When it comes to digital marketing, it’s best to leave intuition and assumptions aside and be guided by real data. Although it’s not an exact science, making decisions based on key metrics greatly increases the chances of success for an online business.
There are many KPIs (key performance indicators) in digital marketing, metrics that measure the performance of the actions that make up a strategy and inform us about its effectiveness. However, some are more crucial and essential than others, such as the ones we want to discuss in this article.
If you’re just starting to delve into the world of results analysis for your digital marketing strategy, it’s important that you know and know how to interpret what we believe are the four most basic and essential KPI’s—those you absolutely must focus on. Below, we’ll explain what they are, why they’re important, how to know if they’re healthy, and the consequences of not achieving good results in each of them.
4 Essential KPIs in Digital Marketing: We’ll Help You Understand Them and Use Them to Your Advantage
1. EEAT, the KPI to focus on to improve the SEO of your digital marketing strategy
EEAT is an acronym that refers to the Spanish words “Expertise, Knowledge, Authority, and Trust.” These are four factors that Google considers when evaluating the quality of a website and ranking a site in the SERP (Google search results page), so they are very important in an SEO positioning strategy.
EEAT is not a factor that directly influences ranking, but they are guidelines that Google’s human evaluators take into account to improve the search engine’s algorithms (which consider more than 200 factors to rank websites, many of which are opaque to the general public). In that sense, following this concept of content quality used by Google, known as EEAT, will help you increase your chances of appearing higher on the results page, which is the ultimate goal of any SEO strategy.
Below, we explain in more depth how you can meet these 4 factors and what each of them means exactly.
- Expertise: The website content should reflect that the person writing it has extensive knowledge of the topic and real experience in the field.
- Knowledge: This refers to the content being written by an expert in the field.
- Authority: Websites with a reputation in the industry achieve better rankings. This can be achieved through a good link building strategy, that is, getting quality websites to link to yours.
- Trust: This criterion is met by websites with clear policies, that cite their information sources, and that securely store user data.
If your website doesn’t cover topics in depth but rather superficially, doesn’t cite reliable sources when providing data, has many intrusive ads, and the people writing the content don’t have demonstrable expertise in the subject, you are less likely to achieve good visibility in the SERP.
In the following image, we provide a highly visual guide that will help you understand when you are successfully implementing the EEAT guidelines.
2. ROAS, the most important KPI in your digital marketing advertising strategies
ROAS stands for “Return on Ad Spend.” It’s one of the digital marketing metrics that measures the amount of revenue generated by an ad or specific advertising campaign for every dollar spent.
ROAS is one of the most important metrics in digital marketing because, even if the other metrics are positive, if you spend more than you invested, the campaign cannot be considered successful.
This KPI in digital marketing is expressed as a percentage and is obtained by dividing the revenue obtained from sales by the advertising investment, multiplying the result by 100. However, we can also omit the last multiplication to know how much was obtained for each euro spent.
For example, if we have invested €800 in advertising and, thanks to it, we have achieved a profit of €1,300, the result will be that our ROAS is 1.62 for every euro invested. In other words, we have earned €1.62 for every euro we have invested.
But when do we know if a ROAS is healthy or not? Many people think that achieving a Return on Ad Spend above 1 is enough, but that’s not the reality. Although recommendations may vary depending on the sector and type of business, a ROAS generally starts to be positive when it exceeds €2.50 earned per euro invested.
This is because a ROAS above 1 does not guarantee the profitability of a strategy, as the costs associated with the business must be taken into account. In the following image, you can see a visual representation of when this metric begins to generate positive results that demonstrate that the strategy is the right one. However, it is important to know that these guidelines are general and must be adapted to each business.
3. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is another of our key KPIs in digital marketing. In this case, it measures the percentage of users who complete the desired action (purchase, file download, subscription, registration, etc.) in relation to the total number of interactions or ad views or the total number of website visitors.
It is obtained by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of visitors or views and multiplying the result by one hundred. This indicator is important because it allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy, as well as its ability to attract leads or generate customers.
As with ROAS, a good conversion rate will depend on different factors, such as the sector you belong to or the type of business you have, but we can provide you with some general data that can help you initially. Furthermore, the conversion rate is a KPI in digital marketing that can vary depending on the device used. Mobile phones are the most used device in Spain, ahead of computers and tablets, according to the National Observatory of Technology and Society (ONTSI). You can find a report detailing that “the smartphone stands out as the most used device for digital transactions (71.8%). The consolidation of mobile phones as the preferred tool for online shopping has been a constant in recent years.”
4. Reel display times
This KPI is very important when developing a digital marketing strategy for social objectives. It indicates how long the users see the Reel, and the bigger the reel means the more interest it generates in the audience. Now, it increases the possibilities that the platform’s algorithms can teach to more people, making the new brand more visible. These metrics are normally offered in the platform materials to the “Insights” section.
Why have we tried the Reels format in other formats or other social formats for this article? Because they do not just surpass in popularity the videos published on other platforms, but rather they are the type of contingut that gives the best results to Instagram. More specifically, according to the darrers studies, the videos of more than 90 seconds exceed the shortest videos in terms of the quantity of visualizations.
In our experience, in order to increase the display time of these Reels, it is recommended:
- Capture attention from the start with striking, eye-catching, or interesting phrases or images. The first few seconds are crucial.
- Create dynamic videos, as they capture more attention. Including transitions, moving images, and visual effects is highly recommended.
- Pay attention to visual and sound quality. Pay attention to the lighting in your videos and make sure the message is understood. It’s also a good idea to include subtitles so that people watching content on silent devices also engage with your Reel.
How we improve these digital marketing metrics in our clients’ strategies
These four digital marketing metrics are the ones we consider most when our clients contact us because they aren’t seeing results. Our mission is to analyze them in their context to identify what’s causing them to be less positive, implement changes to the strategy based on the findings, and then re-analyze them later to verify that the changes made have led to an improvement in the KPIs.
For example, with our client Agupunt, a leading brand in its sector, we achieved an ROAS of over 800% because we recognized the need to optimize its entire sales funnel. In addition to having our own methodology, we also rely on advanced measurement tools to better analyze each of the digital marketing KPIs, such as Metricool, Google Analytics, and Google Ads, among others.
If you also believe your metrics have significant room for improvement, we encourage you to contact us. Our team can help you learn the best way to start achieving better results.
