what the original investment was. Your company need to determine and agree on both of these factors before measuring ROI.

6 Metrics to Help You Determine Your ROI

Once you gain an understanding of what your ROI objectives are, you need to consider the following metrics, and these are what will ultimately help you determine whether a campaign has been successful or not.

Cost Per Lead. This is the amount that you spend on a campaign which is then divided by the number of new leads you get.

Cost Per Acquisition. This is very similar to cost per lead. The difference is that its an actual transaction.

Click-Through Rate. This metric depends on whether a customer clicks through to your website as a result of digital marketing activity. When calculating click-through rates, make sure that the clicks are directly linked to the campaign you are running. For example, if you are running a paid campaign on Facebook, then any clicks you get from Twitter do not apply to the ROI.

Unique Monthly Visitors. This metric will tell you how visitors are coming to your website every month. However, do be aware that this is a very broad metric to measure and needs more investigating to determine which visitors are a direct result of a marketing campaign. Our tip would be to segment this metric by “paid, organic and social.”

Understand Your Customers and Their Consumer Habits

With digital marketing, it’s important to recognise the fact that not all customers can be regarded as equal. This is because not all of them will return to spend money with your business on a regular basis. On the flipside of that, some will consume a lot more of your digital marketing efforts but never convert into a paying customer. With this being said, marketing teams need to understand that it’s not about the number of online users reached, but the type of user reached.

For example, you need to consider what a customer’s transaction value is. You need to identify if they are spending money with you for smaller purchases on an ad-hoc basis or you’ve have found that they are a consistent buyer and have a loyal relationship with your business. There is another factor that can be taken into consideration and that can be the number of years that a customer has been using your business for. By looking at this will allow you to determine their loyalty.

The best course of action for your digital marketing efforts would be to identify who your most profitable customers are, and where they are coming from in terms of your digital marketing efforts. Did they see a social media post? Or, did they receive a product newsletter from you via email? Returning customers are the ones to have the most positive impact on your business, resulting in repeat transactions and higher profits.

Know Where You Are Spending Your Money

If your digital marketing campaign has been strategically planned and implemented in the right way by creating achievable objectives, then this can be a great way to generate promising results and provide you with data to support any future campaigns. Failing to keep track of how much money has been invested in a digital campaign will cause you nothing but problems and your ROI calculations will be wrong.